War, Leadership, and Honor

This chapter examines the themes of war, leadership, and honor explored in Bujold's fictional work. While there is no evidence in her books that Bujold is a pacifist, in the sense of opposing all war on principle, what seems to interest her most is not the fighting, or even the peacemaking, but the whole question of what makes a good leader, which is perhaps at its most focused and immediate among the military. Bujold's work presents us with models of good leadership, both within the armed services and in civil society, and models, too, of its opposite: mismanagement or, at the extreme, tyranny. Sometimes these models seem a little like caricatures; yet this is offset by an ability to dissect political contests with more subtlety than one finds in any other writer of space opera.