vorkosigan | Shards of Honor

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Shards of Honor - readthrough!

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!

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I think, though, that a huge amount of Miles' personality developed *in response to* Barrayar. I suspect that if he'd grown up Betan, he might still have developed that charm (remember, it was developed early as a way of getting others to do what he wanted because he couldn't physically do it himself) but I think a lot of that "I'll show you I can do it anyway" would be missing, and he'd be a vastly different person without that. What do you think would happen?

No, it's English. Explicitly so in Brothers in Arms at least. Beta Colony was colonized from America, so almost certainly English there (and throughout Nexus high culture) too.

OK, I missed that! (And I just re-read BiA, too!)

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.

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...

I hadn't really either - but since people above had, I was assuming I was missing a giant clue. I mean... whatever they're speaking, it's obviously radically different from what we speak today, because it's far in the future...

I'm definitely going to be talking about it. Trans issues are pretty dear to me... but it's a complicated topic. I haven't reread it in a long time and I passed over Dono/Donna as best I could when I did last, because it was throwing me out of the story... this time, I want to really sit with it.

*considers* It is hard to say, since his social pressures would have been so different. I think that if he was still crippled in some way some things would still be the same simply because of Aral, who has, as we see with both Miles and Mark the Barrayaran body issues pretty deeply ingrained. Given how often Miles hyperactivity is mentioned, I expect that would be the same too, and would be a social challenge wherever he was.

Where does it say this? I've read Brothers in Arms several times and don't remember this. Do you have a chapter and a quote?

It's when he's at the reception with the Lairoubans. He doesn't speak Lairouban or Arabic; she doesn't speak English, Russian, Greek, or French in their Barrayaran dialects or any other, and as such they can't understand each other.

Chapter 4, p.125 in TPB Miles Errant, other page numbers are anyone's guess.

IMHO, the ready availability of audio recordings as a form of cultural interchange will probably delay language drift in the future. English and American English are not diverging nearly as fast as they once were.

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).

Sweden ruled over Finland for 500+ years and the Finnish language still survived. I guess the same could be said for the Norman ruling class in Britain where the court spoke French and the people English. I think it is mostly about what language is used in what setting and how common it is that people switch back and forth between these settings.

They're not Betans, except for Cordelia. They're Escobarans. I don't think we know of any other Betan women that got captured. Possibly freighter crews, but Beta Colony didn't properly enter the war until late and the Barrayarans were blockading the wormholes.

The question of the raped women is interesting, though. Cordelia mentions in Barrayar that Elena Visconti's contraceptive implant was taken out by Vorrutyer, but this may be an assumption on her part. Contraceptive implants are -not actually mentioned- in Shards of Honor to the best of my recollection, and Visconti doesn't mention it in her accusation in TWA either. Cordelia's apparently wasn't removed.

Possibly the implants were Made Up Later in the grand scheme of things? Cordelia mentions in this book that one of the babies might have been hers.

A limited number of women were made pregnant and handed to Serg according to Elena Visconti in The Warrior's Apprentice. I don't think all of the pregnancies are because of this. There can't have been any women handed to Serg between Elena and Cordelia because Aral would have gone after Ges and Serg with plasma weaponry.

According to Elena Visconti Vorrutyer didn't rape the women himself, though I'm not sure how she would know in a general sense. If all the women were impregnated for Serg then I think Elena Bothari would have way more sisters and brothers >.>

Escobar is Spanish-speaking and likely has a culture derived from Spain or Latin American. A possible explanation for the pregnancies might be... Catholicism? A philosophical objection to contraceptive implants?

Oh right. I guess I always imagined that they spoke some variant of Russian on Barrayar but I guess it could be English as well unless Bujold is just being neglectful in her punctuation and Miles got English from Beta. Anyway it seems like those are the main Barrayaran languages that survived from Earth. Since there is a Lairouban language I suppose that some colonies or planets have developed new languages as well. Is Betan its own language or just a variant of English, or possibly some other language?

Remember that it was just a thousand years ago that all of Scandinavia spoke the same language. It wasn't until we truly started to settle that languages really diversified. I can still easily speak Swedish with a Norwegian or Dane and be understood. And probably get the main gist out of a German text as well.

Barrayar reminds me a bit of the Austro-Hungarian Empire as portrayed in /A Sailor of Austria/, except -less- linguistically messed up. Before World War II displaced a lot of people into ethnic nation-states, language enclaves were much more common. Many still exist.

Switzerland might be a good general comparison for Barrayar. Multilingual, high local autonomy. Districts are more comparable to cantons or even separate countries than U.S. states.

The Nexus isn't all that far future...somewhere in the vague vicinity of 1000 years?

The Betans are American in origin and Cordelia and Aral share a language, so English seems a good assumption for Beta Colony.

Interesting thought on the Scandinavian languages. Barrayaran English and Betan English are probably further diverged than English accents are today. Makes Miles's accent switch more credible as a disguise, I guess.

Drift does happen, though - I know that when 19th century Norwegian families in the United States who've preserved their native language go back to Norway they sound painfully rural by modern standards. Partly because they immigrated from rural areas, but still. I'm about 1/4 Norwegian myself - my ancestors were crazy enough to farm near Tromsø.

Yes, well. If Chaucer (some 700 years ago) is more or less easily read by a modern speaker of English what do you make of The Battle of Maldon?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Maldon#Other_sources

Or the Charter of Cnut would be even more fitting - just a bit less than 1000 years old.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_English_language#Charter_of_Cnut

But the difference there is more due to invasion by the Normans than natural drift...

I'm not that certain. You see the same with Old Norse as compared with modern Scandinavian languages. As you can see most of the words still exist in some way in modern English so it isn't just a shift of vocabulary and nor is modern English more Latin in its grammar.

I am so sorry but I have to go to sleep now (it's 2.16 in the morning here). I'd love to continue this discussion in the morning however.

But for an example on the other side, I'm told modern speakers of Icelandic can still read the Eddas in the original, because the language has changed so little!

I think my mental scenario didn't include Aral, because I just can't see him emigrating to Barrayar. (Especially not with the whole "on the other side of the most recent war" thing going on.) I agree with you, though, if Aral were there he'd bring some of the Barrayaran prejudices with him though I think he'd be trying not to.

They still translate them to modern Icelandic. Besides there is a lot of difference between the different Eddas as well as the different parts of them. Since they were written from the thirteenth century forward they are also arguably more like Chaucer than Beowulf.

I also think that the Eddas play a very big part in Icelandic national identity. Considering this and the tiny population it might well be a big reason for the slower language shift. Compare this to Barrayar where most of the national identity seems to come from stories and historical happenings during the time of isolation (and later the Cetagandan war) and we don't hear anything of the times before they arrived on Barrayar.

I found this in The Vor Game:

"Language school," said Plause, still reading.

Plause spoke all four of Barrayar's native languages perfectly already. "As student or instructor?" Miles inquired.

"Student."

"Ah, ha. It'll be galactic languages, then. Intelligence will be wanting you, after. You're bound off-planet for sure," said Miles.

"Not necessarily," said Plause. "They could just sit me in a concrete box somewhere, programming translating computers till I go blind." But hope gleamed in his eyes.

So, you see, there are galactic languages as compared to native Barrayaran languages and translations are necessary. Perhaps Aral, being as high in the succession as he is and military, got a bit more in the way of language education than the average Barrayaran. Or he learned Betan from his mother. Surely Cordelia, being a survey commander as well as Betan, ought to speak several galactic languages.

Whatever explanation, I find it a lot more likely than a universe of separate planets where every planet speak inter-intelligible English. I just assume Bujold didn't want to bother with the details of it all as it might distract from the stories.

The Norwegian thing is probably also due the fact that Norway began to reinvent its language(s) after the union with Denmark ended and Sweden took over. I think the transformation continued well up til after WW2.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bokm%C3%A5l_language#History

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Shards of Honor - readthrough!

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Excerpt on languages (non-spoilerly)

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