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

Re: Excerpt on languages (non-spoilerly)

[teluekh.livejournal.com]

Yes, there clearly are galactic languages, but equally the lingua franca of space travel in the -areas we see- seems to be English. Looking at countries with current or incipient space programs, this doesn't seem too unreasonable. In many cases English is already a de facto elite/technical lingua franca, as in parts of India and increasingly China.

Looking at current international cultural exchange in things like...Eurovision, English is a bit more prominent than one might expect too. ;)

Escobar has what looks like Spanish as an official/local language, but English as another language the people we see speak to Betans and Barrayarans.

Miles -doesn't- speak galactic languages, so I think it can be assumed that people are talking to him in a language he understands unless he's specifically mentioned as having a translation earbug. There's circumstances where he clearly -doesn't- have any extra gear, such as Dagoola!

Re: Excerpt on languages (non-spoilerly)

[bibliofilen]

But the lingua franca in Europe has changed several times the last 1000 years. First it was Latin, then it was German for most of Europe until French took over somewhere 15-1600 and today it is English. Besides we can't even be certain they speak English on Beta - considering they were multicultural from America they could just as well speak Spanish, or more likely a new language with characteristics from both languages.

Miles spent a year or so on Beta as a teen. I'd expect him to have learnt the most common galactic lingua franca then if not earlier. That he doesn't speak every language doesn't mean Cordelia neglected that part of his upbringing.

Now I am not saying the new intergalactic lingua franca is NOT descended from English, I am just saying that the whole thing is likely a lot more complex than that.

[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.

[elf]

I don't think Barrayar's smaller, just considerably less populated. It took Earth a long time to reach several billion people, and that's without whole continents full of inedible plants.

It'd be easy to have a relatively unified culture, since it started roughly that way, with any pocket that retained a separate identity at all being considered weird.

[elf]

A possible explanation for the pregnancies might be... Catholicism? A philosophical objection to contraceptive implants?

Perhaps in a few. Seventeen missing implants is a fairly small number, and might be accounted for by a number of different unlikely causes: a tiny fraction of religious objectors, a handful of deliberate removals by Vorrutyer, and a few cases of bad timing--women who'd had their implant removed deliberately a day or two before war hit their area.

Or perhaps no implants is fairly widespread on Escobar, and the seventeen are just those who'd rather ship babies to the fathers. The rest might've kept them, or placed them in Escobaran orphanages rather than risk whatever Barrayar does to war-orphans.

(There's a nice fanfic premise: Unknown Barrayaran bastard heirs, alive on Escobar.)

[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.

[flourish]

Hmm, good point. Bothari being Greek will just have to be my own fanon, then.

Incidentally, the last name 'Bothari' appears to be entirely fictional, so it doesn't offer any clues.

[(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.

[(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).

[(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.