Customer Reviews

Young Miles

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What an absolutely fantastic book!

Young Miles is a compilation of 2 books and one novella. The three parts of the book are: The Warrior's Apprentice, Mountains of Mourning, and The Vor Game. They have all been published before, so if you own them, don't buy this book expecting anything new. Is it the book's fault some people don't know what they're buying when they purchase it? Cordelia's Honor; Miles, Mystery, & Mayhem, and Miles Errant are also compilations.

This book is the first of the Vorkosigan saga with Miles, a cripple, as the main character, and it starts with him dropping out of military academy because of a broken leg. A member of the Vor (a military caste) class, his father the Prime Minister (former regent)of Barrayar, and living in a society that revolves around the military: this shatters Miles' dreams for his future. That is, until he accidently finds himself the "admiral" of a mercenary fleet and reveals a conspiracy against his father and himself. Unfortunately, being the leader of a private army on Barrayar is punishable by death. In The Mountains of Mourning, Miles is sent to investigate a case of infanticide, with the motive for the murder being an infants deformities. In The Vor Game, Miles has several other adventures, including attempting to stop an interstellar war and save his emperor.

The first book I read by Bujold was Cordelia's Honor, which is a compilation of Shards of Honor and Barrayar. It tells the story of how Miles' parents married and how he became crippled. Cordelia, Miles' mother, was affected by a gas grenade thrown into her room when she was pregnant. Although she survived, her son's bones became twisted and brittle. So, Miles, the hero of this compilation, is 4'10" and has a curved spine, a head the size of a normal 6' person, and brittle bones that snap at the worst times. He's also extremely bright and hyper.

Bujold is an excellent writer that makes each character come to life. There is no such thing as a two dimensional person in her world; each one is so incredibly different and deep. The reader can't help but get attached to some characters, crying and laughing along with them. I found myself giggling hysterically at some points in Young Miles, much to the confusion of those around me. Young Miles, like Cordelia's Honor, is also a page-turner. I read half the night away, only stopping when my eyes couldnt' stay open any longer. It's fast-paced adventure full of politics and military strategies. I often felt like my mind couldn't think fast enough to keep up with the story! It was absolutely wonderful!

For those who have not read anything from Bujold, this is a great starting point in the Vorkosigan saga. It has characters from Cordelia's Honor, but Bujold doesn't expect people reading Young Miles to know everything about them. She does a great job keeping each story independent yet in line with the other stories. I started with Cordelia's Honor, which isn't quite as fast-paced (at least Shards of Honor wasn't) as Young Miles, but it's still an awesome book. It also gives a more in-depth look at Cordelia, Aral, and Bothari (Miles' bodyguard in Young Miles). What's great about these compilations is you get 2-3 books in one! Saves money, and it saves the reader the time it takes to run to the book store to get the next one (which you feel you must have the moment you finish a book). I can't wait to start Miles, Mystery, & Mayhem!

Anyway, this is an excellent book in an excellent saga. A must read for any sci-fi lover! Even if you don't like sci-fi, you're bound to love this saga.

If you have already discovered Bujold, and are still in the stage of trying to acquire copies of everything she's written, then you might be frustrated by the reissue volumes, each of which includes two novels, and frequently a novelette. This volume includes The Warrior's Apprentice, "The Mountains of Mourning" from Borders of Infinity, and The Vor Game. Thus, there is nothing new here for the collector. On the other hand, this makes an excellent introduction to Bujold's work for the newcomer, because it introduces Miles Naismith Vorkosigan as he first creates his alter ego Admiral Naismith, then gives some revealing insights into his Barrayaran background, and finishes up with Admiral Naismith being given a permanent role in his life. Many of the later Miles books, while excellent in and of themselves, probably won't have as much resonance as they should have if you do not have this background in mind. (Which is not to say that these are something you need to suffer through to get to the good stuff. The good stuff starts right away. Why are you even wasting time reading this review? Read the book!)

Note: the other reissue volumes are Cordelia's Honor, which includes Shards of Honor and Barrayar, and Miles Errant, which includes Cetaganda and Ethan of Athos, as well as "Labyrinth" from "Borders of Infinity."

"Young Miles", by Lois McMaster Bujold is the second compilation of the Vorkosigan saga. The first compilation combined the novels "Shards of Honor" and "Barrayar", to tell the story of Miles' Mother, Cordelia, his Father, Aral, and ended shortly after Miles' birth.

"Young Miles" is an outstanding compilation, consisting of two novels, "The Warrior's Apprentice" and the Hugo award winning "The Vor Game", divided by a novella, "The Mountains of Mourning, which won both the Hugo award and Nebula award for best novella. At the end is an afterword by author Lois McMaster Bujold, which is an interesting piece in its own right, telling the story of how these works came into existence.

All three tales are available in seperate forms, the two novels by themselves, and "Mountains" is included in "The Borders of Infinity", but this definitively compiles the present tales of Miles as he embarks on his early career.

Most would envy Miles Vorkosigan's position in life. The "Vor" at the start of his name signifies he's a member of his planet's nobility. He is heir to his father's title of Count, destinied to be one of the members of the ruling legislative body of his planet. He's foster brother to the Emperor. His father was the Regent in the Emperor's youth, and now serves as Prime Minister. Wealth, power and nobility; a grand and enviable destiny.

But no one would want to be Miles Vorkosigan, especially not on Barrayar, a planet which had been isolated from the galaxy at large long enough to lose much of its technology, including medical technology, until the past few generations. A planet where mutated children were killed at birth, so that precious resources would not be wasted.

For Miles is a mere 4'9" tall, hunchbacked, a mishapen head, and with brittle bones which break with alarming regularity. Not a mutant, despite the epithets he deals with daily, but the victim of a poison gas attack on his parents while he was still in his mother's womb.

The adventure starts with "The Warrior's Apprentice." 17 year old Miles washes out on his attempt to join Barrayar's military academy because of breaking a leg during the physical testing stage of the entrance process.

Discouraged, he ends up taking a trip to Beta Colony, to visit his grandmother Naismith, to accompanied by his bodyguard, Bothari, and Bothari's daughter, the beautiful Elena. Along the way, he picks up two additions, a mad jump pilot, Arde Mayhew, and a Barrayaran deserter, Baz Jesek. Events result into a jump into a war zone. Events further result in the creation of the Dendarii Mercenaries, by Miles, and led by Miles Naismith, an unexpected creation of Miles Vorkosigan.

"The Mountains of Mourning" tells the tale of a newly minted Ensign Miles Vorkosigan forced to investigate an infanticide in the back country of his father's district, a child killed simply for having a deformed mouth, for being a mutant, a matter of personal significance to the deformed Miles, and to his parents.

"The Vor Game" has Miles receiving his first assignment after graduation from the military academy, unexpectedly to a desolate frigid base as a meteorolgist. Dealing with an insane commander results in his arrest and confinement, which ends with his going on a mission to Miles' Dendarii Mercenaries. But there's more to it, as Miles ends up stumbling on an old friend, an extremely important old friend, in the most unlikely of places.

If you already have these three tales in their seperate incarnations, fine. But this compilation is truly exceptional and should be obtained whenever possible.

I got the two books that are reprinted in this one almost by accident. I decided to see what the story was like. I could not put them down, and I now get my hands on anything that Bujold is willing to publish.

This is not the first book in the time line, nor is it the first book Bujold has written of the series. However, I recomend that you start with this book or the two that compose it. There is nothing that is not explained enough to understand despite all the history that has gone on before. But, the charecters are so well developed by the time that this book is written that everything comes alive.

Young Miles is the only really new charecter introduced. Almost all of the supporting cast and situations have been well established by this book. When we meet Miles, we fall in love with him. He is not a superman, but he achieves the superhuman. He can be annoying, flighty and self absorbed, but we see that it is his way of dealing with the world and overcome the bad luck he has handed to him before he was even born. Another way of dealing with the world is to be hyperactive and accomplishing several actions at once, so much so that when he is accidently given an "upper" laced drink no one notices until he crashes days later.

After you read this, you can go back and read the first few books in the series. It is almost like watching Star Wars Episode 1 in that you know much of what will happen, but it does not take away from the pleasure of the stories. But start here and start the book at a time when you have little else to do for the next few days.

Readers should note that this book is a reprint of The Warriors Apprentice, The Mountains of Mourning and The Vor Game. The only new material is the authors afterward (7 pages) in which she explains the background to writing the series

When a friend recommended the Miles Vorkosigan books I was at a loss as to where to start. So I picked this up and saw in the back a timeline listing the books in chronological order. While Shards of Honor and Barrayar (republished together as Cordelia's Honor) tell the story of Miles' parents meeting, poor Sgt. Bothari's troubled mind and how exactly Miles came to be crippled, this is the book that shows the painful process of a young man becoming one of the most unorthodox military leaders in modern sci/fi. I heartily recommend the first two for the sake of getting a more complete picture of Barrayar'a social/political structure, but if you just want to follow Miles around I suggest this one.

Several years ago, Baen Books began releasing Lois McMaster Bujold's tales of Miles Vorkosigan in omnibus form, each volume containing several adventures arranged in story chronology order. Young Miles contains three tales, the novel The Warrior's Apprentice, the novella "The Mountains of Mourning", and another novel, The Vor Game. Chronologically these stories occur after Barrayar and before Cetaganda.

In The Warrior's Apprentice, Miles fails to meet the physical requirements to be accepted into the Barrayaran Military Academy. Through a series of screwball comedy-like events, where one damn thing just snowballs into another, in short order he attracts a cadre of misfits and former losers, dedicated personally to himself, and eventually creates and leads the Free Dendarii Mercenaries under the assumed identity of "Admiral Naismith". This is Bujold's first exploration of the idea that, like T.E. Lawrence (on whose personality he's partly based), Miles is an "enabler", drawing to himself people who perform under his influence better than they might have otherwise.

Warrior's is an immensely fun book, a coming-of-age tale, a comedy, a tragedy, and a military SF novel all rolled into one. A word about the "tragedy" part of the equation. Shortly into this novel, my favorite character in the series thus far dies. I've been told (by the lady who turned me on to Bujold, and has messiah-like done the same to as many others as she can) that one woman simply quit reading at this point, just refused to continue either the book or the series, she was so pissed-off this character was killed. I can understand that. I was if not angered at least shocked and saddened to see this character go. But with 20/20 hindsight I can see why it happened. There's simply no way Warrior's, or most of the subsequent events in Miles' life that Bujold wanted to occur could have happened with this character around. So Bujold achieved a wrenching death scene AND cleared out the problem this character presented all in one fell swoop.

"The Mountains of Mourning" was originally published as one-third of the Borders of Infinity collection. Miles is forced by his duties as Lord Vorkosigan to play detective, to investigate and solve a murder. I have to admit, at least to me, the mystery wasn't much of a mystery, I had the killer pegged from their first appearance; and I think my solution to their eventual punishment would have been much more "an eye for an eye" than Miles'.

The Vor Game is the longest and most complex story in the book. The first thing you need to know about The Vor Game, it won the Hugo award for Best SF Novel of 1991. I'm not sure I would have voted for that, myself. Structurally the book is divided into two parts quite different in tone. The first tells the story of Miles' initial assignment as a Barrayaran officer, and, with the discovery of a dead body and a packet of unknown contents, as Bujold puts it in her Afterword, "tried very hard to turn into a military murder mystery." In the first draft, the packet contained money. Bujold's test readers were jumping up and down, waiting to find out what happened next - and couldn't understand her insistence that NOTHING was supposed to happen next, the dead body and packet weren't really important (!). Finally, she changed the contents of the packet to something totally non-mysterious and moved on with the tale. I was, frankly, at this point in the story settling in for a thoroughly enjoyable murder mystery myself, and, like the test readers couldn't understand why it never materialized. So there that dead body and packet sit in the middle of the first section of The Vor Game, about as useful as a vermiform appendix. This fascinating set-up should either have been allowed to run its own course or removed entirely.

The main problem I have with The Vor Game is that, in its second part, the event precipitating Miles' adventures is that, out of all of explored space, he just happens to find himself thrown into the same cell on a space station jail (in a completely different star system than Barrayar) as his childhood friend, the runaway Emperor of Barrayar! This is a coincidence of such staggering proportions, the book should have been called Deus Ex Machina, a plot twist so hamfisted all I could do was shake my head and think, "You have GOT to be kidding me." But there it is. And this book won a Best Novel Hugo!

Most of the rest of The Vor Game is set-up; it's not until the last 70 pages that at long last we get to see what we're really after, Miles back in the saddle as Admiral Naismith. At which point the book begins to absolutely ROCK, as Miles juggles 50 plates in the air at once, with the fate of star systems balanced in his hands. The second part of The Vor Game is much more fast-paced, lighter and more amusing than the first. NAISMITH LIVES! Eventually.

Young Miles is two novels (The Warrior's Apprentice, The Vor Game) and one novella (Mountains of Mourning) combined into one book. This is the second omnibus in the Vorkorsigan Saga but the first collection that deals with and introduces us to the character of Miles Vorkosigan.

All three entries are fantastic in their own right as they introduce us to a young Miles and tell the story of his coming of age in lieu of failed military career. It's better not knowing the plot details before you go in, but needless to say when all is said and done, Miles has on one of the greatest sci fi adventures to date.

Bujold is great at most aspects of the sci fi novel but her greatest strength is her development of Miles himself. Part crippled, and very complex, this vertically challenged protagonist uses his mind and his charisma to get through almost every challenge he comes across. It's so refreshing to see character development of this level and Miles quickly becomes and lovable and endearing underdog. He is brialliant and cunning while also being flawed and he is probably one of the few literary characters who actually warrants 6-8 books solely about him. Miles Vorkosigan is arguably the single best and most interesting multi-book science fiction character to date, easily beating the likes of Ender Wiggin and similar heavy hitters.

The three books really compliment each other well as they show many different sides to Miles. He always finds himself in sticky situations and here he uses his wits, intillect and magnetism to get extricate himself. Bujold is also one of the rare science fiction writers out there that can generate comedy from human interaction. This serious is the perfect mix of melodrama, comedy and invention.

It's not surprsing to see the long list of Nebulas and Hugo Bujold has won for her Vorkosigan serious (although her Paladin Of Souls win is as incomprehensible as it is political and depressing) The Vor Game won the Hugo award and probably deservingly so as it much better than the (slightly more than mediocre) Fall of Hyperion and the bloated and ridiculous Earth by David Brin. I haven't read the others nor heard anything amazing about them.

Bottom Line: Excellent beginning into one of the best sci-fi operas out there. I rank this series only behind the Foundation series as far as space epics go. A must read for all sci-fi fans and people who like rooting for underdogs!

Miles, the son of a powerful Vor family, is driven to succeed. He's smart, intelligent, and politically saavy. By birth, he should be assured a place in the ruling class when he reaches maturity.

So, what's the problem?

Miles was injured when his parents were victims of a terrorist attack while his mother was pregnant with him. His brittle bones break at the slightest pressure and cannot be replaced with synthetics until he reaches the end of his growth. The people of Barrayar have a fear of genetic defects and many people condone killing all children who are not 'perfect'. A practice that Mile's father has been trying to discourage in his province.

In "Mountains of Mourning", Miles is authorized to find the person who killed a newborn child who was born with a treatable genetic disorder. Imagine the locals 'joy' to find a 'mutie' has been sent to try one of them for doing their best to preserve their genetic purity.

Miles uses his intelligence to overcome the obstacles in his path. While everyone thinks he has been given every honor due to his position, Miles knows that he's earned every pat on the head, every medal, every good grade, every advancment that he has ever received.

Miles is not perfect. He struggles and rails against the system, his body, and the attitudes of those around him. His continuing struggle to achieve his own goals and to make something of himself -- make him a character that I, as a reader, can sympathize with.

I think what makes this series so addicting is that readers feel deeply about the main character. We become emotionally involved in his life -- we cheer him on. We want him to succeed against the odds because the author doesn't cheat -- Miles takes his beatings and goes on. An example that many of us find reassuring.

You can start either with this omnibus or "Cordelia's Honor" to start with Bujold's Vorkosigan series.

The two novels in this omnibus, "The Warrior's Apprentice" and "The Vor Game", are the most space-opera of Bujold's books, and also her most hilarious. Her later books focus more on the human level and less on the high stakes and slapstick, though she always has both comedy and character-focus. Both are good reads.

There are some amazing coinsidences which occur throughout this, but I eat it as part of the comedy.

The novellas "The Mountains of Mourning", and the part of The Vor Game which was originally "Weatherman" are more serious and are good in a different way.