Horizon by Lois McMaster Bujold

Horizon by Lois McMaster Bujold

My rating: 5 of 5 stars
At last, I found books that made me really understand the scope and depth of Bujold's talent as an author.

This series did a lot of things right by me. It rejected the standard (tired) fantasy genre tropes right and left to tell a genuinely moving story about a small group of people committed to changing the world. There are no kingdoms. No nobility. No boy or girl with a special destiny or super-secret pedigree of awesomeness. It's not set in a medieval, white European setting. In short, it's a story created and told whole cloth, without any of the dumb, lazy shorthand that other authors rely on to give world-building short shrift. There's magic, but characters work out the particulars of it with actually scientific experiments. It's really quite something, and I was surprised nearly at every turn when Bujold rejected the standard fantasy trope to do something different.

The first book in the series is a romance, but the three novels after are post-consummation, and the characters have objectives and plans to change the world for the better. Book Four doesn't bring us fully to the new world our characters want to create, but like the real world, we see glimmers of hope in the changes they are successful in bringing about.

I can't recommend this enough to people who like the genre.


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