for drago, the hardest part about the alien contact programme isn't keeping the aliens a secret from everyone
the hardest part is not being able to tell jaxon that he got to meet jarra
hey jaxon, did you know jarra has her pilot's license? you should've seen the way her face lit up when she sat in my fighter for the first time
hey jaxon, did you know she has your laugh? the one you've always been so self-conscious about. it lights up her whole face and it's the most beautiful thing i've ever seen.
hey jaxon, do you know how smart she is? all those famous historians gathered together, so self-important, so arrogant, so sure in their expertise. and yet, out of all of them, your baby sister was the one that came up with the idea of evacuating the citizens of earth to Ark.
hey jaxon. she's so, so very lonely. she grew up feeling abandoned and unloved and the anger is eating her up inside. and no matter how many times i tell her, she doesn't think the clan could ever want her. she won't believe how desperately we've been yearning for her all these years. hey jaxon, i know you still blame yourself for that, but i need you to forget about that when you meet her, okay? jaxon, you have to show her that she's one of us, and if she can find it in her heart to forgive us, we promise to never let her go again.
....hey jaxon. i met your baby sister, and she's everything we ever dreamed she'd be.
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I've had an exceedingly crummy and stressful few days and I am very bored so fuck it oc sharing time AMA about these two:
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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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Jarra, in the main Earth Girl trilogy: I hate my parents for abandoning me at birth, I don't need them in my life, there's no way the Tell clan wants me to join them, they'll take any chance they can get to be rid of me
Jaxon in the Drago series: I will stand in this transit hub for days on end, sleeping only when my body physically forces me to, just on the off chance that Jarra comes through on a school trip and I can find her and bring her home, because everyone in our clan is being eaten alive by guilt at the thought of one of our own growing up alone and unloved. i've never seen her before, but i know that i'll recognize her when i see her.
Gemelle in the Drago series: I will try over and over and over and over again, year after year after year, to hack into the Hospital Earth master genealogy computer to try and find Jarra's new identity and where she lives so we can bring her back home to us
Drago in the Drago series: we have to fix the earth solar arrays because if Earth goes power dark during a solar storm, jarra's going to suffer. what if she's in europe and she has to deal with blizzards and snow without any heating? what if she's in australia and she has to deal with the blistering heat without any air conditioning? i need to learn about more kinds of earth foods and earth culture so that i can know how jarra's living for when i meet her one day. i need to watch all these vids so i can know how she's being treated by hospital earth. hospital earth is my mortal enemy for how they've torn my family apart, one day i'll make them pay. jarra's on the same planet as me right now. jarra might be watching the same news channel as me right now. i can't believe some bigoted norm is sabotaging the earth solar arrays to make the citizens of earth suffer, my baby cousin doesn't deserve this
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Okay here's my favorite seemingly-inane-but-actually-really-good-for-getting-you-thinking-about-characterization OC question: What are their shoes like? On an average day, doing whatever a normal day entails for them.
Oh you're right that IS good.
Well the short and easy answer is that you can see that in the heroforge mockup—
But let's unpack that more!
Xaaya is, yeah, mostly combat boots. Practical. Utilitarian. Dykey. She has a few Nicer Pairs and she has That Beat Up Pair That She Wears All The Time. Probably also has some like, space loafers for when she has to go places that won't let her in the door wearing combat boots. She would probably start biting if someone (read: her mom) tried to make her wear anything else. Her section on this is shorter than Terra's because she's like what are you, a cop? Shoes are shoes.
Terra is, well, a goddamn lunatic.
That sentence is true in many ways but to be fair to her! She used to be very practical by necessity! When Xaaya met her she was wearing, like, converse, which she wore most of the time because while she was into heels between her salary and her foot size and her lack or shopping options she only had, like, a pair or two, and didn't really have many opportunities to wear them.
All that is to say that in her ongoing quest to become a pin-up girl in space and Xaaya's willingness to spoil her in this endeavor, she's taken full advantage of spending most of her time in low- or zero-gravity (and of, like, spacey clothing tech) to amass A Lot of very impractical shoes that make her Very Tall—the shiny silver over-the-knee boots are a favorite. but she likes to mix it up. She sometimes pouts that her ability to sprint in those things is less impressive in space where they can make them with handwavey automatic balance-compensating thingamajigs.
She also still has that pair of converse around here somewhere.
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