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

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...