Once upon a time, a genius named ricepirate made an epic flash based on a voice track of a review of a flash RPG…in other words, folding the very fabric of the internet in upon itself and spinning it into pure gold. At long last, the video has made its way onto YouTube, where it’s been entertaining us all day. Time to turn up your speakers:
One day, when our grandkids ask what the internet was like in the olden days, we are going to make them watch the hell out of this.
It’s excellent.
Coming very late to the series, I was fortunate in being able to read the books in internal chronological order (placing Captain Vorpatril’s Alliance before Cryoburn) and the point of inheritance/titles you bring up helps simplify (mostly) offscreen issues of succession in Cryoburn nicely.
I also love how Bujold used this novel to further develop some tertiary characters such as Lord Vorpatril and Byerly.
And I’ll defend A Civil Campaign as superior to Komarr, but then again I enjoyed Memory more than any of the books that preceded it.
Squeee! I love Ivan! Loved Cetaganda, because Ivan was in it; although he was mostly used as a foil to contrast Mile’s cunning conclusions with Ivan’s bumbling cluelessness.
I’ve read the first six chapters on the Baen Books site, and heard Lois McMaster Bujold read the first two chapters aloud.
So this is a book on which I will definitely spend my Christmas Amazon money!
I got one of the ebook ARCs for this months ago and I have read it 4 times already. I loved this; it made me laugh out loud every time I read it, and not always in the same spots. It’s such a lovely story as both a romance and mystery/adventure. I loved seeing Ivan and Tej discover what they really wanted, and seeing more of the family dynamics between Ivan, Alys and Simon was WONDERFUL.
It’s funny, b/c at the end of the book I’m not really curious about what happens next to Ivan and Tej; I want to know what Gregor manages to find to keep Simon from getting bored again. Because well… a bored Simon finds things to do that, well….read the book J
Oh, and I think Ivan’s sorting system is brilliant and I’ve sort of been using it for my emails, too.
It was a lovely book. I enjoyed Tej’s crazy family and her trying to explain/deal wtih them as much as I love Ivan’s family whom I already know and love. Good times. And great description of the two parts of the book. :)
I got the book and read it- and immediately read it again, with my sister breathing down my neck, and enjoyed every minute of it! Tej is the perfect mate for Ivan- someone who can appreciate what he is, and not expecting him to be Miles, Padma, Gregor, etc., etc.
I also loved the byplay with Byerly- Ivan’s real involvement in A Civil Campaign started with By showing up at the door, and now to have a whole book starting there?
I’m torn between my favorite lines’ “Maybe I should have started with a pony?” versus ” I am not a fate worse than death!”
I am curious about what happens next to Ivan and Tej. Not because Ivan wants to be interesting, but precisely because he wants so very badly to be boring. Tej is less passionate about it, but also in favor of being boring. And well, after this book I now understand precisely why Ivan wants to be boring.
I knew Miles was (depending on how one counts) second or third or fourth in line for the throne after Gregor and his dad. But over the whole series, it had never once dawned on me that since Ivan is next in line for the Vorkosigan countship after Miles and Mark, Ivan also has a giant bull’s eye on his head for the throne. And unlike Miles and Mark, Ivan is healthy… so appearing boring, vaguely stupid and totally uninterested in power is part of how Ivan managed to live past 30. I have to admire a fictional character who is so devoted to his cover story.
I would actually describe the second half of the book as “Alys and Simon are bored”. If only one of them was bored, I don’t think things would have gone quite so haywire. And well, the reader forgets Alys’s place in the ImpSec hierarchy at their peril.
I stopped and re-read all the other Vorkosigan books in a weird order.
My choice was to jump back and re-read Brothers-in-Arms.
The moment the…architectural descent was revealed, I started laughing hysterically and I don’t think I stopped until the book was over (and then some). The complete set of deadpan (and hysterical) reactions was truly priceless. A joke was that _volumes_ the making and well worth the wait (not to mention how clever the causal agent was…I do wonder about the sequence in which the entire disaster scenario got constructed).
I got the e-arc of this book and proceeded to read it compulsively, over and over again. I too found all the answers to questions left pending about Ivan and Barrayar worth the price of admission, but the best part for me was seeing how the cousins relate to each other. Gregor truly loves Ivan; Miles likes to tweet him but also appreciates him while being a bit jealous of him.
I think Cordelia was right when she postulated in “Mirror Dance” that Ivan was the ultimate political survivor. Tej is exactly the mate he needs: someone who appreciates him for whom he is and will help him maintain his cover.