The crew of an astronomical survey ship is exploring a newly discovered planet when they are attacked. Most of them manage to escape, but the captain, Cordelia Naismith, is captured by Captain Aral Vorkosigan, who is known as the notorious “Butcher of Komarr”. The two end up having to work together to survive and get off the planet, and they end up going through many other adventures together, and, of course, falling in love. It’s a space opera written in the 1980s, and it really shows its age.
The book starts out OK, with Cordelia and Vorkosigan working together to survive on an alien planet. But after that, the plot goes all over the place, and at every step, this book is easily outshone by many better sci-fi and fantasy stories from the last 40 years:
- There are space battles, but the descriptions are boring, the twists feel like they are pulled from cheesy heist movies (“and that was my plan all along…”), and they pale in comparison to the battles in The Lost Fleet Series.
- There’s lots of political intrigue, but I found it completely uninteresting, and it can’t hold a handle to the political battles of The Red Rising Series.
- There’s an attempt at character development, but most of the characters feel flat, the love story didn’t work for me at all (it just felt cringey), and it can’t compare to the characters in The Expanse Series.
It’s not that Shards of Honor is bad, per se, but reading it today, in 2026, I can’t help but think I’ve read better versions of every aspect of this story (actually, one part that is outright bad is the weirdly large amount of rape and rape babies in this book; WTF is up with that?). I’m tempted to give up on the Vorkosigan Saga entirely, but the series has a lot of fans, and they claim the later books in the series are considerably better, so perhaps some day I’ll give one of those a shot…
