Barrayar
by Lois McMaster Bujold
Summary
Cordelia Naismith, a Betan survey captain, has married the enemy commander she captured, moved to his planet, and is pregnant. Barrayar is a militarised aristocracy just emerging from a long technological isolation, where women have no public role, mutation is treated as pollution to be destroyed at birth, and political disagreement is settled with poison and troops.
Her husband Aral is made Regent for the five year old Emperor, which puts a target on the household. A soltoxin gas attack meant to kill him instead poisons Cordelia, and the antidote is lethal to the fetus. The only option is to move the baby into a uterine replicator and treat his shattered bones there, which the planet regards as a monstrosity and Aral's father regards as a family disgrace that must be ended before birth.
Then the civil war starts, the replicator is in the capital, and Cordelia goes to get it.
The whole novel is Cordelia refusing to accept Barrayaran terms while operating inside them, and the sequence in which she returns from the capital with a particular item in a shopping bag is the most quoted scene Bujold has written.
Bothari, her bodyguard, is the other achievement: a man who has been used as a weapon by everyone who ever owned him, whom Cordelia treats as a person because nobody else ever has, and whose loyalty is the most unsettling thing in the book.
Around four hundred pages, fast, warm and frequently very funny, with a domestic comedy of a Betan republican trying to run a household of Barrayaran servants sitting alongside the assassinations.
It follows Shards of Honor and the two together are the best entry point to the saga, since the baby in the replicator grows up to be Miles Vorkosigan and everything afterwards proceeds from what is done to him here.
Best for readers who want political adventure with a competent adult woman at the centre.
Historical Context & Significance
Barrayar won the 1992 Hugo Award for Best Novel and the Locus Award for Best Science Fiction Novel, immediately after The Vor Game had taken the 1991 Hugo, making Lois McMaster Bujold one of a small group to win the category in consecutive years.
It was written years after the books that follow it chronologically, filling in the gap between Shards of Honor and Miles Vorkosigan's adulthood, which is why the Vorkosigan Saga's internal chronology and its publication order diverge so completely.
Bujold has said the seed of the book was the question of what a woman from a society with reproductive technology would do when dropped into one without it. The uterine replicator recurs across the saga as the piece of technology that quietly dismantles Barrayaran society over four generations, which is a rare thing in science fiction: social change driven by an appliance rather than a war.