{"id":12044,"date":"2009-04-23T17:56:11","date_gmt":"2009-04-23T21:56:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/vardibidian\/2009\/04\/23\/12044.html"},"modified":"2018-03-13T18:50:27","modified_gmt":"2018-03-13T23:50:27","slug":"book-report-brothers-in-arms-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2009\/04\/23\/book-report-brothers-in-arms-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Book Report: Brothers in Arms"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

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<\/I><\/a>. The one my hand went to on the shelf was Brothers in Arms<\/a>, which, for those who both care and have forgotten, is the first one with Mark.\n

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<\/i>, but I’m not sure.\n

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<\/i> is an ethnic heritage as well; Elli Quinn is uncomfortable with dirtsuckers downside.\n

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<\/i> 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<\/i> Barrayaran accent.\n

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<\/i> American accent.\n

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.\n

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<\/I> 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.\n

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus<\/I>,
-Vardibidian.\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In Which Your Humble Blogger boldly goes where fools fear, wait, that’s not right.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[194],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12044","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-report"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12044","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12044"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12044\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18745,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12044\/revisions\/18745"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12044"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12044"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12044"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}