jsburbidge | Cryoburn thoughts

Cryoburn is very much a paired bookend with Diplomatic Immunity. Where that book was thematically about birth and children, and set in an orbital zero-gravity environment, this one is about death and parents and takes place - much of it - in catacombs under the surface of the earth.

It is in retrospect inevitable that Aral dies in this book: it is one of the few events which could have tied in the overall themes to Miles personally.

There are other thematic deaths as well. The book is implicitly about the death of a society: the changes pending to Kibou-daini after Miles leaves will turn almost everything there upside-down, with a radical reformulation at almost every level of society. It is also, in the end, about the death of memory. It is not so much that Aral's secrets die with him - Cordelia is still a witness to those - but that he is the last surviving witness at the centre to Barrayar's transition from Mad Yuri's war through Ezar's reign to Gregor's day. There may be others who remember as far back, but he is the last one who was there at the beginning and at the centre of the changes.

It is possible at first glance to see this as about death and resurrection together, with Mark's cryo-revival scheme as a future counterbalancing the cryo-sleep of the backstory of Kibou-daini, but (just as it is usual to make a firm distiction between reanimation which merely restores an old life (as with Lazarus) and resurrection to a new life) Lisa Sato and her colleagues go back to their political action group; the newly-raised sleepers in the facility get an extra twenty years of doing whatever they had been doing before. And the dead -- all those embalmed with decaying fluids as well as Aral -- remain really dead.

At first, the plot looks a bit like Komarr, another claustrophobic book with a detective theme, in that much of the plot is driven by an initial and largely incidental coincidence, but where that novel is tightly unified, this one (like, say, A Civil Campaign) is disjointed, with Miles' primary mission merely sharing the same milieu as the "main" plot of the novel. (Running across Jin at random is not, in the end, a coincidence in the sense that running slap up against Tien is, as the whole plot with Jin and his mother and Dr. Leiber is really a separate sideshow to Miles' real mission.) This may have the most understated romantic plot of all of Lois' novels, as well.

Not that Lois has moved away from coincidence in structuring her novels. The neat resolution is made possible by Miles' close relationship with (probably) the one person in the galaxy for whom 3000 frozen and largely poor people are not a liability but a business opportunity.

Overall, this seems to me to be more successful than DI, possibly because it explores new territory (in many ways, DI was a closing of a set of already existing arcs, tying up loose ends).