Book Review: Vorkosigan Saga

Why You Should Read This Book

These books spent a very long time on my to-be-read list, under the vague impression that they were another interchangeable space adventure/mil-sf/space opera series. And that’s not entirely wrong—The Warrior’s Apprentice is one of the best space adventure yarns out there—but these books are so much more than that. I often think that “something else like the Vorkosigan Saga"A material chunk, possibly even a majority, of what I’ve read over the last few years can be traced back to having typed that search into Google and read that post is one of the hardest book recommendation questions to answer, because the series distinctive in so many different ways. The series is a collage of genres—one book an adventure story, the next a regency romance, the one after that a detective storyFWIW I don’t think this exact sequence actually occurs—tied together by a common thread of characters and ideas. A sci-fi series that thinks about the future while retaining focus on humanity. These books span an incredible range of emotions from page to page while still almost always feeling coherentDon’t mention the bug butter fight! I mentioned it once but I think I got away with it….

Series Overview

This is a type 3 series, and while they can theoretically be read in any order I fully endorse the view that you should read the books in internal chronological order, with the exception of deferring Falling Free until you’ve gotten into the series, but still reading it before Diplomatic Immunity:

• Shards of Honor
• Barrayar
• The Warrior’s Apprentice
• Falling FreeI’ve not actually tried this, but my current thought is that this is the best place to drop in Falling Free. Reading in internal chronological order can make The Warrior’s Apprentice and The Vor Game feel like a bit of a duology, and compress the years of Miles’s life between those books, which in publishing order have 4 full novels in between them.
• The Vor Game
• Cetaganda
• Ethan of Athos
• Brothers in Arms
• Borders of InfinityThe novel-length fixup
• Mirror Dance
• Memory
• Komarr
• A Civil Campaign
• “Winterfair Gifts”
• Diplomatic Immunity
• Captain Vorpatril’s Alliance
• “The Flowers of Vashnoi”
• Cryoburn
• Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen