This is fun, and it wants to be fun and for the most part it succeeds. Working as an aide for an admiral in Komarr, Ivan Vorpatril, the Wooster to Miles' Jeeves, if Jeeves fecked off out into the universe and did his own thing with Wooster waving him on from the distant sidelines because Jeeves is a bit of a trouble magnet whose solutions cause more trouble than the trouble as far as Wooster is concerned, finds himself in trouble when a cousin, no a different cousin, sends him off to pick up a woman and take her out for a night for unspecified reasons. The picking up is disastrous because the woman and her half-sister are refugees from a nasty coup on Jackson's Whole, and they promptly stun him and tie him up and ponder loudly about how to dispose of his body.

So, a comedy of errors, at least to start with, turning into something vaguely farcical as Ivan, the refugess and the cousin are trapped in an apartment with two types of duly authorised arresting officials trying to get in and nowhere to run, leaving Ivan with no choice but to do the obvious thing and marry her.

That sorts out their immediate problem Everyone returns to Barryar to contemplate the can of worms. There follows an extended middle section of the book where various sections of Ivan's rich, powerful, priveleged, aristocratic but also massively competent, capable, intelligent, over-achieving, highly moral and nice, but tough when they need to be, family, contemplate, with distant amusement and exasperation, Ivan's problem. They are arch, splendid, caring, shrewd, and let us not forget, the scions of a once-nasty, now-nice galactic empire, Bujold's ongoing happy ending for the Miles Vorkosigan series, the kind of equilibrium a comedy is supposed to throw into disorder, but this lot are so awesome, it doesn't look as if anything short of a nuclear bomb would ruffle their feathers.

We don't get a bomb, but just as you're about to build and throw one yourself, Ivan's new in-laws arrive en-masse, scheming, ruthless, haughty, on the run but still, somehow lovable in their own way, and things get interesting again.

So, yes, it's a science fiction rom-com, harmless and fun and inoffensive, wittily written, clever and warm-hearted. It's only real flaw is it's a bit too in love with the setting and the characters to really upset the apple-cart or do anything especially subversive or threatening.