Book Review Lois Mcmaster Bujold THE Weatherman
Sent to a remote and dangerous outpost, Miles faces madness, fierce storms and frozen quicksand traps.
BOOK REVIEW – LOIS McMASTER BUJOLD – THE WEATHERMAN 1990 Baen Press
Actually the opening six chapters of Bujold’s novel THE VOR GAME, The Weatherman was issued as a story in its own right too, as Bujold required funding before the main novel was completed.
Miles Vorkisigen, having extensive military experience from serving as a pretend admiral in the Dendari Mercenaries, expects a military command position on completion of his military training. He is therefore shocked to find himself assigned the role of minor weather report administrator on the planet Vow’s Polar region weather base. His protests fall on deaf ears, but he is told that his cockily knowing more than the officer’s attitude in training has made him insubordinate. The assignment he is given is a way to bring him under control, and he is obliged to obey orders for six months and not upset anyone. Of course, he is going to achieve chaos, as the reader will expect.
He finds the base a hellhole. The weather systems are nasty, with blizzards and high winds likely to sweep people to their doom if unsheltered. There are deep quicksand like mud pits, into which he almost drowns when a prank by some of the established soldiers goes wrong. Another man has frozen to death in a pipeline, trying to hide a lover’s birthday cake from potential thieves.
Worse, the man who is expected to instruct Miles in his duties is an alcoholic mess and the base’s commanding officer is psychotic. When an illegal chemical supply is in danger of causing a radiation leak, the officer tries to send men to an unnecessary death in order to get it fixed. When the men mutiny and refuse to follow the deadly orders, and even remove their uniforms to stand naked and defiant in the sub-artic tundra in protest, Miles is ordered to kill them. Instead, he strips and joins them. The officer may have got away with killing the ordinary men, but daring to attack Miles might lead to his own court martial and execution. He has no choice but to call off his plans, and Miles saves the chemical threat without risk to human life.
The officer escapes (destined to return in the main novel itself), and Miles is imprisoned for a period for failing to fulfil his duties and once again disobeying orders to follow his own heroic course.
This is a thoughtful prologue to the main body of the novel, which follows.
Arthur Chappell
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