I’ve had this on my reading list ever since I saw it being featured in Jo Walton’s What Makes This Book So Great but I’ve actually first known about it since I read Eliezer Yudkowsky’s fanfiction The Methods of Rationality as his version of Harry Potter consciously patterns himself after the main character in this book Miles Vorkosigan.

Miles is the son of the Prime Minister of the Barrayaran Empire and like his forefathers dreams of service as a warrior. However due to a foiled assassination attempt during his mother’s pregnancy, he is born stunted and has very brittle bones. After he fails to enter the service academy due to being unable to pass the physical examination, he travels to Beta Colony, the homeworld of his mother, with his bodyguard Bothari and Bothari’s daughter Elena, with whom he is secretly in love. He hopes to help Elena discover the identity of her mother and along the way happens to buy an obsolete freighter to help its pilot. In order to make enough money to cover that purchase, he takes on a delivery contract that he soon realizes actually involves smuggling weapons past a blockade imposed as part of an interplanetary war. When his attempt to bluff his way past the blockade fails, he and his crew successfully capture the war ship instead. In this manner, through a combination of trickery, blind pure luck and the competence of his subordinates, he smashes through every obstacle only to run into ever bigger problems while the stakes keep on climbing and the fake mercenary company he dreams up on the spot turns into a real force.

So my reaction to reading this ridiculous adventure is similar to that of Miles’ opponents who can barely believe how he is able to bumble and bluff his way to victory. I’m certain that if I had come across this book when I was younger I’d have been all over it and pumped my fists when time Miles scored a win. Now however I find it impossible to believe the things he gets away with. For example in one early battle, he learns that the exoskeletons worn by some of the enemy troops can be hacked into and remotely controlled. An older officer tells him that this wouldn’t work as the enemy would surely detect the loss of control and switch to manual mode. Miles’ bright idea is to subtly sabotage the suits, such as ruining their aim, instead of taking full control and suddenly the older and surely wiser officers react as if he were a genius. This kind of thing happens again and again across the entire book, which made it extremely annoying to me. To be fair, Yudkowsky’s Harry Potter does the exact same thing and I was fine with it then. In my defense, I was younger then and Yudkowsky’s intent was to deliberately poke holes in J.K. Rowling’s atrocious worldbuilding as to how the wizarding world actually works. Here in a solidly semi-realistic science-fiction world, this doesn’t fly at all and I can’t understand how the adults in the room let him get away with it.

The main plot itself is a fairly standard action adventure with plenty of fighting. True, Miles himself is terrible at direct combat and instead has his underlings do all his fighting for him so this isn’t quite a macho male power fantasy. But it is a fantasy of a charismatic nerd winning out against impossible odds. The universe it is set is generic sci-fi. With its multiple planets, lasers, power armor and the militaristic Barrayaran society, it feels like fantasy with a sci-fi veneer. Acceptable perhaps in the 1980s but terribly mundane now. The only really interesting thing is that interstellar travel is possible only when guided by pilots equipped with special implants, which seems to come straight out of Dune. Jo Walton wrote that this book has more depth than expected out of a standard young adult novel and I believe this is due to how some of the adult authority figures turn out to not be who they first appear to be and have feet of clay. While that does count as depth, it also plays into the fantasy that Miles always knows better than everyone else and is justified in breaking the rules and doing whatever he wants.

So obviously I didn’t like this book at all and had a hard time preventing myself from scoffing with derision at every page. At the same time, I can see how I might have loved it if I had come across this in my teens. At my current age however, this is far too juvenile and unbelievable for me to enjoy. There’s no way I’m going to read any more books in this series.