Spinoff from the Vorkosigan Saga, set two hundred years before the main series. Leo Graf, an engineer who works for the huge GalacTech company, is sent to a space station to instruct apprentice engineers. Turns out that most of the residents are children (the oldest class is twenty) who were genetically modified to have two extra arms instead of legs and other tweaks to be healthier/optimized for zero-gravity, and are known as "quaddies." Leo is able to stay calm and not react with revulsion, but the more he learns about the quaddies' precarious legal status and treatment, the more he feels like he needs to do something about it, even if he's just one guy. The good news is, sometimes social and ethical problems turn out to be just engineering problems...
In some ways, Leo is a foil to Miles; Miles is a disabled person, surrounded by able-bodied people, but he bluffs his way through things and his heroism turns out to be contagious. Leo is an able-bodied person, surrounded by the quaddies, who are seen as disabled in planetary gravity, and his leadership is similar.
“Or,” Leo raised his voice, “you can take your lives into your own hands. Come with me and put all your risks up front. The big gamble for the big payoff. Let me tell you”—he gulped for courage, mustered megalomania—for surely only a maniac could drive this through to success— “let me tell you about the Promised Land . . .”
I had recently reread part of "The Warrior's Apprentice" so the "please don't yell loudly when you're making a surprise entrance into the room" thing was fresh in my mind...
Even if Colonel Wayne in Nest of Doom led his troops into battle with his rebel yell over their comlinks, I don’t think real marines would do that. It would be bound to interfere with their communications.
There's a similar line with "we have to be careful about what videos we show people." "Oooh, pornography?!" "...No." that has Miles and Elena parallels.
And, of course, the themes of seeing the inherent worth and dignity in every human life, even the smallest and most vulnerable, are clear. (The quaddies were also products of the uterine replicators from Beta Colony, which leads the galaxy in a lot of technological innovations.) There's also a character whose bitterness is similar to that of the villain in "Mountains of Mourning"--when your life has been crushed by the system, it feels unfair for other people to have opportunities that you were denied.
As with Cordelia, Leo's worldview is informed by Christianity, but he's not tendentious about it. Can we jeopardize the mission to rescue one guy:
"Maybe. I’m not sure it’s good military thinking—the precedent had to do with sheep, I believe—but I don’t think I could live with myself if we didn’t at least try to get him back."
The weird legal status of the space station is kind of a parallel with "
A Drop of Corruption":
GalacTech holds Rodeo on a ninety-nine-year lease with the government of Orient IV. The original terms of the lease were extremely favorable to us...
A great description of what planetary gravity would be like if you'd never experienced it before:
Leading from the hatch to the hangar floor was a kind of corrugated ramp. Clearly, it was designed to break down the dangerous fight with the omnipresent gravity into little manageable increments. “Stairs.”
The authorities try to enforce a "mothers are naturally parental, they must mind the babies, menfolk do the other stuff" policy, which Leo thinks is ridiculous, coming from a galaxy with uterine replicators, and the upshot is that a new father doesn't understand things like diaper rash and has to have his partner explain it. A good example of the limitations of this kind of societal structure, without being preachy. (This book features the most gripping, stressful, action-packed scene hinging on a diaper bag you've ever seen.)
Early on, it's established that quaddie education focuses on engineering, not great men of history...
“...a typical downsider history of, say, the settlement of Orient IV usually gives about fifteen pages to the year of the Brothers’ War, a temporary if bizarre social aberration—and about two to the actual hundred or so years of settlement and building-up of the planet. Our text gives one paragraph to the war. But the building of the Witgow trans-trench monorail tunnel, with its subsequent beneficial economic effects to both sides, gets five pages. In short, we emphasize the common instead of the rare, building rather than destruction, the normal at the expense of the abnormal. So that the quaddies may never get the idea that the abnormal is somehow expected of them. If you’d like to read the texts, I think you’ll get the idea very quickly.”
“I—yeah, I think I’d better,” Leo murmured. The degree of censorship imposed upon the quaddies implied by Yei’s brief description made his skin crawl—and yet, the idea of a text that devoted whole sections to great engineering works made him want to stand up and cheer.
And we get a nice payoff to this much later:
Shooting people was such a stupid activity, why should everybody—anybody!—be so impressed? Silver wondered irritably. You would think she had done something truly great, like discover a new treatment for black stem-rot.
Polar exploration drinking game!
“What if someone asks what happened to my feet?” Silver worried aloud.
“Amputated,” suggested Leo, “due to a terrible case of frostbite suffered on your vacation to the Antarctic Continent.”
I've said this before, but Bujold is great at the "leaving out the parts people skip" of pacing. Like, "Claire and Tony have some questions for Leo about the legal situation elsewhere in the galaxy" > "Claire and Tony make a run for it" follows pretty quickly in succession, whereas in other books I feel like there would be a lot more hedging/introspection before that.
( Spoilers )Bingo: so, we get one mulligan square every year, and while I have not availed myself of it for the first four, this might be the time when I use one. You could probably make an argument for "politics" but by that token I think you could make an argument for almost anything for "politics."
Edit to add: the ancient and honorable male art of "monitoring the situation!" :D
“Since then we’ve been tracking the D-620, and it’s continued to boost straight toward Rodeo. It doesn’t answer our calls.”
“What are you doing about it?”
“We’re monitoring the situation. I have not yet received orders to do anything about it.”
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