Mirror Dance
by Lois McMaster Bujold
Summary
Mark is Miles Vorkosigan's clone, grown on another planet and surgically shaped to replace him in an assassination plot that failed. He is short, heavy, furious, and has no identity of his own except the one that was manufactured to be discarded.
He opens the novel by stealing Miles's mercenary fleet through simple impersonation, in order to raid the clone creches on Jackson's Whole where children are grown as replacement bodies for the rich, because it is the one thing he can think of that would mean something. The raid goes wrong. Miles arrives to fix it, and is shot through the chest and killed, and his cryogenically frozen body is then lost in transit.
That happens a third of the way in, and Bujold means it. The rest of the book belongs to Mark, alone on Barrayar with Miles's parents, being slowly and deliberately claimed as a son by Cordelia while a search runs for a corpse that may be revivable.
It contains the darkest sequence in the series, an extended torture and psychological breakdown on Jackson's Whole that Bujold does not flinch from and that transforms Mark into someone else.
Cordelia is the reason the second half works. She has buried a husband's career, survived a civil war and lost a son, and she looks at the person built to kill him and decides, with total practicality, that he is hers now and had better get used to it.
Around six hundred pages, and much darker in tone than the comic adventures that precede it, though Bujold's timing is intact throughout.
Newcomers should start earlier, with Brothers in Arms at minimum, since Mark's existence is that book's ending and nothing here is re explained. Readers should also know the torture sequence is extended and specific.
Best for readers who want space adventure that turns out to be about family, damage and slow repair.
Historical Context & Significance
Mirror Dance won the 1995 Hugo Award for Best Novel and the Locus Award for Best Science Fiction Novel.
It was Lois McMaster Bujold's third Hugo for Best Novel in five years, after The Vor Game in 1991 and Barrayar in 1992, and she later won a fourth for Paladin of Souls in 2004. Only a handful of writers have four in the category.
The Vorkosigan Saga now runs past fifteen novels, written out of chronological order and published mostly as mass market paperbacks by Baen, a route that kept it slightly outside literary attention while it accumulated more major awards than almost anything else in the field.
Bujold was named a Science Fiction Writers of America Grand Master in 2020, and has said the series' governing question is simply what the worst possible thing she could do to a character would be.