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

[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.

[aedifica]

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?

[branchandroot]

*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.

[aedifica]

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.