Week Nine: Space Opera

This week we were asked to read a novel in the genre of space opera, which is a sub genre of science fiction. The novel I selected was Shards of Honor by Lois McMaster Bujold.

To start off with I found it really interesting that the main character was a woman. A large chunk of movies or novels that involves space travel the main character that you follow around is a guy. This novel was a great example of having a space adventure and romantic drama mixed together. I thought that this space opera was interesting and I really enjoyed reading it until I got towards the end. The book has a very strong theme with the concept of love and what people will do to find it.

For example the main character is a woman named Cordelia Naismith and she falls in love with Captain Lord Aral Vorkosigan of Barrayar, notorious as the "Butcher of Komarr". She gets captured and her crewman as Vorkosigan prisoners. Vorkosigan expresses a wish that Cordelia marry him and remain on Barryar as Lady Vorkosigan. She turns him down. Later on towards the end of the novel Cordelia recovers in a prison camp on the same planet where she first met Vorkosigan, and discovers that it was used as a staging ground for the surprise invasion.  The camp inmates, mostly women, have been subjected to torture and in some cases rape by their captors, until Vorkosigan arrives and summarily executes the officer in charge.  Cordelia inherits command of the camp by virtue of her rank and spends much her time dealing directly with Vorkosigan. He proposes to her again, and she again rejects him because she sees what Barrayaran society does to people.  Vorkosigan negotiates an exchange of prisoners, one of whom is Cordelia, and deals with a delivery of uterine replicators - artificial wombs, each containing a fetus from a woman raped by a Barrayaran soldier, one of which is Bothari's.On her way back to Beta Colony after the prisoner exchange, the Betan psychiatrist assigned to Cordelian becomes convinced that her injuries are the result of being tortured by Vorkosigan, and the fact that she denies it means that she has been psychologically tampered with as well. She is assumed to be suffering from a form of Stockholm Syndrome. Desperate to keep the secret of the Barrayaran plot, Cordelia refuses to let herself sleep, developing insomnia, a stutter, and a nervous tic, which further leads the authorities to conclude that she has been brainwashed and may even be a spy. Fending off attempts to "cure" her, she disables one of her minders, and flees to Barrayar, where she finds and marries Vorkosigan.

This example shows what obstacles for Cordeli to go through in finding a love with Vorkosigan. Overall I somewhat recommend this book but you really have to like space and romantic drama.