Review: CryoBurn

CryoBurn by Lois McMaster Bujold
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

It's ok. Like many of the later Vorkosigan books, it would have been better if it wasn't carting all the Vorkosigan baggage around with it, in my opinion. Some fun new characters who are completely overshadowed by All the Usual Suspects, whether there was a reason for them in the story or not. Weirdly unfocused, with a tendency to drill into extreme detail about things that then have nothing to do with the plot. Lots of time/pages spent by various characters recounting to other characters the details of things we've already read about. Also, Bujold has a habit of occasionally swapping point-of-view characters in mid-scene with no warning or context. I noticed this once or twice in earlier books, but in this one it happened constantly. Could be an artifact of bad transition to ebook.

On a planet obsessed with cryonic freezing, people who are frozen still get votes, which are managed by the companies that froze them, who thereby - obviously - control the entire government. This phenomenally stupid idea works out badly, though actually nowhere near as badly as you'd expect it to in real life. The executives of the companies try to get out of the ensuing mess by exporting their system to another planet, which plan never had even a shade of a chance of succeeding, because the people on planet 2 aren't idiots, and don't have the same laws for frozen votes. Collapse. Confusion. Alarums. Good guys triumph by virtue of surviving long enough to outlive their suicidal opponents. The End.

View all my reviews