Bite-size Bujold

[mtvessel]

Aug 2021
Mira's Last Dance / The Prisoner of Limnos / The Orphans of Raspay - Lois McMaster Bujold – Spectrum Literary Agency, Inc., 2017 / 2017 / 2019
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Now that the Penric and Desdemona series has reached ten episodes, it is fairly clear what Bujold is about. Her inspiration is evidently the early Swords and Sorcery novellas of Fritz Leiber and others, where each story is linked to the others by a shared setting and some recurring characters. The problem with this model of publishing is that it leads to static characterisation; Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, for example, change hardly at all from one story to the next. To be fair, that is not quite true of this series - Penric's relationships do evolve a little as it progresses, but not nearly as much as I would like.

In Penric's Mission, we left our hero and his embedded demonic support team making their escape from Cedonia in the company of love interest Nikys and her brother General Arasaydia. Mira's Last Dance takes up the story as they approach the border town of Sosie. Alas, the baddies are on the lookout for them, forcing Penric to adopt a rather improbable disguise.

The characters are as fun as ever, but the story is based on a trope that I always find implausible and which, perhaps because of its cultural connotations for people from my part of the world, means that I couldn't suspend my disbelief. Definitely one of the weaker outings in the series.

The ruse is reused in The Prisoner of Limnos but to rather better effect. Nikys' mother is immured in an island temple complex by Arasaydia's enemies and Penric hatches a daring plan to break her out. There is some genuine tension as well as a few amusing twists.

The Orphans of Raspay sees Penric captured by pirates while on a sea voyage. It has to be said that the titular orphans are a cheesy way to prevent him from resolving the situation prematurely, but the borderlands port to which he is taken is one of the more effective settings that the series has had and the climatic action is unusually dramatic. It was also nice to finally have a map showing the relative locations of the countries in Penric's world, which greatly helps in anchoring them in the reader's imagination.

None of these stories is unsatisfying, but the absence of the character progression or developments in the world that you would get in a full-length novel is noticeable. Still, a regular dose of bite-sized Bujold is better than no Bujold at all.