Science Fiction

Okay, I picked it up and blitzed through Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen, and it was a deep disappointment. The personal and romantic stakes and themes of the earlier books with Cordelia Naismith were coupled with other adventures or plots, and the combination of the personal and the galactic stakes was part of what made them work. I felt like Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen utterly lost the broader plot, and it was just a book about two people getting together and retiring. (Which, to be fair, is a perfectly fine plot and there are multiple genres and sub-genres built around that plot, but in the context of the Vorkossigan Saga, it was a nothing-burger of a story.) There are some revelations about things long-past, which I think Bujold did to try to flesh out the story and maybe give Cornelia's take on some of the events that happened around her in the intervening ~30 years since she had a book from her perspective, but in this book, hardly anything happens. Seriously, the stakes are so low. It's pleasant, but scarcely needs to exist for the rest of the characters or novels. What a baffling addition to this series.