The Vorkosigan Companion - Lillian Stewart Carl [46]
In A Civil Campaign, Martya sets her sights on the mad Escobaran scientist Enrique Borgos, who needs a managing woman to take care of his interests while he spends fourteen-hour days in his lab. Martya is fully qualified to manage a man, and she won't mind spending all the money his inventions will make, either.
Olivia Koudelka pairs off with the most unusual Lord Dono Vorrutyer. Though perhaps the quietest of the Koudelka girls, she was trained by her mother and is quite capable of taking down three thugs when they attack her beloved—two with a stun gun and one by bashing his head into a concrete pillar. The Koudelka girls are as formidable as they are blond.
But the romance that proves the Vorkosiverse is circular is that of clone brother Mark Vorkosigan and Kareen, the youngest Koudelka daughter. When terrorized by Miles's "hellish harem" in Mirror Dance, Mark had thought wildly that he wanted a nice small, soft, meek blonde. Kareen isn't meek, but she's blond and soft and compassionate, and she loves the dark and twisty complexities of Mark's tormented soul.
Her parents are less enthused, given the massive amount of baggage Mark carries. Once again Cordelia goes into Betan matchmaker mode to convince Drou and Kou that Mark and Kareen deserve a chance to see if they suit.
Thirty years have passed, and it is no longer necessary for young people to claim their sexuality in "a mad secret scramble in the dark, full of confusion, pain, and fear." That was a time Drou remembers without affection. Barrayar is a better place now, and even Kareen's protective Da eventually agrees to give love a chance.
The last romance that I'm really waiting for is Ivan's. What clever lady is going to see beyond his carefully cultivated façade of the cheerful dolt to the strong, honorable man below?
While I'm waiting, I'll reread the whole Vorkosigan series. Again.
Biology in the Vorkosiverse and Today
Tora K. Smulders-Srinivasan, Ph.D.
"All true wealth is biological."
—Aral Vorkosigan in Mirror Dance
Lois McMaster Bujold's science fiction series that takes place in the "Vorkosiverse" is excellent for many reasons. One of them is Bujold's exceptional grasp of biology, including her ability to imagine and depict future biological technologies and their social implications.
Though she began writing the series more than twenty years ago, the sound basis for the biology in her Vorkosiverse books makes the future biological technologies in them still relevant today. Even more satisfying to a biologist, these technologies do not become the bad guy, as is common for science fiction stories such as Frankenstein and Jurassic Park. The good and evil both come not from the technology, biological or otherwise, but from within the characters.
Bujold does not thrust these biological technologies on her readers as extraneous frills, but rather the technologies are an intricate part of the plot, the setting, or even the characterization in her stories. In one scene, after an assassination attempt against them by poisonous gas fails, Cordelia Vorkosigan tells her husband Aral not to worry, that all they need to procreate is ". . . two somatic cells and a replicator. Your little finger and my big toe, if that's all they can scrape off the walls after the next bomb . . ." (Barrayar). That quote alone implies a whole area of advanced reproductive technology: the ability to clone somatic cells and differentiate them into viable eggs and sperm, outside of the body; as well as the ability to grow the fertilized egg into a baby.
Unfortunately for Cordelia and Aral, the antidote to the poison is very damaging to their unborn son. Cordelia manages to organize some advanced galactic technology on their backwater world and the son, Miles, survives, though the repercussions, physical and psychological,