General Information
===================

 	Title:                  Barrayar
 	Author:                 Lois McMaster Bujold
 	Read By:                Carol Cowan & Michael Hanson
 
File Information
================

	 Number of MP3s:       	18 plus PARS and info
	 File Naming: 		Author - Title XXofYY.mp3	
	 Bit Rate:      		48 KB/s 
	 Frequency:			44 KHz mono
	 Run Time:			11:43 h:m

Story
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To start with, if you haven't yet read Shards of Honor, the first novel in the tales of Miles Vorkosigan (even though it doesn't actually feature Miles, it's about how his parents met), STOP, go back and read it before approaching Barrayar. You'll be glad you did. These two novels, written seven years apart, tell one complete story arc. How that came to be is an interesting story.

Shards of Honor and Barrayar form the beginning of the Miles Vorkosigan series. (Bujold's novel Falling Free takes place within the same fictional universe but, being set approximately 200 years before Miles' birth, features none of the series' familiar characters. Eventually you'll want to read Falling Free, but it doesn't matter when; you can insert it into your Bujold reading experience anytime.) Shards of Honor is Bujold's first novel (not merely the first novel she ever sold, but the first she ever wrote, thus disproving the axiom, "All first novels are unsaleable trash"). She begins writing it in December 1982. In mid-'83, having worked through the Shards material and about a third into what would eventually become Barrayar, Bujold realizes her manuscript is becoming too long to submit as one book (the "wisdom" at the time being a thin manuscript is more likely to be picked off the slush pile than a thick one). Bujold finds a logical breaking point for her tale (Cordelia's arrival on Barrayar), puts it in final draft form, and mothballs the partially finished "rest of the story."

Bujold submits Shards and begins working on another book, The Warrior's Apprentice. She's about halfway through that when Shards comes back rejected with an editorial suggestion she tighten it up. She finishes Warrior's, then cuts about 80 pages out of Shards, giving her two good unpublished novels. In 1985, around the time she finishes her third novel, Ethan of Athos, Warrior's makes it over the transom at Baen, and suddenly she goes from unpublished wannabe to successful novelist with three books (Shards, Warrior's, Ethan) SOLD. Shards is published in 1986.

Fastforward to 1989. Bujold has written four more books, Falling Free, Brothers In Arms, Borders of Infinity (a short story collection), and The Vor Game. Then the program-book editor of Philcon, a long-established SF convention in Philadelphia, asks Bujold to do a short story or outtake to donate to their program book. Remembering the unfinished novel fragment of years before, she troops up into her attic, retrieves the pages, reads them and decides to complete it as a novel. After all, it's already a third finished, right? And in 1992, Barrayar won the Hugo Award for Best SF Novel of the Year.

Shards of Honor stars Captain Cordelia Naismith, commander of a survey team for the Betan Expeditionary Force, and Captain Aral Vorkosigan, victim of a mutiny on his Barrayaran warship. Both stranded on an unexplored alien planet, officers on opposite sides of the Betan-Barrayaran War, they reach an agreement of honor: they will trust and rely on each other for survival as they travel across a planet seemingly intent on throwing all its resources into killing them before they can reach Aral's ship. And then there's the little problem of overcoming the mutineers.... In the process of their adventures, Cordelia and Aral fall in love.

Barrayar deals with her first experiences on that planet, leading up to the birth of her and Aral's son Miles (though there is an epilogue showing Miles at age five). Both Shards and Barrayar are told from Cordelia's perspective. Thereafter in this series Miles, with very few exceptions, takes center stage. Never again will Cordelia be the main character. But for these two books she emerges as one of the most well-realized, loving and vulnerable but still tough-as-nails female SF protagonists ever.

The next book in the series you'll want to read is The Warrior's Apprentice, which picks up Miles' life at age 17.
Two extraordinary women and their guide, the international adventurer 
Omaha Dunn, are not the only ones being drawn to the desert. Former 
U.S. Navy SEAL Painter Crowe, a covert government operative and head 
of an elite counterespionage team, is hunting down a dangerous turncoat, 
Crowe's onetime partner, to retrieve the vital information she has stolen. 
And the trail is pointing him toward Ubar.

But the many perils inherent in a death-defying trek deep into the savage 
heart of the Arabian Peninsula pale before the nightmarish secrets to 
be unearthed at journey's end. What is hidden below the sand is more 
than a valuable relic of ancient history. It is an ageless power that 
lives and breathes -- an awesome force that could create a utopia or 
tear down everything humankind has built during millennia of civilization. 
Many lives have already been destroyed by ruthless agencies dedicated 
to guarding its mysteries and harnessing its might. And now the end 
may be at hand for Safia, for Kara, for Crowe, and for all the interlopers 
who wish to expose its mysteries, as it prepares to unleash the most 
terrible storm of all ...


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