Shards of Honor - readthrough!

[flourish]

To kick off our Vorkosiverse reread: Shards of Honor! I've just got some quick thoughts, and look forward to hearing all of yours too:

• Cordelia discusses herself as being somewhat socially awkward or incapable when she talks about the bad relationship she was in pre-Aral, but she doesn't actually end up being that way in the series later. Is this just self-doubt? Or could it be that Cordelia is "out of step" with Beta colony and for some reason has assumptions about the way people interact that's more suited to life on Barrayar (or, even, not on Barrayar either, but at least on Barrayar she knows her assumptions are likely to be wrong)?
• I've recently seen some people complaining about the question of "blood guilt" that gets brought up with the fetuses in replicators, suggesting that Bujold has some kind of anti-abortion axe to grind. Rereading it this time, I wonder if it isn't perfectly reasonable: on Beta colony there are not typically any unwanted pregnancies, nor would I imagine are they very common on Escobar. The idea that Betan culture - how does Cordelia put it? "has a respect for life"? - has a very different tenor than it does in the United States today, then, or on Barrayar for that matter. I don't have any opinion on the topic that I care to share, but it was interesting to me to meditate on how it affects our understanding of Cordelia...
• It's also interesting that Cordelia explicitly positions herself as a theist. I like that Bujold does not just allow the assumption that everyone is a theist, or everyone is an atheist, or whatever.
• It just occurred to me: Konstantine Bothari - he's Greek! And so is Elena, then. Somehow it did not occur to me that 'Konstantine' established him as part of the Greek minority on Barrayar.
• Rereading Shards of Honor reminded me of Xav Vorbarra's Betan wife. To refresh: Xav is the younger son of Dorca the Just, half-brother to Mad Emperor Yuri. He ended up living through the end of the Time of Isolation (or at least Dorca's reign overlapped the Time of Isolation's end, so I assume Xav lived through it) and ended up bringing home a Betan wife from his ambassadorship to Beta colony. I don't know if we know her name, but his daughter Olivia married Piotr and therefore was Aral's mother; another daughter was Padma Vorpatril's mother. Can we say wonderful fanfiction topic? I would love to dig my teeth into writing about the experience of a Betan going to just-post-Time of Isolation Barrayar! Holy jeez, talk about culture shock.

What are you all thinking about?

Remember: the next book in our readthrough is Barrayar, and we'll be discussing it on June 1!

Comments

[naraht]

It just occurred to me: Konstantine Bothari - he's Greek! And so is Elena, then. Somehow it did not occur to me that 'Konstantine' established him as part of the Greek minority on Barrayar.

That's an interesting point and one that had never occurred to me either. Perhaps because I don't recognize "Bothari" as a Greek name.

I'm racking my brains now to think whether there was anything that marked the Greek minority out in the series--food, customs, religion, expressions--but I really can't think of anything. I must have a look at the books with this in mind.

I'm Greek-American so the topic interests me.

[branchandroot]

The only two instances I recall the Greek minority being mentioned very particularly are in Warrior's Apprentice, when Miles has a run-in with a handful who mark him out as a mutant immediately upon arriving at Camp Permafrost, and in Civil Campaign, during one of the wedding campaign meetings, when Alys mentions infanticide among "certain language groups" in the backcountry. Which Ivan 'helpfully' translates as "greekie hicks". None of the characters with Greek names seem to display any cultural particulars.

I do find it interesting that Lois primarily identifies them as a "language group" rather than a cultural group; it suggests, in-universe, that Barrayar has a unified planetary culture while retaining four (I think) major linguistic divisions.

[flourish]

I wonder how a unified planetary culture on Barrayar would have come about. I suspect it would be through the fact that they were all settlers together at the beginning - but then why did the language divisions remain?

[raven]

Part of me wonders if it's because Barrayar is either a much smaller planet than Earth, or just has less in the way of landmasses - because they only ever mention "the southern continent", and, presumably, the one Vorbarr Sultana is on. Are they unified just because there aren't enough of them to maintain significant divisions?

[teluekh.livejournal.com]

Naked weddings, not necessarily infanticide.

The new wedding customs among even the most marginalized in Barrayaran culture indicate that previous religion has mostly been lost. At least for Russians and Greeks (especially Greeks), it's reasonable to assume the previous religion would be some variant of Eastern Orthodox. Even if the religions no longer exist in anything resembling their past forms (both being very vulnerable to a loss in apostolic succession, "now what?"), their early presence might have helped maintain ethnic identity.

Cyrillic managed to become the alphabet of choice, somehow. Is recent Barrayaran English ascendancy a new development of Vorbarra unification, galactic recontact, and the Cetagandan occupation? It might be reasonable to assume the Vorkosigan district was previously Russian-speaking...

For all we know the Barryaran French were all Quebecois and skilled in resisting language hegemony ;)

Considering there's clear separatist factions in the Counts despite Barrayar being more than a bit of a centralized dictatorship, the unity may just be an illusion. The nervous jokes about ethnic revolt (from all three other language groups!) seem a bit too nervous.

[(Anonymous)]

A minor nit: the Camp Permafrost scene you are describing is during the first section of The Vor Game, not The Warrior's Apprentice.

[flourish]

It only just occurred to me because I had a note on my desk reminding me to call my friend Kostas - and of course he's Greek, and his name is actually Konstantine.

I guess 'Constantine' could also be a Russian name, but with the K, it seems more Greek.

We don't actually get to meet many Greek characters, so it startled me to realize that one was right in front of me. I mean, we hear about Vorloupulous (is that how you spell it?) but other than that, there's just a couple of people who come through in passing, pretty much... at least, as far as I remember.

[cjk1701]

Incredibly late to the party here, but I just wanted to point out that while I can't speak for Greek, I can tell you that the K-sound has only one letter in Russian: both C and K get transliterated as K. So Konstantine could be both Greek or Russian.

Another possible idea is that "real" Barrayaran Greeks have kept large chunks of their culture as well as their language, but those who aspire to Imperial Service, in whatever form, take great pains to appear smooth and urban, and ditch as much of their home accent and attributes as they can stand.

[branchandroot]

I've always taken Cordelia's remarks about her social ineptness to be of a piece with her remark about being a late bloomer--that she spend a lot of her young adult-hood as the social ugly duckling before finally finding her stride. By the time we see her in Shards, she seems to have grown into herself, which makes her later amazing-ness less jarring for me.

Actually, that also suggests the somewhat alarming thought that what she really needed to shine was a challenge... a challenge on the scale of Barrayar.

[flourish]

That's a good point.

Ha - alarming, but given how Miles turned out, not, I think, completely unbelievable. Can you imagine Miles growing up on Beta colony? He'd be bored stiff.

[branchandroot]

*laughing* Oh wow. Miles would have been the original Betan nightmare. Talk about someone who wouldn't go with the flow.

[melannen]

Re point one: I think that for some people, social interaction is a lot easier when everyone has a specific role to fill. Cordelia seems to do really well under military discipline, where she knows everyone's assignments and relative ranks (even loose discipline, like Beta's) but not so well in the murkier, shiftier places of a personal life. She was lucky enough that in marrying High Vor she basically married her personal life into military service - even the women's command that Alys runs is no less regimented. If there's a system to work, she can work the system, and blossom. She just needs the system.

(Aral, on the other hand, doesn't do all that well under a system - it wasn't until after he had Cordelia to teach him that he really learned the trick of owning a role instead of letting it own you, so he had to keep rebelling in order to let *himself* out. They're really each others' best-case scenario.)

Also, Cordelia's ex-fiance was a horrible, horrible little troll.

[flourish]

Great point.

Hmm... don't know whether I agree about Aral. I need to chew on that for a bit. I hadn't thought of it like that.

And yes - he's the kind of character who I want to write into a story just so I can drop a piano on his head...

[beatrice_otter]

Remember what she says? "The inept ... need rules for their own protection." Would fit this theory perfectly. Plus, you know, I'm not naturally good with people myself; It's something I'm learning. And that takes time, but it can be learned.

[branchandroot]

*thoughtful* That does seem indicated in the way she thinks about political systems. She analyzes and classifies them based on their rules and what they accomplish, which suggests that she looks at the world (possibly increasingly, over time) in terms of its structure and systems. She can apply that to Beta Colony, too, but most of that kind of thing that I recall off hand seems to take place only after she's had Barrayar to practice on, as it were.

[flourish]

Right, and it's much harder to turn a critical eye on your own society than it is to turn a critical eye on someone else's - so no surprise she'd be better at critiquing Beta after encountering Barrayar!

[lizbee]

I've recently seen some people complaining about the question of "blood guilt" that gets brought up with the fetuses in replicators, suggesting that Bujold has some kind of anti-abortion axe to grind.

I think I saw the same comment, and they seem to be applying modern-day politics to a totally different situation. If an unwanted pregnancy didn't impact on a woman's life, barring the minor (that is, everywhere except Barrayar) procedure to transfer the blastocyst, abortion would seem like an incredibly blunt solution to the problem.

(If it's the comment I'm thinking of -- in the "authors showing their ids" post? And frankly, I'd rather Lois went back to showing us her id in her writing, instead of smearing it all over the internet -- the commenters also seemed to take issue with the continuation of "non-viable" pregnancies. So in one fell swoop, the commenter wipes out Elena and Miles, and leaves us with a very short series.)

[flourish]

Yeah, that is the same comment thread. I didn't read it too closely - didn't feel like digging into id-territory... it's dangerous ground!

[teluekh.livejournal.com]

Yeah, the more developed planets of the Nexus have an environment that removes nearly all the possible reasons for abortion, aside from "No, really, I just want to kill the fetus". The level of possible pre- and post-conception genetic modification implied is eyebrow-raising.

Nearly everything seems "fixable", which in and of itself is a little creepy. For instance, the Donna transformation implies that Beta Colony can successfully adjust mental self-image from male to female and possibly even sexual orientation.

Heck, even "I wanted a girl" is fixable. Odd thought.

Beta Colony in particular seems a Lake Wobegon of a sort: "and all the children were above average". Like Barrayar, it's aggressively pro-natal but in a different way.

All successful space-colonizing cultures have to be much more pro-natal than modern Western Civ, and in that sense fundamentally divorced from the reality a lot (though not all) of the readers are living in. I'm not surprised some people are made uneasy by that.

[lizbee]

Yeah, the more developed planets of the Nexus have an environment that removes nearly all the possible reasons for abortion, aside from "No, really, I just want to kill the fetus"

I'm sure Jackson's Whole would offer that service, though, for a price.

For instance, the Donna transformation implies that Beta Colony can successfully adjust mental self-image from male to female and possibly even sexual orientation.

Reading ACC for the first time since I discovered transgenderism and the surrounding issues and problems was ... troubling. I'm hoping that more educated people than me will be talking about it when we get to that book.

[bibliofilen]

Exactly. If parenthood on places like Beta and Athos is planned and calculated based on ability to support the children the unlawful parenting of children would quite logically place the economical, social and psychological burden with the perpetrators/Barayaran rapists.

I don't think Beta even has unplanned pregnancies. Remember that you're not sexually eligible until you have had your implantation (so how the captive Betan women became pregnant is actually quite a mystery, unless it was women in comitted relationships who was already attemting to conceive the old fashioned way).

Since Betans don't even kill animals unless it is for survival reasons offworld it is only reasonable that they'd find it distasteful to terminate a pregnancy (especially since there is no woman who has to suffer for it).

[(Anonymous)]

"Nearly everything seems "fixable", which in and of itself is a little creepy. For instance, the Donna transformation implies that Beta Colony can successfully adjust mental self-image from male to female and possibly even sexual orientation."

'Mental self-image' is by nature very mutable, and Donna seems to have been something of a psychosocial tomboy anyway (at least, by Barrayar's standards).

Sexual orientation is a very complex topic, but it's known that female sexual orientation is far less rigid than male, most likely because it's a recent development. Female sexual response has far more to do with the nature of a relationship than male. It's entirely possible that the Donna-Dono transformation involved no neurological alterations or conditioning at all.

Even if there were changes made to Donna's mind, many male/female differences arise from gross neuroanatomy and simply can't be changed, even with Beta Colony's implied level of technology.

[teluekh.livejournal.com]

See, I'm not sure current LGBT issues really map onto the Nexus very well because of the all the actual and potential biological messing around that's going on. I'm also hesitant in mapping what we think we know now 1:1 into what we'll know in the future. I'll add that just because some people have enormous trauma from body image mismatch doesn't mean that everyone necessarily would.

Gender transition comes up as soon as Mirror Dance, actually, and the poor over-boobed girl clone doomed to receive some old man's brain is far more problematic a representation in my mind than Donna...

[elf]

I expect Cordelia is/was socially awkward in dating situations; she's incompetent at flirting, and used to be naive about power-hungry people. (Since she has no interest in sleeping with someone to make them more malleable, she didn't notice it happening to her. And still might not.) She's still socially "awkward"--but on Barrayar, it doesn't bother her in the slightest; she doesn't care if 90% of the people she meets think she is too forward, too blunt, or unwomanly.

Since she knows she's working without an understanding of people's basic motivations ("marry a rich guy & have many children" being totally alien to her), she spends more time consciously analyzing why people act as they do. This lets her see motives that are invisible from within the culture because they're masked by "what everyone does/thinks." She gets a rep for understanding the hidden motivations, because it doesn't occur to anyone that she's utterly clueless about the mundane ones.

Bujold's anti-abortion axe was derived from other sources, I believe; interviews and whatnot. It is supported by canon, but canon doesn't require it or particularly display it--Beta, as a high-tech high-income world, doesn't have unwanted children, doesn't have deaths-of-convenience. Not even of animals; Cordelia has problems eating any meat not grown in a vat.

I expect she could understand the idea of families that don't want to deal with bastard children (although she'd be appalled), but doesn't have a frame of reference for families that don't want additional children because they can't afford them.

Cordelia's got to have some level of culture shock from dealing with the harshness of Barrayar's limited resources--the idea that children die from not having enough food must baffle her. That people die of simple infections from farming-accident wounds, ditto. I wish we had stories about her discovering what real poverty looks like, and her frustration at trying to rearrange resources to deal with it.

[(Anonymous)]

To respond to your first point, I see the socially inept Cordelia of the past that Cordelia describes to Aral on Sergyar as one end of a long arc of personal development that culminates in the end of Barrayar to produce the centered Cordellia we see in all the books published after Barrayar was written.

This tale is one of repeatedly learning A) not to let others define you and B) to assert herself -- Cordellia first realizes the mistake she made in stepping aside to let her then-lover become Betan Survey Ship Captain and seizes her chance to become Captain on the next time around.

Cordellia is able to function well reasonably well as Captain (in Shards), although her crew clearly is willing to ignore her authority (although this may say more about them than about Cordellia! ;-). Later, Cordellia is still somewhat socially awkward in not being able to assert herself when she returns as "hero" to Beta Colony. Nor is she able to assert herself versus her mother when the Beta psychologists try to "treat" her -- her mother and her are clearly unable to communicate with each other (at that point in Cordellia's life). Her flight to Barrayar is Cordellia's next step in learning to assert herself (and not define herself as a "good, obedient Betan citizen").

Cordellia then tentatively starts to explore what her role may be in Barrayar's society when events intervene. Ultimately, this results in her defying Aral and asserting the primacy of her own needs and duties as mother in rescuing Miles-to-be. From that point onward, Cordellia is consistently portrayed as being completely centered in who she is.

Mark, at one point in A Civil Campaign, muses about Cordellia as a model for Kareen and thinks about the fact that Cordellia doesn't brook any nonsense from anyone but "had to walk barefoot through fire" in order to obtain this quality. I always have taken as a reference to the events in the book Barrayar.

Woman who must learn to travel this "arc of assertion" is a recurring theme for LMB. It crops up with Elena, who eventually grows beyond Barrayar's definition that "real people" are soliders, and then decides to quit the military and have a child. It shows up with Ekaterin, who in A Civil Campaign self-describes herself as having difficulty in even asking strangers for directions (and is completely clueless as to how one might engage in a love affair) but, ultimately, by the end of Diplomatic Immunity is, as Lady Vorkosigan, treating with the Cetegandan Empire. That's a considerable arc of developing self-assertion (and, unfortunately for us readers, it mostly happens off-stage).