Reading: A Change of Station

I am very glad that the Comfortable Courtesan series is now appearing in book form, as it's absolutely perfect when I want to read something fluffy and charming which also features a fabulously diverse cast of characters and showcases a whole spectrum of historical queer existence. The third published volume takes Madame C- out of the demimonde and into Society; on re-reading, I realised that this allows the introduction of a much wider range of female characters who the rules of polite society wouldn't have allowed to come into the orbit of Madame C- the top courtesan, as well as the continued development of existing characters. It's touching and funny and really just utterly wonderful, and while I suspect that this review is mostly preaching to the choir if there is anyone reading this who hasn't encountered Madame C- yet you really should try her.

Reading: Labyrinth

The novella Labyrinth completes the third collected volume of Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan series (Miles, Mystery and Mayhem). In it, Miles and some of the Dendarii Mercenaries are visiting Jackson's Whole, a kind of cyberpunk capitalist hellhole where the only government is the large corporations who run the planet and sell anything and everything to visitors who are able to pay the right price. The Dendarii are ostensibly there to buy weapons, but really there to rendezvous with a geneticist who wants to defect to Barrayar. Miles's life being what it is, things don't quite go according to plan and Miles ends up becoming a latter-day Theseus escaping from an underground basement with a prototype supersoldier who is also a sixteen-year-old girl.

Labyrinth might be short, but it was a fun read. The question of disability rights and is never far away from any story featuring Miles Vorkosigan, and here it's very much in the foreground; as well as Miles, the novella includes a character who is a "Quaddie" (humans who have been genetically engineered to have two sets of arms, rather than arms and legs, to be more efficient in zero-gravity) and Taura, the supersoldier prototype. (Bel Thorne, the hermaphrodite captain of one of the Dendarii ships, also features more prominently than in previous books. I have to admit that I find Bujold's use of the pronoun "it" to describe Thorne quite difficult to take, but I suppose the novella was published in 1989 and the general understanding of gender and pronouns has moved on a long way in nearly 30 years.) I really liked the novella's message of acceptance, both acceptance of other people's differences and self-acceptance; today, I needed to hear Miles telling Taura not to waste her life trying to be normal when she could be spending it striving for greatness.