Let's see what happens.

[vor]

Tori here! Player of Archie Kennedy (simplestgift ) and Peeta Mellark (victorbychance )? Don’t know me? Enh, well. Point is, I am bringing in a new character. If you’ve heard of him, I’m impressed.

Meet Gregor Vorbarra from The Vorkosigan Saga by Lois McMaster Bujold. Hailing from the 30th century, he’s “preternaturally quiet” and pretty glum and nearly impossible to read, but shrewd and extremely good at handling people. He’d “be shy if he could, but he’s not allowed.” He’s “not allowed” because he’s the head of a feudal government which spans his entire planet and two others. This quiet, self-effacing guy is Emperor of Barrayar. This has been going on since he was four.

At this canon point, he’s twenty-five, suicidally depressed, and a runaway, so he’s not exactly eager to go back to being a prisoner of his own security. Everything from grocery shopping to changing a lightbulb is going to be a new, exciting experience. Running a planet is hard enough. Learning whether or not one can make it from day to day on one's own, personal, non-inherited merit?

He’s going to like it here.

manage_circle add_read vor or hover click.

Oh by the way, he’s going to use an alias for a while. Anyone who can supernaturally detect lies or read minds will know better.

Comments

[galaxynymph]

I've heard of this series but I've never read it.

Tell me more?

[vor]

I just spent about an hour trying to think of how to describe the series, but the trouble is that it's not a series that has a single plot, with each book like a chapter in that plot. Each book stands on its own. So maybe I can describe the setting a little.

It's way in the future. We're still living on Earth, but we're also living on a zillion other planets. Sort of like each nation independently colonized a planet or two. Beta Colony is essentially California on steroids. Escobar is descended from Latin America. Kibou-daini originated in Japan. The Cetagandan Empire is a whole slew of planets, the ultimate objective of the Empire to genetically engineer the post-human race. Things like that. All these planets are connected by a web of wormholes that lead from system to system.

The central planet of the series, Barrayar, is unique in a very particular way. When it was first colonized, a bunch of people were dropped off there with bedrolls and blankets. Then, the space ship that dropped them off lost the wormhole that led them to Barrayar. As a result, Barrayar was completely lost to the rest of the galaxy for about five hundred years. When they were found again, they were pretty much an entire planet filled with Medieval Czarist Russia. Since then, they've caught up with most technology, but they still retain some charmingly old-fashioned (or barbaric, depending on how you look at it) ways, such as their feudal government and system of oaths.

Most of the series revolves around the Vorkosigans, who are part of the military aristocracy known as the Vor. Specifically, most of the series revolves around Miles Vorkosigan, who, for a Barrayaran, has some unique difficulties. Since the Time of Isolation began, there's been an obsession on Barrayar with genetic purity. Miles' defects are not genetic, but a result of a poisonous gas attack that occurred when his mother was pregnant with him. He's less than five feet tall and has extremely brittle bones. He's also hyperactive and a genius at stirring things up. His part in the series begins with him accidentally acquiring a mercenary fleet when he was on a vacation to impress a girl. Things go downhill from there.

Before that, however, we have two books which have his mother, Cordelia Naismith Vorkosigan of Beta Colony, as the protagonist. Those are more about her dealing with Barrayaran politics, its complexities and intrigue, and sets up the rest of the series. I'd probably start with those.