The natural culmination of my recent binge on fun SF is Lois Bujold's Diplomatic Immunity . Bujold's Vorkosigan series (of which this is the latest installment) is perhaps the best fast-paced, fun-but-not-trashy SF out there, so a new book in that series was an automatic buy.
The last few Vorkosigan books have been a bit less fluffy than the rest of the series; some people applaud this, but I'm not one of them. If I want grim books, I've got shelves full of worthy candidates. Good, weighty books are easy to find; it's good, light books that are exceedingly rare.
Fortunately, Bujold never got too weighty -- even at their darkest, the books were still fluffy enough to qualify for my light reading category; fortunately, too, this latest book reverses the trend, and gives us a straightforward action-adventure tale reminiscent of entries like The Vor Game.
So, just to make sure we're all on the same page: This is an excellent installment of an excellent series that fits square into my favorite genre. About the only complaint I have is that this book is a quasi-sequel to Falling Free, one of the worst books of the series, and one which had previously had nothing to do with any of the other books and could thus be skipped over easily. Now, alas, that earlier book is required reading.
Oh, well; I've already read Falling Free, so what do I care?
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