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okay, how on earth does one pronounce "Vorkosigan"?
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. ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
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![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
yuletide fandom, yes? Yes.)
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.)
no subject
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 :)
no subject
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.
no subject