Old School Wednesdays Readalong: Shards of Honor by Lois McMaster Bujold

mary anne

The first the I read the two books contained in “Cordelia’s Honor” (omnibus version) I liked Shards of Honor better, but now every time I reread them I prefer Barrayar – it has a lot more meat to it. What I always remember about Shards of Honor is the epilogue. It sends such a poignant message about war, and about mothers and their children, and what a total waste war is through a mother’s eyes.

I don’t know if I would have liked Shards so much the first time if I had not known I was reading about Miles’ parents…had not considered that. One of the aspects of Bujold I appreciate so much is considering characters and events in one book in the light of who they are and the role they play in other books. I had read “The Warrior’s Apprentice” right before I read “Cordelia’s Honor”, and Sgt Bothari plays a pivotal role in both. It’s fascinating to just “watch” him, so to speak and consider the seeds of who he will become, and the roots of who he has been.

Loup

I tend to be unable to separate Cordelia’s assault from Aral’s history and I think it’s a facet of the genre that his traumatic past is elided while hers is highlighter. It does make a difference, to the romance and to the assault scenes, to have that in mind.

Then again, my favourite Vorkosigan is Mark, so I seem to have a like for Bujold’s messed up anti-heroes.

Cynthia Porter

The book that made me fall in love with Bujold’s worlds was Barrayar. When I later went back and read Shards of Honor for the first time, I was very disappointed. The writing isn’t as strong as the rest of the series and for me, it would have put me off reading any of the others. I classify it as “necessary to read if you are doing the whole series, but don’t start here.”

Loup

I wouldn’t call it anti-abortion, since it is mentioned quite clearly as an option but the moral quandaries presented by uterine replicators get more airtime. So characters have the opportunity to abort, to carry to term (bodily and with a replicator) and also not-abort AND not carry the pregnancy to term, which has a huge number of societal ramifications.

Beatrice_Otter

I’m going to talk about abortion, birth, and pregnancy issues in the series in case there’s anybody like Frida who might be squicked by them and wants to know whether the other books would be okay to read. There will be spoilers, but not many, so if you have read the books or want to know if reading them is worth your time, I hope you find this useful.
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Abortion issues in the book Barrayar are different than they are in Shards. For one thing, it’s personal; Cordelia is pregnant herself and is urged to get an abortion because ::spoiler::. Never is abortion described as inherently wrong/bad; it’s just not something Cordelia wants for herself.

Please remember that both Barrayar and Beta Colony have *very* different reactions to and thoughts about children, pregnancy, and abortion than modern America does, and both Cordelia and Aral reflect that. And that these two books were written before the abortion issue got hot in America. And that one of the through-lines through the series is all the sf-nal things one can do with a uterine replicator.

As for Beta, your gonads get locked up at puberty, and you only get them unlocked when you want a child, and you’re limited on the number of children you can have. Mistakes and unwanted pregnancies are pretty much impossible. And they have gene-cleaning technology and medicine to make sure that the kind of birth and congenital defects that often prompt abortions now just don’t happen and/or are fixed before they become a problem. So the issue with Cordelia is that she can’t really comprehend a world in which each pregnancy isn’t deeply wanted. She comes from a world where *every* pregnancy is wanted and most of the possible medical issues that might prompt an abortion never come up because of genetic engineering beforehand. (And this is true whether you’re talking about body-births or replicators.) If Beta Colony has any abortions at all, there can’t be many of them because they aren’t *needed*. The whole concept is just not on Cordelia’s radar.

Barrayar, on the other hand, is very different, because of both their primitive medical system and their deep fear of mutants (legacy of radiation poisoning from the event that stranded them without contact with the galaxy). At this point in the timeline, if a woman gives birth to a baby who is visibly not perfect–anything from a cleft palate or harelip to too many fingers or toes to any other problem at all–the mother is expected to slit its throat right then and there. That’s her *duty* as a good Barrayaran mother. So abortion–for those who can afford the medical care to tell if it’s a mutant or not–is definitely the more humane choice. But part of the issue here is that the mothers have so much pressure that it’s not a fair or honest choice. On Barrayar, abortion isn’t the choice of the women who want to control their own bodies, it’s the choice of the men who want to control women’s bodies. Cordelia is definitely anti-infanticide, and she’s very much against getting an abortion herself, but again, it’s not that she thinks abortion is wrong as an absolute, it’s that she thinks abortion is wrong for her and that Barrayar’s whole system of controlling women, and their whole attitude towards reproduction, is pretty screwed up. (Which it is.)

For both planets, their attitudes and beliefs about pregnancy and abortion don’t really map well onto American ones. There is a scene later in the series, where a doctor at a replicator-clinic on a different planet sees that one of the fetuses in his care isn’t developing, and at that point it’s treated like a miscarriage.

I hope this helps.

J Johnson

Shards was my first Bujold book way back when it was released and it remains a favourite. I certainly prefer Cordelia and Aral as characters to young Miles: for me, its Miles early adventures that strain credulity.

That said, most of my favorite bits come near the beginning (blue cheese and oatmeal) and the end (Cordelia trying to evade the well-meaning Betan psychotherapist). I don’t find the (near) rape scenes moustache twirling at all – they established Ges and Serg as the loathsome creatures they needed to be to justify the elaborate scheme to dispose of them. I find Bothari a much more problematic character but that’s a whole other story.

Loup

I think it’s worth mentioning that for me, Elena Senior’s experienced is the more horrifying. Partly because Cordelia isn’t raped (tortured, threatened, but not raped) and because I found her narration of the scene very effective. The fact it is so situated in her head and her emotions (rather than in the bodies or an omniscient narrator) makes it different to the way rape was used in contemporaneous SFF.

Her comments, later, about Elena Senior were chilling though, and an excellent puncturing of Miles’ worship of Bothari.

I think it is impossible to really interpret the relationship between Bothari and Cordelia without that very mindful spirituality that she actively works on.

Erik

I started reading the books in order, so with Shards of Honor and then Barrayar, before getting to Miles. I agree with both readers that SoH is a bit simplistic compared to the later novels, but it is nice to see a strong heroine for a change. Imho, both Aral and Cordelia were to an extent oddities in their own world, but both very principled and with high integrity. This is what drew them together I believe, ‘doing the right thing’ no matter which side they are on and which culture they were from.

The rape scene doesn’t bother me so much (I have read worse, e.g. Donaldson’s Gap series, book I). It illustrates perfectly the perverse and sadistic nature of Serg, taking on the weak. And since this is common practice in war, even today, why not mention it in a book? War is ugly and no amount of laser fire and space battle should glorify it. Something Miles also realizes over time.

For me, attacking Escobar as a means to get rid of the crown prince seems a bit risky and way over the top for a subtle emperor like Ezar.

In the end though, it is the human struggles, personal miseries and the dialogue which kept me reading on. Aral is not perfect, Bothari is psychologically mutilated and Koudelka is physically destroyed in a society focused on perfection. Interesting! Aral surrounds himself with these kind of people, with potential and twisted pasts.

Finally, SoH (+Barrayar) provides the backdrop for all future conversations between Miles and his parents and other meetings, and even though this past is never spoken aloud, it resonates between the lines. E.g. the couch scene with Kou and Dru in A Civil Campaign, and of course Ilyan’s eidetic chip and all it contains. The references to captain Negri and the clouds over Gregor’s sanity. The Vorkosiverse is certainly not complete without these two books!

Elizabeth

I’ll start with: I love Bujold’s science fiction. I never got as deeply into her fantasy, but what won me to her series was not Miles (although I adore the pushy little bastard) but Cordelia. I found a snippet from Barrayar in a magazine years ago, before she got very popular, and hunted until I found everything and pieced it together.

I don’t remember if I read Barrayar or Shards first TBH, and the short cut I read from Barrayar was fairly early on in the book, before one of the scenes that made me adore and revere Cordelia FOREVER (I still remember I read that at an airport and I LITERALLY yelled ‘Yes!’ when one event happened — Barrayar readers can probably guess what that was, LOL.)

Honestly, I think there are a lot of reviewers who are failing to comprehend WHY that not-quite-sex/rape scene was there — including, no offense, Ana — because they’re failing to see what it shows. It is NOT gratuitous, nor is it fortuitous that Bothari breaks conditioning at that moment. There’s a reason and a point, which SHOULD have been obvious as you read the rest of the story — if you didn’t just say ‘ugh, okay, this is gross’ and actually look at what Bujold was doing with it. There’s a REASON it’s not PC. Because the villain ISN’T.

It’s one thing to TELL a reader that someone’s a torturer. It’s another to SHOW what a character is. There is no way, given Cordelia’s culture (as someone else mentioned) that she could ever have grasped just HOW twisted and sadistic Vorrutyer and the Prince were unless she’d been exposed to it. How could she? The only other Barrayaran she knew was Aral, and he was derided as the ‘Butcher of Komarr’ — an appellation that turned out to be wildly false. In fact, when she and her crew are about to be taken prisoner, the other crewmembers are apprehensive about her fate if they’re captured, but Cordelia shrugs it off — she clearly thinks that most of this stuff is propaganda, and we see by the jingoistic speech she’s given to read at the end that she’s actually got a good reason for believing the rumors are inflated. It’s hard to separate fact from fiction in that situation.

But by having her have contact with Vorrutyer and witnessing — she sees that not all the rumors are baseless. Further, she gets a better idea of what happened to Elena Senior — which is critically important for multiple reasons. One, it explains why Aral and Simon showed up when they did (minor) but two, Bothari’s actions in relation to Elena explain SO much as to why he refused and why he acted as he did to save Cordelia. (It’s also heartbreaking to know when you go on and read what eventually happens to Bothari.)

Aral later explains that Bothari begged Elena away when Vorrutyer and the Prince were done with her. And he saves her life. HOW he does it — yeah, weird and creepy for Elena, but the point is exactly what Cordelia gets: Bothari has been as twisted and broken and tortured as Elena. But because it was done to his head, and not to his body, we STILL dismiss it as nothing. Vorrutyer and the Prince essentially took a man with psychological problems to begin with and raped him mentally. There’s really no other word for what they did. And THAT, even more than the horrors they visited upon Elena, tells both Cordelia and the reader just what kind of people Vorrutyer and the Prince are, and why the Emperor is not wrong in wanting to stop the Prince by any means necessary. Breaking someone physically is horrific enough. But breaking someone mentally? Physical injuries can heal. Mental injuries destroy a whole *person*, and these two did it just for the hell of it.

I even understood WHY Bothari indulged in the happy household fantasy he did, totally creepy as it was — the level of self-hate he had to feel for the things he was forced to do, the level of regret — I think he was trying to mend his own mind as much as he was trying to mend Elena’s body.

The actions to Elena are still terrible. But they are not and never were Bothari’s doing, any more than it’s a whip’s fault for causing injury and not the wielder. Bothari was a tool.

So yeah, he was already fighting Vorrutyer before Cordelia came along. Cordelia took the right approach and she also reminded him of Vorkosigan and the man Aral helped him to be. Cordelia, as much as I love her, is not the only person in Bujold’s world who is capable of creating men as greater than they dream of being (in Aral’s words) – Aral does, too, though I think he fails to realize it. Miles comes by all this honestly on both sides.

Further, this whole scene explains in part WHY Bothari is as fiercely loyal as he is. Aral showed Bothari how to be someone better. Cordelia reminded him of that and basically said, “Look, I’ve seen the person you really are. I understand you’re being forced, and I forgive you.” And that combination is why Bothari chose to do what he did. It wasn’t at all a ‘convenient’ rescue.

But Vorrutyer? Nope, she ain’t forgiving him for crap. SHE knows who the villain is here, and it wasn’t Bothari. And notice, THAT is the point where Bothari acts.

So if all you saw was a gratuitous sex scene, no offense, but you saw ‘sex scene’ and didn’t bother to read into what it really was. It was there for a reason, and a good one.

I might also add that it adds an extra dimension to Aral’s problems with his bisexuality. It’s not ONLY that he’s bisexual in a world which doesn’t accept any sexuality variations at all. It’s that the guy he fell for is someone who is the antithesis to what Aral holds dear. I think that if Vorrutyer had been an honorable guy, Aral probably would have bucked the system and stayed with him. What Vorrutyer doesn’t get is that it was his dishonor and sadism that made Aral break with him.

I admit also, I despise anti-heroes (which is why I hate Donaldson’s Covenant series, as much as I appreciate his plot and writing) and don’t care for reluctant heroes, and I love heroes who actually do believe in things like honor. So, yeah, I loved Aral. I prefer the struggle of a good guy trying to stay good over the blah blah blah redemption arcs. It’s a lot harder to STAY a good guy than it is to go do penance and IMO, a more interesting story.

Thus, why I loved Aral’s conflict in this, too. He’s a soldier whose duty, as he sees it, is to protect his home and his people and to serve the Emperor. His honor and moral code demand that he not commit murder to do so and that he stops those who would, no matter what the cost to himself. And if his world won’t give justice to those who’ve committed it (especially in Aral’s own name), he will by-hell inflict it himself to keep it from happening again, even if (again) there’s a personal price to be paid. And though Aral makes light of it, if he’d been anyone else, he would have been quietly murdered for stopping that political officer. As it was, he was demoted not one rank, but at least two and made a pariah. (How much of one we find out much later, with Miles’ first posting, and we realize that Aral got shunted to that godawful base Miles first gets assigned to.) That’s…huge.

And yet, here’s the Emperor, showing him that the one and only way that he can save Barrayar is to set up a scene of wholesale murder. Not just of anyone, but men who know and trust him.

Without Cordelia seeing exactly what Vorrutyer was and what he was capable of doing, I don’t think there is anything in her background which would let her understand Aral’s dilemma, nor anything which would have prevented her from just telling all to the therapists rather than covering it all up herself.

So, yeah. We needed that scene.

Granted, I loved Barrayar more than Shards — but that said, this is still a good work, and Bujold only got better from there. And yeah, there is a LOT here that makes everything in the later novels make so much more sense, but it’s well worth reading in its own right.

Oh, and final note – I’m hugely pro-choice myself, but I didn’t take Cordelia as being anti-abortion. It’s also important to note that at this point, Cordelia has never had anything to challenge her views as to quality of life versus existing. If you read Shards and especially her view about what happens to Dubauer, and then go read the closing of the Vorkosigan saga and see what choice she makes…she has learned to make the distinction between quality of life and existing. But in the Beta Perfect World in which she’s been raised, there is no such tradeoff. TBH, the people of Beta Colony really are pretty sheltered.

The one comment that I think may have triggered the idea that she was anti-abortion was “Some of the women were pretty emotionally divided about abortions. This [putting the fetuses in the uterine replicators] puts the blood guilt on you.”

She’s not saying HER point of view. She’s saying that was the point of view of some of the women who were affected. I truly didn’t get that Cordelia was anit-abortion, tho. And, having had a very problematic pregnancy myself, I can understand why she fought so hard for Miles — it wasn’t so much because of — damn, don’t want to spoil, but basically, for Reasons, she knows Miles will be her one and only shot at children. She’d come from a world which permitted very few of them, and had wanted a large family. If nothing else, she wanted ONE. I totally get that, though I admit, I understand it a LOT better now than I did when I first read it.

Anyway, hope that helps.