Cryoburn
Lois McMaster Bujold
Baen Books, 2010
U.S. hardcover, first edition
ISBN 978-1-4391-3394-1
252 pages; $25.00

It’s been a long time since Lois McMaster Bujold gave us a Miles Vorkosigan novel – eight years, to be precise, since Diplomatic Immunity. I’ve missed Miles; his adventures have always been the science fictional equivalent of popcorn, fun to read, not too taxing, written breezily and well. Cryoburn takes a leap in time to show us a Miles who is now 39 years old, married with four children, and working as an Imperial Auditor – with his own peculiar, almost childlike, disregard for rules and complete creativity and curiosity. It’s good to read about him again.

This adventure finds Miles on the planet Kibou-daini, which is built around the industry of cryonics, that is, freezing those who are fatally ill, injured, or just too old to live any longer. The idea is supposed to be that these individuals will be thawed and cured of their afflictions as cures are discovered by medical science, but oddly, few revivals ever take place. The reason for this seems to be not that medical science is making no advances, but because the cryocorps that run the cryonics businesses accumulate the votes of those who are frozen, and are allowed to exercise them. Who wants to give up even a single vote – a single bit of power – by reviving someone?

Miles goes to Kibou-daini under the pretense of attending a conference on cryonics, but when we first come across him on this planet, he is wandering about the deep, dark halls of a typical cryocorps installation, with rows upon rows of frozen corpsicals around him, hallucinating. Someone attempted to kidnap him and probably shot him with a sedative to keep him quiet. Unfortunately, because of Miles’s strange body chemistry, most sedatives have precisely the opposite effect on him. The hyperactivity which resulted was probably what allowed him to escape his captors, but now he’s lost and not exactly in his right mind.

Fortunately, Miles is rescued by a young boy, Jin, who takes him back to his homeless shelter and cares for Miles until Miles recovers from the drug. This particular homeless shelter, though, turns out to be quite fascinating to Miles. It is an illegal, underground cryocorps, freezing people who can’t afford the procedure otherwise. This business and its owner show a whole new aspect to the cryonics business to Miles, and reveals a fissure in Kibou-daini’s society between the wealthy and the poor – one that is even more a matter of life and death than is the same fissure in our own society. Miles becomes very interested in and involved with Jin, who turns out to have a mother who is a political activist working for justice in cryonics, a mother who was illegally frozen to shut her up when her protests started to catch fire.

Miles accomplishes his first mission – to prevent a Kibou-daini takeover of Barrayar – quickly and with finesse, but by then he is more interested in Kibou-daini’s problems, and more specifically, with Jin’s. His schemes to solve those problems consumes the bulk of the book in trademark Vorkosigan style, complete with conning the conmen, deceiving the liars, politicians and corporate bigwigs, and working some real justice for those for whom the word “justice” has been only a theory that never worked in their favor.

In other words, this is a typical Miles Vorkosigan story. It’s fun. This is by no means the equal of Bujold’s more challenging Vorkosigan novels like Mirror Dance; I’d be very surprised indeed if this book were nominated for any awards, no matter how often Bujold has been on the Hugo and Nebula shortlists. But that’s not to say that it’s not worth reading, because it is. I’d enjoy ten more like it. But the end of the book indicates that Miles is moving into a new phase of his life, and I suspect that the next Vorkosigan novel is going to be quite different from this one. I look forward to it.