Vorkosigan Readthrough: Ethan of Athos

[extrapenguin]

It's here, and rather more issue-y than I recalled.

• Genetically repairing fetuses is a thing.


• Homophobia is alive and well at Kline Station.


• Ethan is woefully underprepared and has no idea what he's doing.


• "Quinn Excites Dismay" :D


• "women's work" – sexism is alive and well in the Nexus, sigh.


• SPACE IS NOT COLD, VACUUM IS AN INSULATOR LMB NO.


• Did no-one import the tech for same-sex couples to have kids genetically related to both? That's a thing that should exist, given the biotech level.


• Quinn mailed Okita's clothes to Admiral Naismith – I now want fic of Miles receiving the clothes.


• Terrence is very, very screwed up, consistently with his upbringing.


• ...Speaking of which, did no-one in the Cetagandan administration pause and think "this is a terrible idea, the kids'll be able to read minds" and then order them to be treated well? Like, Terrence's upbringing counts as major Idiot Ball imo.


• Elli is delightfully dramatic.


• Did Terrence rent the Presidential Suite, or were they taking turns pacing?


• Ethan shows his ingenuity with the grocery shopping.


• Does Elli regularly talk with the not-present Naismith to develop plots?


• The false disease vector report thing was very ingenious.


• My favorite minor character is the Security guy who cites the codes Millisor's violating. Bureacracy!


• So, what can we learn of Millisor's lifestyle from the doc's report, beyond the fact that he's stressed?


• Based on the remark that Mr. Coffee-Colored Skin couldn't be Cetagandan: are all Cetagandans pale skinned? (Some must be, since Barrayaran Ceta descendents are still being discovered, ergo they can't all have been much different to Barrayarans in skin tone, but all? Is this using the shorthand Cetagandan = ghem?)


• Apparently Bharaputra's hitmen have coffee-colored skin as a common feature.


• Did Elli get the hobby of "banging her head against brick walls" from Miles, or did she already have it?


• The resolution was a bit too pat and not that foreshadowed.

Next: "Labyrinth", on Sunday 16.10. (I'm increasing the gap to 4 weeks, since my schedule is rather full.)

Comments

[stranger]

I have no evidence, but I would totally guess that Elli learned to bang her head against walls from Miles. As a character point, it's too Milesian not to have happened that way.

Barrayar's ethnic make-up is pretty solidly European, so the general whiteness of the (long-isolated) population has a reason. The rest of the galaxy doesn't have that excuse. I'd expect Jackson's Whole, Beta, Hegan Hub, and so on, to have a mix of human colors although very few are mentioned until late in the series.

Good point about Cetagandan (Ghem, at least) being assumed white or white-ish for a large part of the series. I could see this as both Barrayar and the Gham including some brownish, olive, etc., colors (think, Southern-European and Middle-Eastern), but the big-deal ethnic marker on Barrayar is language instead, so nothing else is seen by the characters. Well, maybe.

I would frankly expect a range of exquisitely beautiful skin tones in the Haut constellations, but again, very little is mentioned explicitly.

[melannen]

The "we can't make a baby from two dudes" thing always struck me as a very bad prediction, given what we were doing with artificial baby-making even at the time she wrote the book. (And if everybody but Athos has the tech, it seems like 'we'll steal you the tech' is a much better ending to the book.)

[shanejayell]

It's funny because we just had a news article on bables made with two men. So, yeah...

This is one of the weaker LMB books, honestly. *shrug*

[krait]

Quinn mailed Okita's clothes to Admiral Naismith – I now want fic of Miles receiving the clothes.

You and me, both. Along with a 'snapshot' of Miles's face when opening his very expensive intergalactic mail!

On a side note, "Quinn Excites Dismay" may be one of my most favourite character catchphrases. :D

[james]

The problem I always had with this book was - it seems like Bujold was trying to cram all the "look we can have homosexuals in this universe" onto one planet, in one book, so that we didn't need to have them on Barrayar. Which annoys me, because why not? Why couldn't Byerly just be gay (and end up with a man, don't get me started on how he marries a woman, wtf.)

It's an issue that does get addressed and fixed in Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen, but when this book came out and I read it I thought - well, if Bujold is willing to write about homosexual people, why can't they exist on Barrayar, too?

Sometimes I feel like I'd love to see this entire series re-written and edited and updated from the standpoint of Bujold now, after growing as a writer and after seeing some of the (unintended?) consequences of early choices. Like the whole bit about women having very few career options (which again gets addressed and fixed in GJaRQ.)