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.
no subject
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.