I doubt that Gentle Readers will be surprised to find that YHB picked up one of Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosigan books, in the aftermath of the discussion of The Sharing Knife. The one my hand went to on the shelf was Brothers in Arms, which, for those who both care and have forgotten, is the first one with Mark.
It’s an exciting one, with some humor and a lot of shooting. I was particularly sensitive to portrayals of ethnicity, and what I found was something that I think may be a genre convention, but I’m not sure.
Here’s the thing: ethnicity, in the Vorkosigan world, is largely a matter of planet of origin. That is, planets stand in not only for nation-states but for ethnic groups. A bunch of details stick out for me: Miles switches back and forth between a Betan and a Barrayaran accent. Dov Galeni has changed his name from the more Komarran-sounding David Galen. Ky Tung is an Earther, and finds himself at home in Brazil; there’s some sort of joke, I vaguely remember, about the Asian cooking there. It’s also clear that space is an ethnic heritage as well; Elli Quinn is uncomfortable with dirtsuckers downside.
Now, when we are on Barrayar itself, it’s a sprawling and diverse place with different accents and language groups, somewhat different social norms in the South than in the North, food and drinks associated with localities, and other details of depth that make Barrayaran uselessly vague as a descriptor. The same is true to a lesser extent on the other planets, which makes sense as they exist to be other planets. But when we go through the wormhole, suddenly there is a Barrayaran accent.
As I was thinking about that, it occurred to me that when you are in (f’r’ex) Connecticut, the United States is a sprawling and diverse place with different accents and language groups, different social norms in the South than in the North, food and drinks associated with localities, blah, blah, blah. But the minute you get to Europe or Asia, suddenly there is an American accent.
So I’m not trying to knock Ms. Bujold’s stuff, nor am I saying that the convention, if it is a convention, is a bad one. And I remember old stuff from the Glodden Age when the American Planet was fighting the Russkie Planet; it’s an obvious and ancient convention. I’m just suddenly bemused to find that it’s still there, and that I don’t really notice it, most of the time.
Or, rather, I suppose I’m asking whether (for those of you who read these notes and lots of other specfic) that convention is one of the old-fashioned attributes of Ms. Bujold’s works in a field that has largely abandoned the concept of planetary unity and a planetary ethnicity (in those parts of the field that still have people traveling from planet to planet), or whether that’s how things mostly are, rather than having interplanetary intercourse with subplanetary ethnicities. Because, of course, if and when we humans do get off the planet, or make contact with other races, I can’t imagine that we’ll be anything other than a sprawling and diverse place with different accents and language groups, etc, etc.
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.
Got here from Bujold’s link to you 🙂
Hmm. I seem to remember that, for example, Asimov in the Foundation novels made at least a trifling nod towards making each planet have slightly varying conventions, different accents, etc. Hmm. Cordwainer Smith does it too. Orson Scott Card does it, in spades, in Speaker for the Dead and succeeding books. Then again, there are quite a lot of books I can think of (a lot of hard SF – Vinge, Stross, Scalzi maybe? it’s been a while since I read him) where I feel there’s much more of a pan-Galactic society with no distinguishing features.
All of my positive examples above, plus Bujold, have the feature that space travel between worlds is (was) nontrivial (at least as hard as flying across an ocean; usually harder). Card is in some ways the most extreme (with the colony of Portugese, the colony of Chinese, etc.) and he’s also the only one with no fast (non-relativity-limited) space travel. I think planets-as-nationalities is not so much a convention, exactly, as that a good writer will identify it as a natural consequence of the convention of having different planets with limited communication between them. Which is kind of exactly what you were saying, above.
It’s something I’ve always noted about Star Trek, Voyager, Deep Space 9, and now (as I watch them on Hulu), Babylon 5–every planet or species is homogenous, with the exception of humans who have variation in skin color and eye shape, etc. You might have a planet with more than one species on it, but within a species/race they are all pretty much the same-looking, even if their personalities are quite different. It’s really obvious on Babylon 5, as it deals with racial and other issues which are just early 90’s American headlines written in space.
I can’t tell if it’s convention or just a lack of imagination or a way of getting around incredibly awkward didactic explanations of why this subgroup of Ferenghi hate that subgroup of Ferenghi… Or whether, realistically, meeting an alien race would naturally help fuse the original race into a more outward looking confrontational stance.
Interesting thoughts.
A couple belated notes:
1. The version of the accent thing that I do object to, and that I still see fairly often (usually in unpublished stories), is when writers use “Terran” to mean “English.” As in “On Terra, we call that a ‘rock.'” Or “It comes from an ancient Terran word: ‘house.'” Or “They were speaking Terran; I recognized the word ‘automobile.'” (All examples here made up by me.) Sure, there are plenty of ways one could try to explain that kind of statement, but I’m pretty sure that most of the time the author just forgot that there are other languages on Earth.
2. I think my favorite rendition of the planets-of-diversity thing (the opposite of the Jungle Planet thing) is Delany’s Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand. Though it’s been a long time since I’ve read that. But iIrc, he makes a significant point of noting that a planet is a big place and contains a lot of different cultures, ideas, languages, etc.
3. Of course, even outside of sf, we do make this kind of generalization all the time, at the national and cultural level, casually assuming that everyone from California, say, or everyone from the US, or everyone from France or Germany or Latin America or Eastern Europe or any other region or locality or culture one could name all have the same worldview, tastes, ideas, and ways of speaking.
Oh, yeah, and then there’s things like “Indian food.” It took me a long time to figure out that (for example) North Indian and South Indian cuisines are rather different; likewise different regional cuisines of China; and so on. And of course within each of those regions there are further distinctions and differentiations, down to the level of individual cooks on particular days. But I still say “Hey, let’s have Indian food for dinner.”
Yeah, Indian food is a better example than the American accent, if only because we all know what Indian food is (I think, although of course I no longer really know all y’all that well), and also know that there are ten million Indians cooking ten million different dishes in different styles at any given moment. So, you know, it makes some sense that there would be (f’r’ex) a Barrayaran food restaurant on Earth.
I don’t think I’ve ever read a version of that scene where the Venusians visit Pluto and are dragged to a Venusian food joint, and complain about how every time they go to one of those they have to eat G’rbla’ach, and they make western-style G’rbla’ach, with pedroonias, instead of the traditional way. Which would be totally dopey, probably, although (just to bring it back) Ms. Bujold could completely get away with it because after all this time we do have some sense of regional Barrayaran food, and Ivan is just the kind of guy to complain like that.
Thanks,
-V.