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Title: The Warrior's Apprentice by Lois McMaster Bujold ISBN: 0-671-65587-6 Publisher: Baen Books Pub. Date: August, 1986 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $2.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.31 (36 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: Very well written space opera
Comment: This was the first of Lois M. Bujold's "Miles Vorkosigan" books. This series has won two Hugos for Bujold, and with good reason. They are very solid, well-written adventure stories with excellent characters and fascinating plots. This book is a bit pulpier than the others -- Bujold was still finding her voice -- but still quite good, and the proper place to start if you want to read Miles' adventures in chronological order
Rating: 2
Summary: Not Bujold's Best Effort
Comment: I've read "Cordelia's Honor" and Bujold's recent fantasy novels and enjoyed them quite a bit, so I know that she can write pretty well. In this book she just doesn't. To qualify that, "The Warrior's Apprentice" introduces us to Miles Vorkosigan, the handicapped son of Cordelia Naismith and Lord Vorkosigan. At the start, an instantaneous misstep ruins Miles' hopes for a military career on Barrayar. As a consolation, he gets a vacation back to Beta Colony. An odd series of events leads to him buying a space ship, recruiting a crew, and undertaking to run a blockade into a war zone. Then the silliness begins.
The backbone of the story is how Miles overcomes his disability to provide strong leadership, and inspire others along the way. A worthy theme, to be sure, but Bujold orchestrates it in a preposterous way. It works like this: Miles and his band of wacky misfits take on one spaceship of soldiers and wins handily. Then he tricks all the defeated soldiers into joining his side. Then he uses his new, larger band of wacky misfits to beat up a larger group of soldiers. Then all those people agree to join his side. Repeat this several times, and all of a sudden Miles not only controls a solar system, but also has high self-esteem. Now none of his opponents ever seem to consider seriously fighting back, and furthermore you'd have to be pretty dumb to fall for some of the tricks that he uses.
In Bujold's defense, I can say that she does a decent job with characters, although not as good as scifi greats such as Donaldson's Gap Saga. Miles and his merry men for the most part feel genuine and at least a little bit gritty, if not incredibly deep. But a solid novel needs both good characters and good plot, and it's too bad that Bujold dropped half the ball on this one.
Rating: 2
Summary: Disappointing and superficial
Comment: Having just finished "Shards of Honor" and "Barrayar", I simply couldn't wait to pick up the first book in the Miles Vorkosigan series. Unfortunately for me, it seems Mrs. Bujold has shifted tones when going from Cordelia to her son Miles.
Where Cordelia's novels were sometimes funny, sometimes inclined to the romantic, but as a whole well-crafted and dramatic, "The Warrior's Apprentice" feels more like a running joke. It seems Mrs. Bujold has decided she would show Miles is human by making him whine, cry, puke his guts out and tremble in fear most of the time, 'in aparté' for the reader. Oh, he also lusts after Elena a lot, and shows us his noble streak by going down the 'unrequited love' path. Bleh.
What is particularly irritating about the novel is the way things just fall in place conveniently for Miles. Miles' genius is that which comes forth in second-rate novels, where it is not so much the protagonist that is intelligent, but the rest of the Universe that is downright dumb. Miles recruits people by stuttering half-baked lies; he exposes imperial schemes by confronting admirals with his sharp wit; he outwits entire armies by concocting plans full of assumptions that his enemies conveniently fall into.
I realize this novel is intended as light reading, but so were "Shards of Honor" and "Barrayar". They were light reading, filled with drama, action and humor, and a certain dose of romance. "The Warrior's Apprentice" feels like a bad imitation of all that made the Cordelia books so great, and all the characters from these two books are here only as cardboard cutouts reminding us of the clichés at the heart of the vibrant characters we grew to love previously.
I wish Miles were more like his mother.
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Title: Borders of Infinity by Bujold, Lois McMaster Bujold ISBN: 0671720937 Publisher: Baen Books Pub. Date: 22 May, 2001 List Price(USD): $6.99 |
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Title: The Vor Game by Lois McMaster Bujold ISBN: 0671720147 Publisher: Baen Books Pub. Date: 01 September, 1990 List Price(USD): $6.99 |
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Title: Cordelia's Honor by Lois McMaster Bujold ISBN: 0671578286 Publisher: Baen Books Pub. Date: 01 September, 1999 List Price(USD): $7.99 |
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Title: Cetaganda by Bujold ISBN: 0671877445 Publisher: Baen Books Pub. Date: 01 October, 1996 List Price(USD): $7.99 |
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Title: Brothers in Arms by Lois McMaster Bujold ISBN: 0671697994 Publisher: Baen Books Pub. Date: 02 January, 1989 List Price(USD): $7.99 |
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