This is a collection of novellas that take place in the world of the Five Gods (the site of The Curse of Chalion, Paladin of Souls, and The Hallowed Hunt). Penric is a local and mostly minor noble who helps a dying woman on the side of the road. She dies and her vested demon chooses Penric as a host (which makes him a default sorcerer). In addition, I’m also reviewing an early collection of stories called Protozoa.
Penric’s Demon
I have read this before, and maybe even reviewed it before (I forget exactly when all this went down), but I will do so again, as I now have my hands on all the books in the series. I do want to plug Audible Escape, which is a “channel” of Audible that costs like $6 a month in addition to the credit service, and is primarily a “romance” novel series, but for some reason has a bunch of Lois McMaster Bujold books. So bonus!
Anyway, this book takes places within the world of The Curse of Chalion, Paladin of Souls, and The Hallowed Hunt. In the novel, a young, broke noble Penric finds a dying mage and aids her. As she dies, he falls ill and succumbs to some kind of ailment. When he comes to, he quickly becomes aware that he is now possessed with some kind of demon, whose collective consciousness is created from all its previous hosts. This imbues Penric with a kind of magical power and the potential for much greater magical power. This new status gives him direction as he explores the different possibilities. It also makes him an attractive target for others.
This book picks up in a lot of ways from The Curse of Chalion, except in one major way: it adds some levity and a sense of humor. That book is dreary, and Paladin of Souls is somber. I haven’t read The Hallowed Hunt (but Audible Escape!) and who knows there. But Bujold is so funny, and those other books aside from their quality needed some laughs.
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Penric and the Shaman
So in this second novella, we get a treatise on the second of two threads these novellas take: Penric in action!
Also there’s extended discussions on the different kinds of magic in the world. I feel like magic works really well and interestingly in the world of the five gods. In the Harry Potter world my biggest issue, outside of potions and horcruxes, I almost never feel like magic costs anything. It’s one thing to say it requires skills or that you really have to want to cause harm to cast the unforgivable curses, but a lot of the time, I don’t see the consequences of the magic itself.
In this world, we’ve have so far learned about two types: demon sorcery and now shamanism. The cost of the demon sorcery is the build up of chaos or chaotic energy, as well as fatigue and attrition of the body of the magician. In addition, the potential of the demon to “ascend” and take over its host. But the chaos builds up and needs to be dispelled or else build up heat and pressure. Penric compares this is a cased sausage overheating and bursting at the seams. In shamanism, the cost is blood and visited upon the bodies of “Great Beasts” — animal familiar whose very bodies become the catalyst of this energy.
So, in this novel along with the broader discussions of the kinds of magic we get to see Penric act as a kind of detective tracking down a maybe rogue and dangerous shaman. It’s also nice because it shows the gaps in the narrative — this is some five years after book one and while that story would be great, this helps to builds the episodic nature of the novellas.
Penric’s Mission – The second thread of the novellas is the story of Penric’s later adult life (30 and on) as he is brought into conflict, confrontation, and interaction with a neighboring kingdom (well, dukedom, I guess) Cedonia. Penric is aboard a ship when he is party to and accidentally complicit in the attempted murder of a Cedonian general. Feeling responsible for his role, he presents himself to the general’s sister, a high born widow, as a doctor and treats the general. He’s able to use his magic to help to heal the general’s burns and his eyes (something truly terrible happens to his eyes) and in the meantime his beauty and wit and allure comes to the attention of the widowed sister. This embroils Penric into their lives. One of the best elements of this novel is Penric’s interactions with other sorcerers. Penric is trained and educated, but because of his youthfulness he’s constantly accused of being a “hedge sorcerer” and he hates it. Also, Desdemona, the collective name of the demon’s various soul pieces, hates it, and she’s is quite bent on some chaos, and of course is far more powerful and skilled than most other demons.
Mira’s Last Dance
This is a direct sequel to the events of Penric’s Mission. Penric’s Mission is long compared to the previous novels, and so getting more of the story is very satisfying, and we’re not done yet! Anyway, we find our hero and his twin companions find themselves as political exiles and in hiding. In smallish village they hide themselves in a brothel under the promise of ridding them of a recently developed bedbug problem. When Desdemona discharges the chaotic energy that builds up in Penric’s body, it can be directed in a few different ways. They have channeled this into successfully killing bug infestations. This is the charming side of things and includes Penric scanning incoming customers and ridding them of their various vermin as they enter. But on the other side of this is that Penric finds a a cancerous lump in the breast of the madam of the brothel and offers her treatment. It’s revealed that Penric was never treated fairly or healthily in his role as a healer (exploiting his talent) and his resulting trauma is explored.
The main plot of this novel involves Penric allowing Mira, a former courtesan to come to the fore in his mind, to help him produce an elaborate ruse.
Penric’s Fox
We return here to the earlier thread of novellas with Penric at 25 and solving another murder mystery. There are multiple ways to kill or de-demon sorcerers: if a sorcerer kills another person (using magic) it opens a soul door through which the soul of the dead person and the demon both pass through. This creates the real incentive to either not ever kill anyone or only be willing to sacrifice your demon to do so. Desdemona of course is quite against it for these reasons. Killing the sorcerer also releases the demon, which then jumps to nearest living host. Also, there’s various rites that can remove an unwanted demon.
Penric and compatriots find the body of a young archdivine-trained sorcerer in the woods. It becomes clear that she’s been murdered, likely in order to steal her demon from her. However, the demon seems to have jumped into a passing wild fox. When the sorcerer and his crew discuss things with local authorities it becomes clear that a lot of this information was known to them, suggesting they were involved with the plot.
What follows is a chase through the forest trying to find the fox, realizing that the fox and the demon have a unique relationship and then resolution. We also get some additional story from the fact that Desdemona’s first two hosts with a mare and a lioness.
The Prisoner of Limnos
This novella takes us back into the story of Nikyas, Adelis, and Penric (now 31). Penric likes Nikys and Nikys likes Penric but there’s complications to their getting married: marrying a sorcerer is fraught for many reasons — marrying the demon (like stepkids?), the travelling, the various powers. Both are working for the duke of Orbis (neither of their homelands) and she receives information that her mother is being held captive in a tower prison in a neighboring kingdom. We are then pulled into the political and family intrigue of Nikys’s mother’s past and family.
The Orphans of Raspay
I think this is the best of all the novellas for a few reasons. A lot of the various threads throughout the novellas come together (and are not spent!) to make this just a good story over all. Penric is on a ship for an errand when he’s awakening from a seasickness related sleep. He’s taking by pirates, put into the prison ship, and meets a pair of young orphaned girls (would you believe they’re from Raspay?). They were waiting for their estranged father to meet up with them when their ship was taken. We find out that they are the children of a married marchant’s preferred consort. Penric realizes that he has to help save them before they (including him) are sold into slavery. At point he says something to the effect of: “I wish for once my prayers were answered instead of being the answer to someone else’s prayers.”
This novella then turns into a prison escape book as the dangers keep circling and enclosing, as the different plots and schemes work and then don’t work, and the claustrophobia of the island prison keeps growing and growing. What this most reminds me of is the Mile Vorkosigan novella “Borders of Infity.”
Protozoa
This is a collection of five short stories by Lois McMaster Bujold. This collection we are told and given the title are kinds of “practice” stories before she turned to her primary set of works, novels. In the introduction to the collection, she tells us a lot of these stories are from a time where she was trying to better understand how to write, what to write, and how to function in the publishing world. So many of these stories became a kind of preview of the worlds and universes she would later create or simply small stories to try to make money.
There’s two kinds of story here: sci fi stories set more or less in the Vorkosigan universe, and three stories that takes place on a more or less contemporary Earth. The Earth stories takes place in Putnam, Ohio and are about ordinary people’s interactions with science fictional or fantastical elements. The first story called “Barter” is about an overworked housewife with too many kids and a shitty husband. One day she’s visited by a strange visitor demanding ammonia to drink. She gives it to him and he agrees to give her a set of remote controlled bio-stasis fields. If this one sounds familiar, maybe it should because it was written for Twilight Zone magazine and was bought and turned into an episode of Tales from the Darkside (a show I used to love as a kid). The second story in this series is about a man getting revenge on his nosy and prying neighbor. The third story is about a town with a pothole problem. Their city won’t fix it so they fill it with garbage out of a kind of protest, and the hole keeps growing. Ultimately this series of stories fits Bujold’s own estimation of them: Twilight Zone meets Garrison Keillor. They are generally off-putting, not because they aren’t good….they’re ok at best, but because they are NOT the kinds of stories that Bujold writes and it’s weird.
The last two take place more or less in the Vorkosigan universe. One introduces some of the elements we know about Barryar and Barryarans. The longer story, “Dreamweaver’s Dilemma” is an early story that establishes the wormhole nexus, Beta Colony, the time of isolation, and the new technologies on Earth. It’s perfectly good, but its elusive as a reading product but is always listed on the official guide of stories in the series. It’s an interesting collection of stories that show her potential, but are also mostly good for completionists.