Books like Shards of Honour

An all-time SF favorite! Final review, first posted on Fantasy Literature: Shards of Honor (often packaged with Barrayar and sold as Cordelia's Honor) is one of those SF space opera books that I love beyond reason and pull off my bookshelf every few years to reread, contentedly immersing myself in Bujold’s well-imagined world and the relationship between two characters I adore.A bit of background: I started my VORKOSIGAN SAGA experience years ago when I grabbed A Civil Campaign off the library shelves, and was introduced to the very short, brilliant, terrifyingly competent and wildly adventurous Miles Vorkosigan. Though I didn’t realize it at the time, that book was not the best place to start with this series; it assumes a lot of background knowledge about the characters and events in their lives and really isn’t characteristic of the series, with its focus on romance and social satire over adventure. I was a little mystified but interested enough to check out more books in this series from the library.And eventually I ended up here, with Shards of Honor, and Cordelia Naismith and Aral Vorkosigan’s first meeting. She’s the Betan captain of a surveying team exploring an uninhabited (she thinks) planet; he’s the commander of a Barrayaran military outpost on that planet. (Beta is extremely socially progressive; Barrayar has a rigid, traditional and militaristic society.) Their groups clash in a deadly meeting, and Aral and Cordelia are abandoned among the dead and wounded. They need to cooperate to survive. As they trek to Aral’s camp, running into deadly alien animals along the way and surviving on scanty rations, they gain respect for each other, and love starts to develop. Cordelia is loyal to Beta, however, and more, she can’t imagine living and raising a family in the paternalistic society of Barrayar. That and the conflict between their worlds pull her and Aral apart.I totally fell in love with these two characters and their adventures, a mix of political intrigue and battles, both in space and on land, and between individuals as well as societies. Cordelia’s and Aral’s unusual romance went straight to my heart, and their respective moral dilemmas were heartrending. Shards of Honor might not be the best book in the VORKOSIGAN SAGA, but it’s the one most beloved by me.