'The Warrior's Apprentice' - Book Review

The Warrior's Apprentice
by Lois McMaster Bujold
1986
NESFA Press, 306p.

This is the first Miles Vorkosigan novel. More or less - the timeline is complicated. Are you going by publication date? Or internal series chronology? Or when Miles' parents met? Or possibly the chronology of the whole universe Miles lives in, because Falling Free happened two hundred years prior to Miles birth and has no connection to him (but it's now labelled as part of "The Vorkosigan Saga"). Or do you prefer the order Bujold herself recommends, which isn't quite any of the above? <sigh> This is one of the three books Bujold wrote before any of her works were published, and at the time she seems to have meant it as his first major adventure - although she wrote Shards of Honor about Miles' mother meeting Miles' father as one of those at-the-time unpublished works.

After I re-read The Curse of Chalion for the third or fourth time I decided I should try the Vorkosigan stuff again, although I hadn't liked it much at the time of publication even though it came very strongly recommended by pretty much every member of the staff of the Merril Collection.

Miles is many things: very young, a genius, both very honourable and very devious, very short, and very brittle (his bones break easily). And he lives on a world where euthanizing malformed infants is the norm, so he's considered an abomination by many. The book starts with Miles failing to get into the Barryaran military - he maxed out the written test, but failed the physical test. On a visit to his grandmother on another planet (along with his bodyguard and the bodyguard's daughter who Miles is desperately in love with), he gets involved with a drunk and unruly pilot, which escalates into him buying a very old ship, which escalates into him taking a smuggling job to pay off the purchase, which escalates ...

In the afterword to Cordelia's Honor (an omnibus volume that includes the above-mentioned Shards of Honor and Barryar), Bujold wrote: "... accidentally discovering my first application of the rule for finding plots for character-centered novels, which is to ask 'So what's the worst possible thing I can do to this guy?' And then do it." Never has the woman behind the curtain been so obvious as in this novel: every brilliant move Miles makes inevitably saves him from one problem while propelling him into something worse he couldn't have anticipated. Which means we have out-of-the-frying-pan-and-into-the-fire for 300 solid pages.

It's not bad ... but it was always obvious it was going to keep getting worse until the last fifty pages when you knew she had to clean it all up. There's also no real threat to Miles himself, as he has something like a dozen books about him that follow this one. The writing is good (surprisingly good for SF of the period), but not on par with the quality of her writing 15-20 years later. Both her prose and her plotting improved with time.