Modern warfare wasn't supposed to have this much blood in it.
Miles Vorkosigan has a chip on his shoulder. His physical handicaps have kept him from succeeding in life as a Vor Lord, but rather than roll over he invented an alter-ego, Admiral Naismith, and commandeered a mercenary fleet. That was ten years ago. The frenetic need to prove himself has passed. Miles has come to terms with who he is and attained a measure of satisfaction with his life.
In other words, as a character he has become boring.
Luckily for Lois McMaster Bujold, she happens to have a Miles-clone in the offing. And Miles's little clone brother, Mark Vorkosigan, has plenty of unresolved issues.
All True Wealth is Biological
Miles first learned he had a clone in Brothers in Arms, the preceding novel in Bujold's Vorkosigan Saga. Mark was created as part of a poorly thought-out plot. He was to replace Miles and assassinate the Barrayaran Prime Minister, their father Aral Vorkosigan. When Miles foiled the plot he gave Mark something Mark's creators never had: the chance to choose a life for himself.
But when you've been bred and conditioned solely to be someone's doppelgänger, it isn't easy to find an identity of your own. Mark can't help resenting Miles. His entire life has revolved around him. This is more than just your average sibling rivalry. It's more than just Mark resenting the success and adoration that Miles seems to enjoy so easily, although even Miles's giving Mark his freedom feels like an older brother's condescension. This is a deeply borne psychosis. Mark wants desperately to escape Miles, to live his own life. But with every step he seems to still be trying to become Miles.
The Harrowing Harem
As Cordelia, Miles and Mark's mother, points out later in the book, insanity runs in the Vorkosigan family. Mark wrestles with an anxiety of influence. Miles expresses multiple personalities outwardly to prevent them from becoming inward realities. Their father, Aral, struggles with a sexual inclination for men in uniform and a murderous obsession with honor. Other than a tendency to overanalyze her family, what is Cordelia's madness? Simply that she loves them all.
Love is exactly what Mark has trouble coping with. He has no experience with it, and cannot comprehend his new family's acceptance of him. Nor can he seem to appropriately express his sexual drives, which his creators twisted just as surely as they twisted his body in their efforts to make him mirror Miles's deformities. Once again, in the face of his own perversions and impotence, Mark is met with Miles's success: a veritable harem of tall, beautiful, self-assured and competent women. It doesn't help that these women find Mark loathsome.
Confusion to the Enemy
The plan Mark resolves upon, his ticket to self-respect, involves impersonating Miles in order to use the Dendarii Mercenaries to rescue clones from Jackson's Whole. The irony here is not limited to Mark seeking his own identity by impersonating Miles once again. It's doubled by the fact that such a goal, if not this method, was suggested to Mark by Miles in the first place (in Brothers in Arms).
Needless to say, Mark is not Miles, and the mercenaries' raid fails. Who should come to the rescue? Who but Miles, big brother extraordinaire. But now, an action-packed one-third into the book, Bujold suddenly makes everything much more interesting. The Miles-as-hero card has been played once too often, and this time things go wrong. In the aftermath, Mark must go to Barrayar, the home he's never known, to face the parents he's never met.
Here, in this second third of the book, where the pace slows, Mark at last finds his own identity, and he does it not by becoming something, as he's tried to do all his life, but by facing what he is. It's not a pleasant experience. But having faced it, he can change it. Only then is he ready to return to Jackson's Whole and conquer the madness lurking inside him.
Recommendation
Mirror Dance is a superb novel, well deserving of its Hugo Award. My faith in Bujold's Vorkosigan Saga, strained after Brothers in Arms, has been resurrected. The development of Mark's character is among her best work. And if Elena Bothari-Jesek and Elli Quinn are both shadows of what they once were, strong showings by Bel Thorne, Aral and Cordelia make up for it.
The trisected structure works very well, serving the story's themes and action equally. If the first section's action orientation fails to generate much investment in the characters, it keeps you reading until the second section introduces Mark more intimately. The third unites action and introspection in a crucible formed by several disturbing scenes. It's a bizarrely happy marriage, like multiple personalities who have amiably agreed to share face time.
All together, it works very well. I recommend you read it. And if you pay attention, you'll realize that Bujold's Vorkosigan books aren't "just" space operas.
– Panguitch
See my Vorkosigan Saga Concordance for an overview of the series, suggested reading orders, and reviews of the other books: http://www.epinions.com/content_4838039684
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