• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Kline Station

A three-hundred-year-old space station orbiting a planetless dark star, Kline Station serves six nearby jump points and the interstellar traffic that flows through them.

Athos

Athos is a predominantly agricultural planet settled and governed by a monastic order. All human residents of Athos are male. Reproduction is carefully controlled by the government, and is practiced through uterine replicators, using ovaries harvested from off-planet women and the sperm of the planet's males who have been selected as worthy parents. Fear of women is endemic in the society, and few men from Athos travel through the wormhole nexus other than for necessary spaceflights to restock the planet's egg banks and for galactic trade. Even access to information and literature from outside Athos is restricted on the planet, except for necessary scientific journals and other research material.

Frost IV

A colonized world destroyed in recent history due to a major tectonic disaster. The planet is frequently used by the illicit on Jackson's Whole and elsewhere as a convenience for forging new identities. Given that all Frost IV's official records were lost in the planetary disaster, it is very simple to assign an untraceable identity from Frost IV to someone seeking a new life, assuming that they are old enough to have lived through the disaster.

Aslund

One of the Hegen Hub worlds, it is part of the Hegen Hub Alliance.

Nuovo Brasil

Mentioned in the Vorkosigan Saga, but no detail about it is provided.

Mahata Solaris

Miles Vorkosigan passed through this planet's local space in his guise as Admiral Naismith while fleeing Cetagandan assassins shortly after the breakout from Dagoola IV.

Lairuba

A world settled by Muslims. The ruler is a hereditary head of state with both political and religious power. He is known as the Baba.

Zoave Twilight

A nearby neighbor of Marilac, with a rich neighborhood of wormhole jump points that provide cross-routes throughout the nexus.

Kshatriya

A distant planet famed as the source of mercenaries hired for interstellar conflicts.

Tau Verde IV

This planet system was the site where Miles Vorkosigan began his mercenary career and his work as an interstellar troubleshooter. Here he found his destiny when he joined up with the Oseran Mercenaries, which he eventually converted into the Dendarii Free Mercenary Fleet. The Dendarii still serve as a secret arm of Barrayaran Imperial Security.

The Vorkosigan Saga Novel Summaries

John Helfers

Editor's Note: Instead of the traditional method of listing the books and novellas in their first published order, we have chosen to arrange them in chronological order as events unfold in the Vorkosigan universe.

"Dreamweaver's Dilemma"

First published in Dreamweaver's Dilemma, 1996

Approximately six hundred years before Miles Vorkosigan's birth, Anias Ruey, a "feelie-dream" composer, uses a device called a dream synthesizer to create artificial dreams that people can experience as if they were actually dreaming themselves, a sort of virtual reality. She is late providing a sequel to her most successful feelie-dream, a romance called Triad, mostly because the idea bores her, and takes a new commission from a mysterious man named Rudolph Kinsey, who makes her uneasy, but the price he offers is too good to pass up. To recharge herself, she travels to the secluded home of her friend Chalmys DuBauer, a spaceship pilot who spent more than a century traveling between Earth and its first off-planet habitat, Beta Colony, and who was rendered obsolete by the technological developments made during that time. She completes the commission, a dark and violent scenario, and gives it to Rudolph in exchange for a bonded check. Before he leaves, he requests a brief feelie-dream for his aunt. When Anias goes to set up her dream synthesizer, she finds it has been sabotaged, and would have killed her if she had used it. Suspecting that Kinsey had tried to kill her, she lures him to DuBauer's Ohio home, which is surrounded by a forest full of lethal creatures. After taking