"My Dear Vicky..."

“My Dear Vicky...”

Lermontov takes up his pen to write a letter, and is not interrupted. AU.

Staring down at the two letters on the desk in front of him, Boris Lermontov knew that he had lost. It was a sensation to which he had been so utterly unaccustomed of late that he experienced it as an almost physical pang, as if the excellent dinner the hotel had served up last night had abruptly begun to disagree with him.

He had thought that Vicky would realise the supreme folly of what she had done: the disaster that must inevitably follow for her career if she walked out on the Ballet Lermontov merely because he, Boris Lermontov, would not permit her to throw away her future on love, marriage, and all such distractions. He could see that stupid affaire with young Julian Craster for the ephemeral nonsense that it was. Sooner or later —he had clung to that certainty even after the news of the wedding— sooner or later she would come to her senses. The world would yield to the sheer force of his will, and Miss Victoria Page would not waste her talents, as she had been doing, in dancing for lesser companies...

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"The Warrior's Apprentice", Lois McMaster Bujold

This was the first Vorkosigan book I ever read; the first Bujold book I ever read. It swept me away, and it still does.

I didn't get to read "Shards of Honour", which I had to order from America via the local bookshop in those pre-internet days, until long after -- this one I just came across at random in the library, and picked out on the basis of its clichéd cover to use as an example of mechanical science fiction as versus my love of high fantasy. Needless to say, I had to pick another book for that particular essay (I eventually went for Isaac Asimov); it rapidly transpired that Miles Vorkosigan's world had as much loyalty, drama, nobility (in all senses) and thwarted romance as any Tolkienesque epic, and it was brilliantly and humanely written.( Read more... )