Vorkosigan Readthrough: Shards of Honor, Aftermaths

[extrapenguin]

So, we've read the book and are here to discuss! I am unfortunately not all that good at thematic analysis or arc stuff, but here are some jotted-down notes from my read:

• Requests for next Bujold Fest: A treatise on Sergyaran nature.


• Huh, nerve disruptors cause blisters?


• Nuovo Brasil is name-dropped along with Barrayar and Cetaganda – now I'm curious about the Nuovo Brasilians!


• Do they have no blue cheese dressing on Barrayar, or does it taste different from the Betan artificial version?


• Aral's command issues, lol. "Now who in my command is so confused in his thinking as to betray both sides at once?"


• As was mentioned in the Tor readthrough, Aral confesses to 0.6 murders per day on their trek to the supply cache. I like that this is a valid statistic to measure. :P


• Koudelka! Gottyan? Nilesa! (I have no idea what I was aiming at with this note, but whatever!)


• Aral: very abrupt, and not all that good at convincing. "My planet sucks and I fell in love with you while you were puking!" is not the height of romance.


• It seems like Aral's almost trying to sabotage the invasion by telling Cordelia a lot about the plans.


• Cordelia: very ingenious. I can definitely see where Miles gets it from!


• What happened to Cordelia's belt???? It was used to tie up Gottyan, but Aral released him and no further mention was made of the belt. Did Aral keep it as a memento? (Oh, and Aral, get better pants. Yours don't fit. Pants should stay up without a belt!)


• Cordelia: very good at emotional band-aids


• 17 replicators, just given to Barrayar, and some of what was said there makes me a bit uncomfortable. "A couple of them were pretty emotionally divided about abortions." Um. And they were given to Barrayar, with the expectation that... they'd be aborted? They'd grow up to be cogs in the Barrayaran machine, off to kill their fully Escobaran half-siblings should a second war happen?


• How come no-one voted for Steady Freddy?


• Hm, the Betan and Escobaran psychs seem to have done nothing more than give Cordelia a stutter.


• oh Cordelia's daring escape :D (an excellent combination of ingenuity and emotional band-aids!)


• Hm, Aral loathes tiny women? (Another things Miles seems to have inherited...)


• The Bothari bits make me uncomfortable.


• Count Vortala A+ snark. I don't suppose we see much more of him?


• "declare everyone a Vor and be done with the whole bloody nonsense forever" oh, Aral.


• The Escobaran war's called the 120 day war, despite only lasting for 118 days and a part of an hour!


• Mother's Tears charms don't seem to return IIRC?


• Medtech Boni carries around a wedding dress??? Okay this section is creepy.

All in all, better than I remembered, especially re: Cordelia and Aral's relationship. It is still structured so that Cordelia gives up everything while Aral gives up pretty much nothing, but it's more that Cordelia is driven away from Beta than that she walks voluntarily. I wonder what it'd have been like had Dr. Mehta and her colleagues not been such colossal assholes to Cordelia.

Next up is Barrayar, with a discussion post hopefully up on the 18th or 19th.

Comments

[azurelunatic]

One of the more visible ways my PTSD manifested, after a summer where I was 100% convinced that if I told anyone else what was going on, someone would die, was a stutter any time I got near the topic. My body was stopping me from speaking about it. You could ignore the other stuff, the quickly suppressed panic when phones rang and the paranoia about fallible human memory combined with the paranoia about leaving written notes even in password-protected files. You could not ignore the stutter.

I imagine Cordelia would have had an aversion to certain branches of psychiatry after that. And I don't recall Barrayar getting mental health services in Cordelia's general push for medicine there...

[spiralsheep]

I've known more than one person with a speech impediment due to PTSD so that's an interesting point in relation to Cordelia.

[azurelunatic]

Plus the other stuff at that point, she was in full-on hypervigilance mode.

[krait]

Well, after some time she does seem to have reconciled with 'Betan therapy' again, given the whole Mark thing.

[azurelunatic]

Now I have this mental image of her sending away for Betan correspondence courses in psychology and lay therapy, as a means of facing the fear head-on...

[princessofgeeks]

Thank you for this!

I have thoughts about the cheese!

[krait]

Do they have no blue cheese dressing on Barrayar, or does it taste different from the Betan artificial version?

Quite possibly the specific bacterial cultures needed to make it were lost during the Time of Isolation!

Given how much else was lost, it's not implausible that a lot of fancy, Earth-derived food techniques would also disappear. (I kind of assume that Barrayar doesn't have sourdough bread, either; given the primitive and incomplete nature of its terraforming, I wouldn't trust wild yeasts not to be toxic, and I don't know that Earth yeast populations would have been able to survive and persist at the concentrations needed.)

If you're a farmer just managing subsistence-level crops on a planet where every inch of your cropland was wrested away from the native flora with slash-and-burn clearing and desperate improvisation, you're probably eating most of your milk products before they can go mouldy.

In more recent years, of course, now that the Time of Isolation has ended, you can probably buy both sourdough and blue cheese; but they're fancy imported goods meant for the luxury market (cheese is relatively heavy!) not the artificial stuff in dressing form that Betan plebes eat.

How popular it would be is anybody's guess, even so - plenty of people on Earth don't like it, so I imagine there's a number of Barrayarans who, even though they could afford it, have bought it exactly once (to show off for their upper-class friends by having it at their soiree) and never again. It'd become a background mental note at High Vor functions: If there's a cheese platter, avoid the weird streaky one, and beyond that you'd hardly remember what it tastes like - just enough to know the answer's not "high fructose corn syrup, soy lecithin and skim milk powder." :D

Re: I have thoughts about the cheese!

[azurelunatic]

Imagine the cook-to-cook black market. One Vor imports a kilo. The cook sniffs suspiciously, runs it under the scanner...

A small galactic lawsuit later, all the galactic cheesemongers know to include scratch-and-lick samples, a vid, and an as-is clause when selling to Barrayar.

Vorbraggart imports a kilo. Cook is appalled, but puts out a very few grams on the cheese display, and when it's barely budged from the chilltray by the end of the night, it goes a long way to flavor a sharp sauce...

A week later, and Vorambitious is hosting a party. Words, and a large amount of the nigh unobtainable speciality of Vorambitious's District makes its way into the Vorbraggart kitchen with the early delivery...

[stranger]

I thought Nuovo Brasil was the Escobar capital?
Not that there's much detail about Escobar overall. I only remember that Illyan kept a picture of their beautiful, high-rise glass security building as a contrast to the Mad Vorrutyer gothic monstrosity he had.
(I suspect this only came up in Captain Vorpatril's Alliance, though Bujold inserts this kind of thing so seamlessly that it's easy to think of it as part of Memory or other works with a lot of ImpSec content.)

The blue cheese dressing brings up a good set of questions about just what Earth-native species the Barrayarans had to work with. Horses, obviously, and cats and a lot of plants, but did cows survive the original settlement? Goats? (I'd guess goats and sheep would be hardier than cows.) There are fish, but the whole vat-protein thing casts actual species maintenance for meat animals into question. It would be easy to say this or that species didn't thrive, and particular cheese-producing molds, or edible oats as opposed to groats, could have been left by the wayside, so that the Betan packaged foods tasted very different from Barrayaran equivalents even with similar names.

I wonder if vat technology could produce milk, and work into cheese and yoghurt from there, in the absence of cows?

Betan psychological therapy as shown in Shards seemed curiously crude; while it served a plot purpose, it seemed more a satire (like Steady Freddy) than a realistic story element. In fact, the whole Betan society as shown in this first book struck me as kind of a satire of the U.S. in the 70s (nobody had voted for Nixon, either, as of 1973) and 80s. Cordelia and Aral were the well-drawn leads, and Barrayar and what led to that era's politics had to be shown as Aral's background, but Cordelia's background could be implied, some elements brought out, and some sketched for comic effect.

[azurelunatic]

My slowly assembled headcanon is that Dr. Mehta was a low-level member of the military with medical aspirations, but who had washed out of actual Betan psychological therapist training on ethical grounds. This made her a perfect target for a certain paranoid faction within the Betan was party (whose star was ascendant at that point) who arranged for her (and a number of others in similar circumstances) to get further training and the promise of a secure little government niche in exchange for occasionally following Special Instructions.

She and her cohort were billed to the rest of the service as sort of a stopgap, people given special quick training to be able to effectively triage and field-treat veterans who had seen combat; I might imagine that Beta Colony's psych programs might not have covered military trauma in that much depth during peacetime in a non-militarized society. Therefore special training would have been necessary. The resulting crew would have spotty training, not super good manner while practicing, and would be trained to focus on some of the more extreme possibilities dreamed up by the paranoid military mind rather than the actual problems of the homecoming veteran.

[stranger]

I kind of like this scenario. It makes sense if we're taking Beta as realistic, in the Shards depiction. The peaceable society dealing with an aggressive new threat probably would panic and shove it all off to the "war party" faction, which inevitably had its own distortions of reality.

[extrapenguin]

Nuovo Brasil, name-dropped with Cetaganda and Barrayar, seems to be another imperialistic multiplanetary nation. I'll keep an eye out for more name-drops of them. I don't think the Escobaran capital is named; if it is, I don't recall it.

You have a good point about the Betan society = US society. It would even fit with the trend of SF writers having one society be the "default" society they come from, and make the next society be the patriarchal empire.

[spiralsheep]

I don't think there are any other mentions of Nuovo Brasil and, yes, it's implied to be at least a whole system iirc. I don't think the Escobaran capital was ever named either, unless in the very recent stories I haven't read yet.

[reginagiraffe]

•The Bothari bits make me uncomfortable.

I'm pretty sure the Bothari bits are supposed to make you uncomfortable. Bothari is an uncomfortable person.