Reviews

Reader's Chair continues its inexorable and much appreciated march through the Bujold canon with this latest rendition of the 1989 collection of three Vorkosigan adventures. The first and most successful story, "The Mountains of Mourning," is a Hugo and Nebula Award-winning tale that finds Miles dispatched by his emperor father to investigate an infanticide in a rural and provincially minded region. In "Labyrinth," Miles covertly travels to wild Jackson's Whole as Dendarii Mercenary Admiral Naismith on an undercover mission to extract an important research geneticist who mandates the destruction of his last surviving experimental creature as a condition of his departure. In the title story, Miles infiltrates a Cetagandan prison and performs a memorable poetic dance before women. A thread that works better in print than on audio is the dialog between Miles and Simon Illyan, chief of Barrayar's Imperial Security, which introduces each story. Here, it is confusing, abrupt, and unnecessary. Michael Hanson and Carol Cowan, as they have so often in the past with Bujold's work, once again assert their sure and confident narrative control over the material. Essential for all sf collections.DBarry X. Miller, Austin P.L., TX Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.