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]

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.

[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]

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]

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.

[branchandroot]

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

[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.

[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...

[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?

[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]

I could see a general cultural unity coming about during the Cetagandan invasion; nothing like all-out war and us v. them for unification. If it happened that recently, that could also explain why the language divisions are still extant. It seems less likely that the cultural divisions that tend to follow language would have been that thoroughly erased, though.

We may just have to posit, in-universe, that none of our narrators has taken much notice of specific cultural practices, though that's really a bit of a stretch.

Out-universe, I think it was an oversight.

[naraht]

Yeah, it just doesn't make sense to me that you'd have language divisions without cultural divisions. People learn languages much faster than they lose cultures.

[bzarcher]

Ever been to Quebec?

Admittedly, there are some minor cultural divisions there, still, but the major divide is most certainly language.

[flourish]

Ooh, good call. I like the idea that language groups focused on preserving language as a carrier for culture... but then the culture ended up all mooshing around anyway so language divisions are now the primary thing.

[twistedchick]

The language differences might remain, despite cultural similarities, because of landscape. People in the mountains or in other geographically-separated areas, or those who don't get down to cities often, may be more likely to retain the language they grew up speaking. It's also possible that the common culture includes terminology in both languages, so that some people end up speaking a combined version that becomes Barrayaran, as opposed to the earlier separate languages.

(disclaimer: not a linguist.)

[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.

[branchandroot]

*grins* Now there's some background-fic potential just waiting to happen.

[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!

[flourish]

You know, I've always assumed that since galactic recontact, English has been taught in schools. Perhaps that's why it's "Greekie hicks" - it's not so much that they speak Greek (although perhaps that's a stereotype now) as that they don't speak galactic English, which is taught in urban schools and is necessary to get ahead in the world.

Hmm... do we know anything about English vs. other languages on other worlds? Or is the universe running on the assumption that everyone is speaking a futuristic form of English as the trade-language, and mostly as the natural language too?

[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!

[aedifica]

Really? I've never assumed anyone in the series was speaking English. They've obviously got some sort of galactic language standard, but I don't remember ever seeing a name attached to it.

[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.