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Title: Warrior's Apprentice by Lois McMaster Bujold ISBN: 0-671-72066-X Publisher: Baen Books Pub. Date: 01 February, 1991 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $5.99 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.37 (35 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: This book introduces Bujold's popular Miles Vorkosigan
Comment: Although not as deep as her later works, The Warrior's Apprentice break neck pace and wit results in a pleasant read. In many ways Bujolds novels feel like the science fiction equivalent of Brust's Vlad Taltos novels. Although this book was published after Shards of Honor, it still makes a great place to begin the Vorkosigan series.
Rating: 5
Summary: Miles kicks off
Comment: The Warrior's Apprentice is the third book in Vorkosigan series - if you're going by internal chronology - and the first book with Miles as the main character. Although Shards of Honor is excellent, and Barrayar is quite good, Warrior's Apprentice is where this series really takes flight.
Miles is one of the classic characters of modern SF - Bujold has created someone who is exceptional in many ways (brilliant strategist, painfully intelligent, lucky as hell) and who is still likeable, because she allows him to have flaws and weaknesses - quite a few of them, in fact. Unlike, for example, Honor Harrington in David Weber's series, Miles is fully three-dimensional, and such a fascinating guy that it would be interesting to read *anything* about him.
In Warrior's, Miles' character is still developing. He's on a trip to his mother's homeworld after failing the entrance exam for the Imperial Military Academy when he decides to intervene in a Betan police problem. This leads, inevitably, to his involvement in another system's civil war. Will Miles be able to hold together his fictious group of mercenaries, keep track of his prisoners, earn enough money to redeem his mortgaged land, win the girl, and get back to Beta Colony before his parents find out what he's doing? (He gets himself into situations like this all the time - that's Miles for you.)
In my opinion, the best Vorkosigan books are those that focus on character development rather than plot - ones like Shards of Honor, Warrior's Apprentice, and Memory. In these, the plot is still strong, but it is interwoven with the building of a new character or a new aspect of a familiar one, and that is where Bujold really shines.
If you're just starting out with Lois Bujold, Warrior's Apprentice is a good place to start, despite its chronological position. And if you haven't read this book yet, I envy you - you've got quite a treat in store.
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: 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: 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: Cetaganda by Bujold ISBN: 0671877445 Publisher: Baen Books Pub. Date: 01 October, 1996 List Price(USD): $7.99 |
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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: BROTHERS IN ARMS : BROTHERS IN ARMS by Bujold ISBN: 0671697994 Publisher: Baen Books Pub. Date: 02 January, 1989 List Price(USD): $7.99 |
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