okay, how on earth does one pronounce "Vorkosigan"?

[raven]

I am not doing very well inna head, at the moment. (If I owe you an email/comment/phone call, it is not because I don't love you.) I am okay. Sort of. shimgray talks me down by making whale noises. forthwritten has been telling me about liturgical vestments. Still here.

Anyway. I have finished Cordelia's Honour. It is kind of awesome. Okay, actually, it's really awesome. The first novel, Shards of Honour, is... okay. Actually, no, it's more than okay, it's not spectacular, but it's nice enough. Cordelia is the only character who really comes to life in it, but she does, so beautifully - she's brilliant, and brave, and also very human, and I really, really like the way she's drawn. It's a long time since I read a novel with a female protagonist who actually rang true to me - this is not a male action hero with breasts, nor a Lara Croft type, nor a wilting flower, but a woman who's sometimes a hero and sometimes miserably afraid, who takes life very seriously and has a sense of humour. I like that, very much. And the romance is lovely. Again, it rings true - it's not fluffy or overblown, but sweet, full of sex and charm. (I was upset at the lack of onscreen wedding. I have been reading too much Patrick O'Brian and demand weddings.)

And then the second novel, Barrayar, is just fantastic, and people keep telling me this, but yes, you can see the maturation of Bujold's writing style. Suddenly all the characters come to life - all of them, except Cordelia, were a bit cardboard previously, and then suddenly all their motivations make sense. I loved it, and I can't remember liking a novel nearly so much for a while. I especially like how it isn't Science Fiction with initial caps - it's a story about war and family and people, with a kind of scenic background of faster-than-light travel and uterine replicators. The imperial structure of Barrayar is marvellously mediaeval, or at least, a lot like India - complete with heavily feudal power structures, grand old patriarchs, sexism, racism, dowries and caste - and I love that Cordelia provides an ultra-liberal, socialist-utopian commentary on the whole thing. It's a delight.

Also? Also. Aral Vorkosigan is bisexual. Yeah. This is not handled perfectly. There's a brief exchange where Bujold seems to imply that "bisexual" cannot equate to "monogamous", or that a bisexual person in a relationship stops being a bisexual person, or something. But... I don't know, I get the sense that this is a case of sloppy use of language, not sloppy thinking. Because the joke is that it takes Cordelia several paragraphs to realise that the fact that someone telling her this is supposed to be an insult, and her reply is pretty smooth, all things considered - despite the odd use of terms, she goes on to tell the guy, frostily, that she didn't think she was marrying a forty-four-year-old virgin. His bisexuality is a matter of supreme indifference to her, and by extension, to the reader (tight third-person narration throughout, naturally).

Which I find... interesting. Is this the only example, in science fiction and fannish source generally, of a character who is unproblematically bisexual and described as such? I mean - in the sense that he doesn't exist in a universe where everyone is bisexual (like, say, the Culture), and it isn't code for him having sex with everything in sight, and it isn't "experimentation" or a transitional phase on the way to coming out as gay. Bi-visbility, yadda yadda, do not get me started on Willow Rosenberg. I liked seeing it treated as, well, just as a thing.

And, finally, the head in the bag? Yeah. Yeah, that's pretty awesome. I should keep reading these.

(Also, this is a yuletide fandom, yes? Yes.)

Comments

[emily-shore.livejournal.com]

Thinking of you... I have been meaning to comment on your entries more than I actually do, but I am sending good thoughts your way regardless.

The Vorkosigan books are superb and really they only get better. Sadly there is less Cordelia, but the writing style and plotting keeps improving by leaps and bounds, which is unusual in a long series. Well worth continuing with.

It is a Yuletide fandom, although bizarrely the fannishness seems to focus on (male) characters whom I consider to be relatively minor to the series overall...

[icepixie]

It is a Yuletide fandom, although bizarrely the fannishness seems to focus on (male) characters whom I consider to be relatively minor to the series overall...

Mmm, yes, but something about Ivan simply cries out to be loved fannishly. He's just so...Ivan. :D

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

Thank you for good thoughts. :) I am really looking forward to continuing with these now; I really like the saga aspect, the way they actually do seem to be a history of a family, rather than a grand SF epic.

[clubhopper15.livejournal.com]

I would quite like to get you started on Willow. Thoughts?

Also, hang in there dear :) xxxxxx

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

Ah, Willow. Well, to start with, I love Willow. I think she's awesome. I love how she blossoms from the painfully shy geek girl to the outgoing, awesome geek woman, and I love how she does it through her relationships with other people - she sacrifices so much for Buffy, and her friendship with Giles (with whom she has a lot in common) is so nicely done, and the way her love for Xander matures over time. And then there's Oz. Oz is great. Her relationship with Oz is great, because you see how that contributes to her growth, too.

And then comes Tara, and even that's awesome - "New Moon Rising", where she picks Tara over him, is also nuanced and nice. But after that? This lovely complex character is just squished under magic, and "gay now!". The way she denies everything that came before Tara and her magic - well, not her, exactly, but the way she's written, makes her a completely different person from what she was. And maybe it's my personal bias, but I can't help but feel they could have done it much better by acknowledging that Willow is queer, but also acknowledging that she did love Xander and Oz. I mean, why the fear of casting Willow as bisexual? Her queerness didn't have to deny her history, and her magic use didn't have to obliterate all her other features. I just feel we were short-changed with her.

[anotherusedpage.livejournal.com]

I liked the way Aral's bisexuality was dealt with a lot; and I think that Cordelia's language which might look problematic is based around a world-view where sexuality is about action rather than desire, because all desires are assumed to be equal and personal, if that makes sense.

Shopping! She went shopping, with all the implications that has about female political power/desire.

I think the books get even better once they have Miles Vorkosigan in them, although it's a shame to lose the female POV.

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

Shopping! That was just... wonderfully, wonderfully done. I liked the prosaic element, too - the way a shopping bag is the only thing they can find to put it in, throwing in that bit of real-life-ism among all the high drama.

[deathbyshinies.livejournal.com]

Is this the only example, in science fiction and fannish source generally, of a character who is unproblematically bisexual and described as such?

Y halo thar, excuse to bang on about genre fiction while procrastinating doing any work!

Woman on the Edge of Time. Remind me to stuff it down your throat lend it to you at some stage, if you'd like. Futurist utopia where most people are more fluid on the Kinsey spectrum (and don't label themselves as 'bi', 'straight', 'gay' etc). However, it differs from the standard 'everyone is bi' trope in that there are still individual variations - the main future!character we meet mostly sleeps with male-bodied* people but has one beloved ex who is female-bodied, there is at least one character who sleeps only with male-bodied people (and is male-bodied himself), one character who models the classic 'anything that moves' trope (but it's treated in a fairly positive and kind way), and one character is openly asexual (= has probably never had sex and explicitly doesn't want to). And this in 1976!

* it's also trickier because the future!society doesn't do gender in the same way as 20th/21stC Western society.

Also, Tamora Pierce in the really-quite-dire Circle of Magic books shows an f/f couple as the foster mothers of the orphan heroes. They really do have quite a lot of the Willow-and-Tara about them (except there is no Dead Girlfriend, there is heroic life-saving of beloved partner instead! hooray!), and one of them has a male ex. She never uses the words 'lesbian' and 'bi' in the books themselves (they wouldn't fit in with the pseudomedieval setting, to begin with), but she is on the record as saying that one is a lesbian and the other is bi (the lesbian character is the more femmey of the two and the bi character is a bit butch, which pleased me on many levels).

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

Ooh, ooh, I meant to say above how much Cordelia reminds me of Alanna of Trebond, a little older. They have a lot of the same types of awesome - they're both pragmatic and human as well as heroic. I have to admit, though, that I never got beyond Song of the Lioness, because I didn't like the Daine books much. I will try and remember this, thank you!

And I will try and dig out Woman on the Edge of Time, it sounds marvellous. Have you read the Culture novels, out of interest? I've never been quite sure of what I think about the way they do gender, and it's interesting...

[biascut.livejournal.com]

Sekrit confession: I only know about the Bujuld books from HP/Bujold fanfic, so I keep meaning to read them but it would be weird and backwards.

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

I think you would like them. I mean, you don't like SFF generally, do you? But I think you'd like them regardless - they're very character focused and smart and interesting.

[amchau.livejournal.com]

(Join the club. I first heard of them via AJ Hall's fanfic.)

[icepixie]

Ohhhh, you're making me want to reread these so badly!

I always thought of Barrayar's politics/culture as being based on imperial Russia, but it's interesting to hear that it can also be compared to India. Barrayaran life is so fascinating and also so, so sad at times--the hints we get of Cordelia's bitterness are, I think, very apropos.

I also liked that Aral's bisexuality was just...bisexuality, and nothing else.

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

*grins* Hurrah! Barrayar is all things to all people, I think - it's a very Earth culture, if nothing else!

Is Aral the only gay/bisexual character in the series, then? I'd like to see more of how Barrayar handles the issue...

[osymandias.livejournal.com]

I have Barrayar lying around, and must read it - read Shards of Honour a while ago, and have read some of the later books (though haven't yet got to A Civil Campaign, which everybody seems to regard as the zenith), but haven't got around to reading it yet.

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

Read it! It is so much better than SoH, and it's not as if that one's particularly bad...

[maryavatar.livejournal.com]

Heh. I actually have a friend whose last name is Kosigan (Ko-SEE-gun), but read Vorkosigan as it's written because I didn't notice that all the surnames in the books were real surnames with 'Vor' tacked on until it was too late.

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

I've just re-read a chapter mentally chopping "Vor" off names. Er, yeah. :)

[ancalemon.livejournal.com]

I think this may be getting into the "everyone is bi" trope, but I recently re-read Spin State by Chris Moriarty and was thinking about just how awesomely genderqueer it is. You have the main character (female and entirely okay being bi), who sleeps with an AI (who are all referred to as "he" the way ships are "she") who sometimes wears male bodies/avatars and sometimes female bodies/avatars...it's also very weird about consciousness and what constitutes "me." A good book all the way around.

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the rec! I'll remember that one, I'm trying to read more SF these days...

[flourish.livejournal.com]

I say it "Vor - KOH - See - Gan."

As for the thing about "he's not bisexual, he's monogamous" - LOLOL! I thought that was actually a great comeback (as a self-identified bisexual person). I interpreted it as her retaliating against the idea that bisexual people can never be monogamous, actually. Personally, I feel a bit like deciding to be monogamous really does limit my ability to claim the label "bisexual," but I also don't regret being monogamous... um... anyway, my point is that that's a really contested space and I think it can be read a lot of ways, and since Bujold generally does a really good job dealing with this kind of thing, I give her the benefit of the doubt.

Also, the later books do really cool stuff surrounding gender norms in general (Taura!!!!) and also able-bodiedness and what that means.

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

Hmmm. I'm not sure, myself - I'm totally with you on it being a contested space. I am a self-identified bisexual person, also! (I used to be a self-identified mostly-gay person. My partner is not a woman, though. He's quite sure of that fact.) Like you say, though, I'd be tempted to give the benefit of the doubt, simply because the rest of it is so well done, it does seem to be all lexical.

[martin-wisse.livejournal.com]

"Shopping".

The bisexuality of Aral and the way Cordelia talks about it has been the subject of some quite ...intense... debates back on rec.arts.sf.written. The consensus ultimately seemed to settle on that no, this is just plain wrong, but yes, this is more Cordelia the character than Bujold the writer.

Glad to see you like these and in a way I'm quite envious of you, as you have so much better novels in the series still to look forward to. Shards of Honor was already a cut above the usual mil-sf and the series just goes from strength to strength (with some mild duds here and there, e.g Falling Free).

And it's a very queer friendly series, with all those wonderful characters who just happen to be gay or bisexual or something else entirely and it's just like being heterosexual in that it informs the character, isn't left there as just some undefined thing nor the sole point of these characters.

And it's so intelligently written for what looks at first sight to be just a series of adventure sf novels, where you don't notice a lot of the hard sciencey bits because Bujold weaves them so skillfully into the stories she tells and the societies she created.

(Can you tell I like this series so much?)

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

Shopping. :P It's kind of awesome.

I'm very much looking forward to the rest of the series, I must say. Queer-friendly SF is far too rare...

[vampire-kitten.livejournal.com]

Is this the only example, in science fiction and fannish source generally, of a character who is unproblematically bisexual and described as such?

I have some books of deliberately collected queer sci-fi short stories and extracts. Some of those are out and out gay, some of them are explicitly bi, and some are deliciously neither. Want to borrow? (although I know Shim has a huge pile of books for you to read)

Ursula Le Guin's Gethians (who are gender-neutral most of the time, and then can become either once a month) have a short story where the POV character sleeps with both men and women. And her stories about O (where people marry on all fours

"By Heokad'd Arhe of Inanan Farmhold of Tag Village on the Southwest Watershed of the Budran River on Okets on the Planet O.

Sex, for everybody, on every world, is a complicated business, but nobody seems to have complicated marriage quite as much as my people have. To us, of course, it seems simple, and so natural that it's foolish to describe it, like trying to describe how we walk, how we breathe. Well, you know, you stand on one leg and move the other one forward... you let the air come into your lungs and then you let it out... you marry a man and woman from the other moiety...

What is a moiety? a Gethenian asked me, and I realised that it's easier for me to imagine not knowing which sex I'll be tomorrow morning, like the Gethenian, than to imagine not knowing whether I was a Morning Person or an Evening Person. So complete, so universal a division of humanity — how can there be a society without it? How do you know who anyone is? How can you give worship without the one to ask and the other to answer, the one to pour and the other to drink? How can you couple indiscriminately without regard to incest? I have to admit that in the unswept, unenlightened basements of my hindbrain I agree with my great-uncle Gambat, who said, "Those people from off the world, they all try to stand on one leg. Two legs, two sexes, two moieties — it only makes sense!"

A moiety is half a population. We call our two halves the Morning and the Evening. If your mother's a Morning woman, you're a Morning person; and all Morning people are in certain respects your brother or sister. You have sex, marry, have children only with Evening people.

When I explained our concept of incest to a fellow student on Hain, she said, shocked, "But that means you can't have sex with half the population!" And I in turn said, shocked, "Do you want sex with half the population?" "

There are more bi characters as the series goes on. I won't say who, because finding that is part of the wonderfulness that is a civil campaign :)

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

I have a few, too - I picked up a lovely book a while ago that glories in the title of Feminist Philosophy and Science Fiction. Would love to borrow, thank you!

Le Guin always pleases me with the way she at least always tries to set out a position on gender in all her SFF worlds, even when it's not the focus of the novel. (She does it particularly well in Voices.) I didn't much like the feminist critique she makes with Tehanu, but that's because it's executed badly, I think, not because the idea isn't sound.

[tau_sigma]

it isn't code for him having sex with everything in sight - o hai, Capn Jack Harkness.

I almost didn't click on that cut, because I thought, well, I don't know these books. But I did, because generally your posts are interesting to read, even if they are on a subject about which I know nothing, and I'm glad I did. These books sound great, and I am off to see if they are available on bookmooch.

Not doing very well inna head is not fun. *hugs* You know this, yes. But I say it for solidarity and to remind you that you are lovely, and it is awful, and certainly nothing the other way round.

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

I think you will like them! For some reason they seem like the sort of thing you would like. And, well, who doesn't love gloriously realised SF and women who kick a lot of arse?

*grins* Not the other way round! Thank you, my dear. You are made of very much great.

[flickgc.livejournal.com]

I go with vor-co-si-gan, or possibly vor-kos-ig-an.

There's a brief exchange where Bujold seems to imply that "bisexual" cannot equate to "monogamous", or that a bisexual person in a relationship stops being a bisexual person, or something. But... I don't know, I get the sense that this is a case of sloppy use of language, not sloppy thinking. Because the joke is that it takes Cordelia several paragraphs to realise that the fact that someone telling her this is supposed to be an insult, and her reply is pretty smooth, all things considered - despite the odd use of terms, she goes on to tell the guy, frostily, that she didn't think she was marrying a forty-four-year-old virgin. His bisexuality is a matter of supreme indifference to her, and by extension, to the reader (tight third-person narration throughout, naturally).

I read that as the person telling Cordelia thinking that, rather than Bujold doing so.

You do know that those two books are just fanfic about An SF Series with the serial numbers filed off? [g]

(I much prefer the later books. I love Miles.)

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

A certain person had mentioned that fact, yes. :) He seemed to think this would increase my liking for them, rather than the other way round.

Miles is coming up, just as soon as I get my hands on the next books...

[foreverdirt.livejournal.com]

Oh, I am so happy to read about you reading these for the first time! I read them for the first time while living with footnotetoplato, and the joy of sitting on the floor reading out choice moments to him and getting in a return a genuine laugh and then seeing his hands clapped over his mouth as he struggled not to tell me about what happened next... *beams*

There's some very good fic out there (not just Yuletide) which I will happily rec when you've read some more.

And, yes, Cordelia! Isn't she just amazing? I love her so, so, so much! *flails some more*

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

Eeee! Good fic! Oooh, I do look forward to it. They are such... lovely books. I can't think of a better word for it. They're very lovely.

[lilka.livejournal.com]

Dammit, I want to read Bujold really badly (especially with your seal of approval!), but my pile of waiting-to-be-read books is getting big.

As for unproblematically bisexual characters, there are a couple in Melanie Rawn's Exiles series, including one who's in the second tier of main characters. Sexual politics are a bit different in that universe (it's a matriarchy, but not one that functions as an exact mirror of a patriarchy), but it's certainly not an everybody-is-bisexual type place. I think you'd really enjoy the books, but I recommend that you don't start reading them until she publishes the third one in the trilogy - I have literally been waiting ten years (and counting!) for that book.

Oh, and I spotted upthread that you gave up on Tamora Pierce around The Immortals. I really recommend reading her latest - it's a total change of pace for her, stylewise, and revolves around George Cooper's ancestor who was in the very early Tortal police. You're welcome to my copy if you'd like it :)

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

You will like them. I'm absolutely sure you will. As well as all the stuff I've said above, there are other interesting things, when they start being about Miles Vorkosigan rather than Cordelia - his disabilities allow for very interesting things to be said about privilege.

Thank you for the rec! I should remember that - I'm trying at the minute to read more SF and genre fiction, I was forgetting how much I liked it.

Tamora Pierce - yes. I read Alanna's books, which I liked a lot, and Daine's, which I liked rather less, and then Kel, whom I thought was okay but was rehashing Alanna a little bit. Thank you for that rec, too!

[pinkdormouse.livejournal.com]

I need to read some of the Vorkosigan novels before next EasterCon. You just made me make that more of a priority.

Hope the head stuff sorts soon. I should maybe write you some Hindus in Space comment-fic or something.

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

You should! I think you would like them.

And, thank you. :)