CryoBurn by Lois McMaster Bujold
My rating: 4 of 5 stars Hunting for a Gold Ring in a Cryogenics Privy Cryoburn (2010), the 16th (?) entry in Louise McMaster Bujold's entertaining Vorkosigan space opera series, begins with Miles on Kibou-daini, a planet far from his Barrayaran Empire, drugged, hallucinating, and lost in hundreds of kilometers of cryogenic catacombs ("Cryocombs") packed with frozen "cryo-corpses." Luckily 11-year-old Jin Sato, who's living in a community squatting in an abandoned cryo-facility, takes Miles under his wing. Where are Jin's parents? And what happened to Roic, Miles' armsman (bodyguard/butler)? And why did Miles really come to Kibou-daini? It can't have just been to attend the conference on cryogenics which ended in his near-kidnapping. . . Bujold answers those questions in page-turning, pointed, and poignant ways, organized around her science fictional exploration of the technology, economics, ethics, and politics of cryogenics. On Kibou-daini giant cryo-corps (corporations) compete with one another to get the most clients, wielding the frozen people's "democratic" votes so as to favor their business interests. The competing cryo-corps employ different strategies to appeal to clients (whom they’d rather keep frozen than revive). New Egypt, for instance, offers a faux Egyptian look, complete with genetically modified "sphinxes" and monumental temple-like cryo-facilities. The plot, then, involves cryogenics, a bribery, a powerful corporation, a resistance ("Burn the Dead!"), an orphan boy, a crusading woman, and Miles doing his improvisational best to fulfill his Emperor's mission as Imperial Auditor (detective/representative/troubleshooter), "jumping into the privy and pulling out a gold ring." Bujold tells her story by rotating among a few point of view of characters. Miles is still brilliant, charismatic, and resourceful, and although at 39 he's perhaps less desperate to over-achieve while over-compensating for his dwarfish physique than in his younger days, he's still an unstoppable force once put in motion (a "hyperactive lunatic"). Jin is bright, generous, and sensitive. He avidly cares for a menagerie of creatures and doesn't like recalling that his father is dead-dead and his mother cryogenically preserved. Then there is Roic, Mile's armsman, a good-natured straight-man who worries that Miles' cavalier treatment of laws and rules is rubbing off on him. There are neat supporting characters: Jin's cute little sister Mina; the divorced Barrayaran Consul to Kibou-daini, Vorlinkin; and Miles' clone-brother Mark. Mark, who helpfully shows up for the denoument, is still dedicated to ending the Jackson's Whole practice of rich old people transplanting their brains into the bodies of young clones and has his company working on a more humane means of extending human life. Much of the novel is funny. Bujold writes plenty of witty lines, as when Raven mentions making a family "the old fashioned way: a sperm, an egg, and a test tube." And Jin's innocent and ignorant point of view leads to much ironic humor, for he often doesn't understand what we do, as when Miles makes a joke referring to sex change on Beta Colony. However, there are also some moving scenes featuring Jin and Mina, like the uncomfortable moment when Miles rather callously shows them pics of his parents, wife, and four kids and their ponies and extensive lands and big houses, all of which make the orphaned siblings feel badly. The "Aftermath" of the novel makes all the preceding stuff on cryogenics and longevity treatments stab home. After all, amid all our fancy medical technology, we remain very mortal. (Miles has heard that the longest anyone could live--assuming no death from old age--would be about 800 before the law of averages would kill them with some accident or mistake). Apart from assuming an unlikely Aussie or cockney accent for one local character, Grover Gardner gives yet another excellent reading of the audiobook, and continues to be the ideal reader for Miles and Bujold's Vorkosigan series. Kibou-daini means "Wish Number 2" in Japanese, and the planet must have been settled largely by Japanese from old Earth, but the people's race and names and cultural traces (like green tea and the "-san" suffix) are almost window dressing, having little to do with Bujold's cryogenics theme. About the only thing I didn't care for in the novel occurs when, after Jin has been traumatized by seeing Roic's familiar eyes change into those of a deadly stranger during some dangerous action, Roic makes everything OK by showing the boy and his little sister how to shoot a stun gun and telling them, "It's only a tool." Is Bujold promoting the old NRA canard that "guns don't kill people, people do"? Anyway, I can't believe that Roic teaching Jin to shoot a stun gun would heal the boy's shock so easily. Fans of Bujold's Vorkosigan series should enjoy this book, though, as ever, I recommend the first several books in the series (those dealing with Miles' parents and with his younger days) over the later books. View all my reviews
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