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Synopsis
Cetaganda is the latest installment of the Hugo-award winning adventures of Miles Vorkosigan, in which Miles and Cousin Ivan go to Cetaganda to play the part of sprigs of the nobility doing their diplomatic duty by good old Barrayar. The idea is that they will gain diplomatic polish on this simple mission, but when the Cetagandan empress dies naturally and her lifelong attendant dies unnaturally - apparently a suicide, but there are rumors - Miles and Ivan find themselves in the thick of it. Miles tries to play detective in a strange, complicated, and deceptively alien culture. Meanwhile, handsome and lascivious Ivan manages to get himself involved with several women at the same time - all of whom are TROUBLE from the word go. Miles had always wanted to save the Empire - it was just that the Cetagandan wasn't exactly the empire he'd had in mind...
Publishers Weekly
The power to engineer a civilization's genetic destiny fosters new variations on old struggles for political power in this entertaining space-operatic entry in Bujold's long-running Vorkosigan saga. Miles Vorkosigan, hero of Mirror Dance (winner of the 1995 Hugo Award for Best Novel), is on a diplomatic mission to represent his home planet at the funeral of the dowager empress of the Cetaganda empire when an encounter with an assailant leaves him with a piece of computer software. This proves to be a bogus duplicate of a key to the Cetagandan genome, which each new empress manipulates to produce offspring. With the help of a member of Cetaganda's matriarchal ruling haut, Miles and his cousin Ivan dodge inventive assassination attempts to determine which of the empire's eight governors has tried to pin this ``theft'' on them in the hope of usurping control of the genome. With her usual skill, Bujold addresses timeless issues of human identity through the personal dramas of her characters, most notably Miles, a deformed mutant whose insecurities afford him insight but sometimes obstruct his investigations. Set in a vividly realized world where Machiavellian intrigues are played out behind a facade of aristocratic discretion, this novel, like its predecessors, blends high adventure with wry commentary on the seemingly unbridgeable gulf between human ideals and political realities. (Jan.)