Lois McMaster Bujold, “Shards of Honor” (1986) – This is probably the closest thing to a romance novel I’ve read, unless some of the more courtship-heavy bourgeois novels count. Cordelia comes from a relatively chill spacefaring culture and Vorkosigan comes from a militaristic one. They meet when the latter takes the former prisoner but they come to rely on each other during a long trek across an alien planet and a plunge into confusing and deadly intrigue among the Barryarans, the militaristic culture. You can call Vorkosigan Mister Too Damn Honorable as he constantly gets involved in schemes to undermine less honorable Barrayarans out to do him in. The two cultures get in a war due to dishonorable machinations and Cordelia keeps on getting captured and separated from Vorkosigan and…

Honestly, I wasn’t paying attention for a lot of this. The writing is pedestrian. The characters are flat. The action isn’t bad, in some places. But between the lack of ideas or compelling prose and having read it during a dry period in my reading life, I didn’t get much out of this. The good news is that apparently this is all a prequel and the vaunted Vorkosigan Saga is actually about the main characters kid or grandkid or something. So maybe I’m not missing much if the rotation insists I revisit this particular scifi touchstone series? Who knows? **