Penric

Because I do not participate more than absolutely necessary in the ecosystem of the Big South American River I had not had access to Bujold's Penric stories until the publication of the anthology volumes by Baen this year.

I have now read them and feel as though I ought to make some sort of assessment of the reading experience.

Bujold's great strength has always been the ability to engage the reader's interest early and strongly in the central character she is tracking, and that ability is on full display here.

There's not a lot of new worldbuilding at the foundational level. Where the three novels set in the Chalionverse were centred around the Daughter, the Bastard, and the Son, this set of stories is well within the ambit of the Bastard; we learn little new of the Mother or the Father, or even of the other gods. At a less foundational level, there's lots of new detail of polities not previously seen in a time not previously visited. (Desdemona has a lot of mundane memories from previous sorcerers, but demons do not seem to have knowledge of their prior world, or if they do they do not share them.)

Looking back, most of Bujold's major works, the peaks, involve a thoroughgoing change of life for her characters - Cordelia is going through one in Barrayar, Miles in Memory, Miles and Ekaterin in Komarr/A Civil Campaign, Mark and Miles in Mirror Dance, and the same is true of the central characters in the three Chalionverse novels. Here, only the first story really fits that mold (for all that Penric does move around, his essential function and identity are not subsequently challenged). Some of the people he interacts with are going through life-changing experiences, but only one of them is reasonably central, and a viewpoint character, and that change is set firmly within the context of a romance story arc.

The fates of no empires lie in the balance. Rulers are off to one side, occasionally encountered, never central. These stories are deliberately limited in scope, with traits of mystery, espionage, and romance as generic markings in many cases.

On the other hand, they make pleasant pandemic reading, short visits to another place with different concerns, written to a human scale.