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

[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...

[osymandias.livejournal.com]

I don't think the Culture is quite 'everyone is bi' - I seem to recall that Gurgeh doesn't tend to sleep with men, and has never been a woman, though I suppose this was weird enough that another character pointed it out as such...

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

They don't define their sexualities, though, do they? So you can't say that to be bisexual has much meaning in Culture society.

[osymandias.livejournal.com]

I think I'd say that, as with most things in the Culture, it has as much meaning as the individual wants it to have. I see your point, though.

[libellum.livejournal.com]

Whee, another Alanna fan!

I hadn't evn heard of the Bujold books, but will definitely look them up on the basis of this review. Thanks for the recommendation!

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

You're welcome! And I love Alanna SO MUCH. I'm not so sure about the other Tortall books, but she is just amazing.

[amchau.livejournal.com]

I have only read Ethan of Athos (at some time there was a reason for this, and it may or may not have involved mpreg, it was a long time ago) and one of the ones about Miles, but obviously I must go and look up these ones about Cordelia. Alanna is, after all, made of solid awesome.

As for other canonically bi characters, my examples would be from DW/Torchwood: Jack Harkness (who is canonically *more* than bi), Ianto Jones and Toshiko Sato (whose sexuality is shown rather than discussed, saving them from 'gay/straight now' nonsense. That said, the Tosh/Owen stuff is dire and should be ignored).

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

But Jack does have sex with everything in sight. I'm a little bothered by that - I mean, they may not explicitly be equating "bisexual" with "madly oversexed", but it's something I've always got a sense of, with Jack. (Not so much when he was in DW, but later.)

(Alanna is made of solid awesome. So is Cordelia.)

[amchau.livejournal.com]

Fair point about Jack, yes. That's where Ianto and Tosh are much better--ok, Tosh had a lot of other sucky stuff. But as far as I can remember, Ianto is interested in exactly two people, one woman and one man. You can, I guess, paint it under that old favourite of slash writers as 'he's just gay for Jack', but it does, if not balance Jack being madly oversexed, at least provide a different picture alongside that one.

(Gratuitous quotation warning!

Owen: Let's all have sex.
Ianto: And I thought the end of the world couldn't get any worse.)