Vorkosiverse on Crack_Van

[beatrice_otter]

I'll be driving the crack_van for the Vorkosiverse as a Featured Fandom in March.  The fandom overview is, erm, somewhat limited and out of date, being almost exactly five years old.  I'd like to do a supplement; what things and people do you guys think should be added?

Comments

[branchandroot]

It might be good to mention the Cryoburn CD which has released the books into the wild for legal non-commercial distribution.

I'd also say that a few more words about the planet Barrayar are in order. It's a lot more complicated than a bunch of pre-Communist Russians, and the "all soliders" thing is... well, that's flattening things a lot. Maybe mentioning that Lois spends actual plot time on the variety and the ethnic/class/gender divisions. Cetaganda could also do with some mention of the haut as well as the ghem. Lois elaborated a lot after that initial military-mad-miles focus.

Definitely add Ekaterin to the Characters section. I'd also say Mark and Kareen. Possibly Galeni and Simon, but possibly not. Given latest developments, perhaps Roic as well.

I'd really like to see the het pairings get more specific than Miles/Various Women. That's... really a lot more dismissive and erasing of some fantastically kick-butt women than I'm comfortable seeing, especially in this fandom! Miles/Ekaterin has grown up nicely, and I'm reasonably sure Miles/Elli is still hanging in there. To say nothing of Miles/Bel, and, speaking of that, this is a fandom that seems to call for a more flexible and open-minded framing of fic than just a "slash or het" binary with gen not even getting its own heading. An AO3 link for fic might be of use by now.

I think that's most of my two cents.

[beatrice_otter]

Good point on the Miles/Various Women. Gack.

[philomytha]

Oh, definitely mention that the fic is mostly gen rather than either het or slash, and has a lot of AU gen arcs of various kinds.

The Miles/various women thing - yes, that's definitely not representative of canon. In the fic, there's actually relatively little Miles het of any kind - occasional Miles/Ekaterin or Miles/Taura or Miles/Elli, and yes, some Miles/Bel too - but most Miles fic is gen.

[branchandroot]

Seriously. I mean, in that framework, where on earth would the Petya-verse go? Just calling it slash is like calling Chex mix "cereal". And of late a lot of Miles stuff has Miles/Ekaterin cranked in as an assumption but there's no particular focus given to it, which I would totally put down as more gen than het. *waves hands* So much variety! It's a good thing!

[philomytha]

Absolutely! It's definitely not your 'dominant slash pairing accounts for 90% of fics' type of fandom :-).

[tel]

Well. Most English fic is gen. There's quite a bit of slash in Russian.

[beatrice_otter]

Really? Is there a central archive or journal for Russian fic? It would be nice to have links!

[tel]

I am only knowledgeable about the subset of the Russian fandom I directly interact with. The main slash archive is http://barrayar.slashfiction.ru/. However, the Cyrillic encoding there is nonstandard, so people might have trouble with it. It hasn't been updated in a little over a year.

Current fandom activity is centered on jetta-e's journal (http://www.diary.ru/~jetta-e/)

The most prominent work in the Russian fandom is probably the slash novel "Победивший платит" (http://barrayar.slashfiction.ru/pp.htm or http://barrayar.slashfiction.ru/pp.zip), set just after the First Cetagandan War, in the Cetagandan Empire, starring OCs.

For people interested in reading translations of Russian fic into English, there's a good selection on the Winterfair master list. Some other translations have been done as well.

[beatrice_otter]

Thank you!

[raveninthewind]

I will add this information to the post. (If I can credit you for this, let me know in the next couple of days as my edit rights expire on 2/28 evening, PST).