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

[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.