Vorkosigan Saga Readalikes
I was going to wait to write this until I had three options, but I haven't yet thought of a third series that really gives me those Vorkosigan Vibes, and I don't want to sit on these any longer. Both the Earth Girl series and the Merchant Princes series remind me of the Vorkosigan Saga in various ways.
It's some combo of similar themes, characters, setting, multiple installments, and compulsive readability. Like with the Vorkosigan saga, I eventually lost the ability to wait for friends/the library to deliver the sequels to me, and I ended up buying later installments/the whole series on my ereader so I could have them on-demand.
Vorkosigan Saga…but YA
The Earth Girl series by Janet Edwards
2788. Only the handicapped live on Earth. Eighteen-year-old Jarra is among the one in a thousand people born with an immune system that cannot survive on other planets. Sent to Earth at birth to save her life, she has been abandoned by her parents. She can’t travel to other worlds, but she can watch their vids, and she knows all the jokes they make.
Jarra is a historian-in-training with a lot of experience excavating ruins on Earth, who joins a class of newbie offworld students under false pretenses, basically to show them up and get proxy revenge on the galactic society that's made her a second-class citizen. Then the false military background she concocts for herself- and the relationships she makes with her classmates- turn out to be more real than she ever intended.
Like Miles, Jarra is desperate to prove herself and does all sorts of stupidly heroic nonsense. Her disability is maybe even more of a cultural construct than Miles's is, while still having enormous influence on her psyche, childhood and career goals. The military in this series, which Jarra hero-worships, is (now) strictly a space exploration/terraforming force.
Hilariously, this series also has a Beta (sector) with a cultural tradition of looser sexual mores/trio marriages. There's also a sort of 'second career' arc for Jarra that's very satisfying, after you get lots and lots of fun and suspenseful archeological excavations (I'm not being sarcastic, they're fascinating!) The secondary cast is also really interesting, and there are installments in the series that explore their backstories and post-Jarra paths.
I read this as an adult (it was a tumblr rec!) and thoroughly enjoyed it, so I would absolutely recommend it to adult Vorkosigan Saga fans. It is firmly in the YA bucket in terms of being a coming-of-age story, so you could also gift it to somebody who might be too young for the Vorkosigan Saga and its' bucket-o-content-warnings, but who you otherwise think would love Miles. (This is not really a Vorkosigan similarity, but I also want to give the series a shoutout for realistic-seeming teen slang, which is harder to do well than you'd think.)
Vorkosigan Saga…with extra Cordelia please
The Merchant Princes series by Charles Stross
By the time we meet them at the dawn of the 21st century the Clan of five families who by careful arrangement can produce offspring who world-walk [to parallel universes] have become, in their home world, richer than Croesus. But all this wealth comes at a cost, and envious eyes are watching them just as a business journalist in Boston loses her job and discovers a family heirloom that topples her straight into a cliché that can only end badly in real life: the orphan who discovers she’s the long lost daughter of a noble house, and the subject of all their expectations.
Miriam Beckstein reminds me of Cordelia- a high-tech, driven woman who suddenly finds herself enmeshed with a group of literally feudal relations and embroiled in their political/personal schemes. Like Cordelia, she also sets out on a modernization process for her adopted culture(s), although she has less oblique strategies at her disposal than Cordelia does.
There is also a thematic focus on genetics in this series, and some of the power dynamics connected to that are explored in even greater detail than in the Vorkosigan Saga. The world-walkers have a complex arrangement of arranged marriages to keep the genetic ability to teleport to other timelines, and so like on Barrayar (and Cetaganda), the grandmothers who arrange these marriages are the ones really running the genetic show. (There's also a similar plot thread of 'culturally traumatic nuclear bombings'.)
My favorite part of this series is the latter half, when Miriam meets a political dissident in yet another alternate timeline and works with him to transform his world, and hers in the bargain. If you wanted to see Cordelia winning on a faster timeline, you'll love Miriam and her 30-year plan. There's also a sequel series that explores another member of the family, which has a lot of spy thriller elements and a lesbian romance. (Not going to say too much there, because spoilers.)
My spouse says this series is too 'of its time' for him to really enjoy it, by which he means that the ultimate villain is Evil Mastermind Dick Cheney. This doesn't bother me, but I mention this in case you, too, think Evil Mastermind Dick Cheney is a somewhat dated plot element from the vantage point of 2023. It's definitely more of a Cordelia-and-Aral readalike than a Miles readalike, although the sequel series has some superficial similarities to the introduction of Mark, now that I think about it!
I hope this gives you some new books to check out, all 10 of you Vorkosigan fans that might see this.
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for the record, on goodreads ‘22 challenge:
i read 143/140 books (it was 150 goal but i changed it because their was no way in hell i was reaching that number with the reading slump i was in)
that was 60,944 pages
avg. book length being 426 pages
i have discovered that the earth girl series needs to be known more
avg. rating is 3.8
lancali is the best - she was my first review on goodreads
that’s all. thanks
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November 2023. I've long since accepted that solo Power Girl stories are probably always going to be dreadful, and the dreary first issue of the new POWER GIRL book by Leah Williams (following on her equally dreary POWER GIRL SPECIAL, which at least had Marguerite Sauvage) suggests that that's not going to change any time soon. Some creative highlights of this bold new direction for Power Girl:
A stupid name-change. Rather than calling Power Girl "Kara," which is of course her actual name, or "Karen Starr," the name she's been using since 1977, she's now called "Paige," an arbitrary suggestion from the "Super-Family" so they won't confuse her with their real cousin, the one they care about. Come on.
Still more insufferable gay-baiting. The New 52 WORLDS' FINEST series with Power Girl and the Huntress was relentless in this regard, and of course anything involving Harley Quinn is always on beyond zebra. This time, Power Girl is gal-palling it up with former Teen Titan Lilith Clay (now calling herself Omen). If you just flipped through these books without reading closely, you would assume Kara and Lilith were girlfriends — they live together and walk around holding hands, and they share some kind of astral-psychic bond — but rather than finally committing to Power Girl actually being gay, there are various wink-wink-nudge-nudge ass-covering asides to assure us that "Paige" and Lilith are totes no-homo besties. Come on.
More screwing around with her powers. DC has been through this repeatedly with Power Girl: de-powering her, changing her powers, trying to give her weird magical abilities that aren't part of the standard Kryptonian power set, rinse, repeat. This time, Power Girl has been made over as "a rookie psychic" with a reality-shattering "astral-punching" ability obviously stolen, quite shamelessly, from Marvel heroine America Chávez — who, if you aren't familiar, is a reality-punching, super-strong lesbian from a utopian all-lesbian parallel dimension. So … Power Girl is now a totes no-homo DC knockoff of America? Come on!
Then, there's the cumbersome yellow explanatory caption box:
Does this mean EVERY version of Kara must now have been sent to Earth "to look after her younger cousin"? That was not part of Supergirl's pre-Crisis history, and it certainly wasn't part of Power Girl's! At the risk of being a joyless feminist buzzkill, defining DC's most powerful superheroines in terms of their erstwhile caregiving role for a younger male relative (in the face of the near-extinction of their world and people, yet) is a really bad look. I hate it!
How much of this should be blamed on Williams and how much is editorially imposed is hard to say — DC has always struggled to find anything to do with Power Girl, or even ways to portray her that don't just come down to "What if Supergirl were kind of mean and really stacked, with a more confusing origin?" — but it certainly isn't good.
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