A Civil Campaign

I am a huge fan of Lois McMaster Bujold, and have read almost all of her fiction (and will soon start working my way through Penric). She is the ONLY author who has won a Hugo or a Nebula for 5 novels (despite all of the fuss that has recently been made about The Broken Earth trilogy) - and this is a very impressive feat.

HOWEVER

I was utterly dismayed by this tale of the butterbugs. When it comes to humour, I guess you're either LOL, falling off your chair, etc.... or you are tossing the book across the room and muttering expletives.

Don't get me wrong. I do enjoy Bujold's humour. It is one of the great joys of the Vorkosigan novels. I would say that she is one of the authors who has been most effective at injecting humour into her SF. I think I am probably happier, however, when the humour is in the background, rather than front and centre.

In this novel, I perceived the butterbugs as sucking up all of the oxygen in the story, and it just about ruined it for me. I still rated the novel C++ (which translates to 2 stars), because I did like the rest of the novel. Miles really is wonderful.

I found I had much the same reaction to Connie Willis' novel To Say Nothing of the Dog. I do enjoy her writing and her sense of humour - The Doomsday Book and the story Fire Watch are among my top favourites, and Blackout / All Clear is also very good. These works are all set in the same universe as the former novel. But for me, I found the humour here moving to centre stage, and so I did not enjoy To Say Nothing of the Dog at all. I rated it as one of the very least enjoyable of all 106 novels that have been awarded either a Hugo or a Nebula to date.

My rating system: I begin with one star being equivalent to a rating of "C -". Progressing upwards, I add ½ star for each step, up to the maximum 5 stars, which is equivalent to a rating of "A"+. I reserve ½ star for BOMBS, there being no option of zero or negative stars.