Bujold & Sayers

[truepenny]

melymbrosia is talking about books again, and her comment on A Civil Campaign has inspired me to post on why I find the ending of that book both incredibly satisfying and incredibly wrong. (I'll be talking about Memory, Komarr, A Civil Campaign, Diplomatic Immunity (Lois McMaster Bujold) and Strong Poison, Have His Carcase, Gaudy Night, Busman's Honeymoon (Dorothy L. Sayers). Dunno how spoilerish I'm going to get, but I don't promise not to give things away.)

And since this is going to get insanely long, if you aren't interested, don't click here.

Before I start--and I always do this, standard disclaimer type stuff, before I get out my sharp little knives--I want to say that I am a great big slavering shameless Bujold fan. Got all her books, read 'em all at least twice, etc. etc. Looking forward tremendously to the new Chalion book.

But for me, the Vorkosigan books hit their ne plus ultra with Memory. I think Memory is a brilliant book, the way that the plot and the thematics and the character development all integrate and make the whole greater than the sum of its parts. Yes, Miles comes out at the end smelling like roses, but he also hits his absolute nadir as a human being in his progress through the book, and for me it feels like he earns his auditorship. The book works.

I start having problems with Komarr, and they focus on Ekaterin. She's too freaking perfect. I would like Miles so very much better if he could for once fall in love with a woman who isn't breathtakingly beautiful. And Ekaterin herself is so clearly tailor-made to be Miles's Perfect Spouse that she's boring. Boring, boring, boring like a very boring thing (as jess79 would put it). Her primary motivation is her child, and since I don't like children, I can get behind that on an abstract level, but I can't empathize with it particularly. And Bujold, who writes such fascinating male characters, never puts her back into it when she's writing women (the honorable exception being Cordelia before Miles's birth). Poor Ekaterin is stuck being the love interest, all her subversive feminist thoughts about Barrayar's patriarchal system notwithstanding. (Hang on to those thoughts, 'cause we're coming back to them.)

I love the experience of reading A Civil Campaign. I giggle insanely and cheer and love everybody at the ending. But then, because I am cursed with a brain the size of a planet, I start thinking. ACC suffers from the same problem I was talking about in an earlier post about Harry Potter: the world divides cleanly into Those Who Like Miles (Whether They Admit It Or Not) and Those Who Don't. Even in Komarr, there are characters who don't like Miles who are still perfectly decent human beings (e.g., the Komarran who proposes to Ekaterin). But in ACC that subtlety is gone, and what's worse, she's mapped it onto her political divide. It's a bad bad bad sign when the Emperor is officially impartial, but everybody knows he's secretly in favor of your protagonist's party. (Just replace "protagonist" with "antagonist" and suddenly you have a horribly corrupt and evil government. Bad.) So everything comes together too cleanly; defeating the people who are annoying Miles also means defeating the people who want bad things for Barrayar and are otherwise icky. Too simplistic.

But back to Ekaterin. The blunt brutal fact of the matter is that she caves too quickly. It's no secret that ACC is in part an homage to Dorothy L. Sayers (along with Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, and Georgette Heyer), and thus the parallels with the Vane Quartet (SP, HCC, GN, BH) are not only obvious, but intentional, and thus fair game.

At the end of SP, Harriet and Peter are in a roughly similar position to Ekaterin and Miles at the end of Komarr. Peter has saved Harriet from being hanged for a murder she didn't commit, is passionately in love with her, and has told her so. Harriet's still in emotional overload, and so can't process.

Now here's the key difference. It takes Sayers two insanely long books (for a total of 917 pages in my hardback editions) to get Harriet around to the point where she can accept Peter's love. She has much of the same baggage as Ekaterin (the guy she didn't kill being her emotionally abusive lover) plus the horrible obligation of being grateful to Peter. And because Harriet isn't Perfect, she behaves like a spiteful bitch all over the place and generally tortures both herself and Peter trying to come to terms with the fact that she loves him. ACC (405 pp. in the hardback) cheats by essentially switching models in midstream, jumping from Sayers to Heyer, who lets you do these rapid-fire every-plot-thread-resolved-happily endings. And the obsessive pairing off of the Koudelka girls seems borrowed from another Bronte: Anne and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.

So the end of ACC is emotionally satisfying, but it's a cheat. It cheats by yanking out Ekaterin's spine and trampling her character flat. All those feminist thoughts (which Sayers deals with honorably and extensively in GN) get swept away by the passion of True Love. And no matter how much I want to be, I'm not okay with that.

The problem even carries over into Diplomatic Immunity. DI and BH are equally pieces of fluff, but BH includes some extremely serious and emotional scenes as Peter and Harriet try to negotiate their relationship around Peter's work and what it does to him. I was hoping when I bought DI that at least some of those feminist issues would come up, but no. Ekaterin is reduced to Adoring Bride and Helpmeet. Once again, she's Perfect and therefore boring. I want Ekaterin to find her Inner Bitch and tell Miles where he gets off. And I want it soon.

And now I feel like a bitch myself. But I can't turn my critical faculties off, even when I want to. Mea maxima culpa

Comments

[papersky.livejournal.com]

Yes.

I pretty much agree with all of that except not liking children. I thought Komarr was just fine, and yes, a lot like SP, and thereafter I totally agree with you. I hadn't thought of her switching from Sayers to Heyer, but yes, that's what she does. It's a pity, because Gaudy Night is one of the most wonderful things, it's a novel, after a lot of clever detective stories. I think Bujold did do this, with Mirror Dance after a lot of clever adventure SF novels, but ACC is clever and pretty and it skids along on bug butter it just isn't Gaudy Night. What ACC needs is a large chunk of "I loved them, and you gave them to me." at the very least. She forgives Miles when she shouldn't if she is to have spine and guts when he needs them. And in DI we don't see her being a hero, it happens offstage, out of POV, when Miles is unconscious and we're not looking. I'm sorry?

I don't think BH is fluff, actually, I think it's one of the few novels in the world about what happens after "ever after" that isn't a miserable adultery novel. Harriet and Peter go around looking for their chimneys, like real people. Have you read Renault's Purposes of Love also known as Promise of Love (In addition to a UK edition with the first title, I own the US one with the second, 1939 -- week of Dunkirk -- paperback, with a sickening Harlequin cover and an even more puke-inducing added last chapter. It's very different without that last chapter.) I ask because I do not wish to give spoilers if you haven't.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

I haven't read Purposes of Love. Am I to take it that I ought to?

And, yeah, I shouldn't have said BH was fluff. It's fluffier than the others--or perhaps fluffy in a different direction than the early Wimsey novels. But it is also extremely serious, and it is the only one of the nine novels that really deals with Peter's psychological problems. So I misspoke.

What you said about GN is exactly how I feel: it's still a mystery, but it absolutely transcends the genre even as it celebrates it.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

What Purposes of Love is about thematically is considering romantic/sexual love as a struggle between lover and beloved. It examines all the things in the Symposium and the Phaedrus and comes to the conclusion that one person always loves more and you can fight over who is to be lover and who beloved. Did I mention that it's a nurse romance and that it had a doctor-kissing-nurse cover? It has great characters too.

The thing about it is, in this context, that BH is about that as well, about how not to be eaten by a beloved, which is a real thing, those roles are there and waiting, keeping things balanced isn't easy, especially if you love someone like Peter, or Miles. And ACC and DI are very much not about that, because Ekaterin isn't actually fighting on the level where it counts. Miles can steamroller her, and does, at the deepest level of integrity. This does happen to people, as well as characters, but it's nice when the author notices. I can't believe she noticed with Elli Quinn so much and then flattened Ekaterin like that!

I adore Bujold, don't get me wrong. If I didn't I wouldn't care.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Oh, and the other problem with DI and Ekaterin's off-stage heroism, is that she's being a hero for Miles and more or less as Miles's Voice. (Unlike in Komarr, where she is quite genuinely heroic without Miles; Miles isn't even relevant.) So she's, in a horrible way, just another piece of Miles--an extension of Miles to take care of off-stage things for him when he's got to be either on-stage or unconscious. She's become exactly the thing everyone has been agreeing for books and books and books that Miles doesn't need and shouldn't have. He's taken her over.

I haven't read the novella about their wedding. Perhaps some of these things get thrashed out there?

[papersky.livejournal.com]

I have read it, and no. It's best where it isn't about Miles and Ekaterin.

(I'm trying to email you at the same time as this, but Caliban is being insanely slow at spitting out reformattable ascii. I swear my puter, which is a 286, is faster. However, actually using it means plugging this monitor from Sycorax into it, and then plugging it back in afterwards, so it's easier to use Caliban. Caliban's a 386 laptop.)

[rhi]

And in DI we don't see her being a hero, it happens offstage, out of POV, when Miles is unconscious and we're not looking. I'm sorry?

Actually, that I consider to be Bujold painting herself into a corner with her plot, unfortunately. The choices seemed to me to be: shift POV to Ekaterin to let her handle the problems (which I strongly agree, I would have loved to see) and then Ekatrin has to recap it all to Miles to go into the denouement (which would have bored me to tears); or she does what she did, and Miles hears the synopsis and the plot goes from there. It simply didn't work, but I'm still not sure what else Bujold could have done.

[coffeeandink.livejournal.com]

I always assumed the model for the explosion of pairings was Shakespeare, not (any) Bronte; they're similarly rushed, and similarly tenuous.

I don't think Ekaterin is boring, but I do think that the speed with which she sucuumbs to Miles--possibly that she sucuumbs to Miles at all, though he *is* capable of great charm and determination--is at odds with the rest of her character presentation, especially her deep reserve.

The problem I have with a lot Bujold's treatment of women is ... hmm, I'm going to muddle this; it's very clear but very inarticulate in my head, and very tied in with narrative. Bujold likes to do a lot of subversion within existing structures--in fact, really, as a writer I think she's more about reform than subversion. So she'll try to show the extent to which a patriarchy is dependent on the power, strength, and intelligence of women (thus Cordelia and Aunt Alys as eminences grises), or to which a corporation is dependent on the intelligence and efficiency of engineers rather than bureaucrats (thus Falling Free); but she isn't prepared, narratively, to break down and rebuild plots around these things, any more than her characters are willing for civil war.

So you get a novel about motherhood where the pregnancy has to be violently deferred in order to get a plot (Barrayar) or a girl alchemist hero eventually giving way to a soldier hero (The Spirit Ring) or a major character all too clearly conceived only as "the love interest." The plots aren't really re-imagined with women at the center--or rather, they sort of start off that way, and then they drift.

I hated Memory when I first read it, because I knew depression like the inside of my own head, and I read Bujold to get out of it. It's one of my favorites now. But I wonder if it took so much out of her she hasn't been ready to really *hurt* Miles since. He hasn't had to pay for his mistakes. He hasn't had to lose anything.

She ought to write the one where Aral dies.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Or the one where Taura dies.

I agree. The last three books have been largely about letting Miles get what he wants, rather than what he needs, and she seems to have abandoned her own self-described plot generator: "What's the worst thing that can happen to Miles?"

And I think you've described exactly the problem with what happens to women in her books: they drift gently out of focus, because the resolution of their problems are not properly centered with the resolution of the PLOT problems. That's what happens to Ekaterin in ACC: her desire to be autonomous and to get away from the whole heterosexual romance thing has no PLOT to anchor it. The plot is all about what MILES wants, and Miles doesn't want Ekaterin to be autonomous. He wants her to be with him. We don't get a plot about Ekaterin at the university, or Ekaterin finding a job she can do with no relevance to Vor-anybody. We get a plot about Ekaterin's relationship with Miles, and Bujold, as you say, isn't interested in a genre revolution. Just think how different that book would be if Ekaterin stood up in the Council of Counts and said, Lord Vorkosigan is honorable and just. If he were not, he would already have coerced me into marriage--as he easily could. It is a sign of his integrity that he has not done so, and I thank him for that. And sat back down.

It would have been a very strange book if that had happened, and everyone would have hated it. People tend to get very crabby with books that renounce their generic allegiance. But it would have been interesting.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

Maybe she thinks there isn't a story there.

Like Le Guin "women's work is really central and interesting, but I am going to tell a story about an evil wizard so we can have some plot here guys".

I'd have liked your ACC better than the one there is. And I'd have expected her to marry him two books down the line even so, but I might have got an Ekaterin POV GN equivalent.

Eleanor Arnason and Maureen McHugh and Rumer Godden, I remind myself.

This sort of thing does make one think about what one is doing in one's own writing.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Yes. ***sigh*** It is difficult to rearrange one's thinking sufficiently to let female characters do interesting and important things without simply turning them into men with tits. I, in fact, don't do very well at it.

*embarrassed pause while Truepenny totals up the number of women in her stories and considers what all they get to do.*

Okay, fine. I suck at it.

Although, to be fair to myself, I think that's partly because, at this stage in my writing career, I'm interested in what happens to people who have power and autonomy and have those things taken away from them. And since in our Western, patriarchal culture, with Western, patriarchal models of storytelling, women are already automatically in a one-down position, that means that the things I want to get at are things that are easier to show with male characters. And really, I don't want to go writing polemically and make the characters women just because I think I ought to. That's going to kill the story deader than a diplodocus.

And I used to be WAY worse.

Right. I'm going back to your novel.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

I'm never shrill, you know. Reviews all over tell me so. It really bugs me that it's necessary to state that I am not shrill, as if the default for writing about a woman who fights is to be shrill.

I'm not sure what the difference between a woman and a man with tits is. People have said Sulien is a man with tits, but then people have said that I am -- somone to my face once said I wasn't a proper woman because I believed in using logic in argument. (It was months before I realised that the only winning response to this would have been to burst into tears.)

I do want to write about women doing things, and I think I do OK with that, and the reason I want to is despite identifying fine with male characters I always felt the lack of girls parts when I was a kid, which was more true when I was a kid than it is now, and because at least half of the characters who come to me out of the dark are female, and few of them are powerless.

I need to rephrase something at the end of the dragon book to make it clearer.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Well, thank god that you are never shrill. Because we couldn't have that. *g*

Okay. Let me try this again, because I have something that I mean, if I can just figure out how to say it.

I don't think answer to the problem of women not having anything to do is to write a standard quest & action driven story simply replacing the hero with a heroine. (And I am not trying to imply, btw, that you have done any such thing. Gah. I hate online communication; it always goes writhing away from my control when I least expect it.) I think the answer is to come up with different stories, which will have the added advantage of challenging and strengthening the genre. Molly Gloss does this in Wild Life, which keeps threatening to turn into a conventional adventure story and never does. But it's hard to tell different stories, when we have the old Western male-dominated models ingrained in our minds before we can even talk intelligently about what a story is. Even when you know better, that undertow is always dragging at you, trying to pull you down among the rocks and coral and sunken ships. Full fathom five thy father lies ...

[coffeeandink.livejournal.com]

Well, I think that one of the things you can do to solve the problem of not having women do anything is to take a traditional action-driven story and replace the hero with the heroine. If it's set in our culture--or even a reasonable derivative of a real one--and you pay attention to the characters, then you're going to find your plot deformed by gender anyway. (This is one of the very cool things about Buffy, I think, although according to Joss's usual origin story, gender was an issue from the very beginning, and Buffy started off telling the underside, the other (Other) side of the story, the girl's side.) Hth had a pertinent complaint (http://www.livejournal.com/talkread.bml?journal=bettyp&itemid=74229) about Kushner and Sherman *not* doing that in The Fall of the Kings, and how it deformed both plot and worldbuilding.

I'm not sure, even, what difference is between a woman and a man with tits. I mean, the latter just makes me think of various awful stories where the (usually male) writer just keeps having to remind the reader how *girly* the female narrator is, and they always drive me up a wall.

Narrative structure fascinates me. I'm very bad at writing traditional structures, and this frustrates me, because there's quite a lot I like about them. Trying to find the bits of the wreck I can bring up to air and reuse.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

You mean Kushner and Sherman have a female pirate and it isn't a big deal? I don't know, that world is very weird, gender does matter, they're all men at the university. It's a strange thing, the whole thing is peculiar whether you do anything with it or whether you don't.

I had a character who was female, and who was someone who had been a warrior when she was young because she thought it was fun and now she was middle aged and she was fighting and risking other people's lives because it was her duty to, and the difference between the way she'd been heedless of stuff when she was younger and the way she was now required to be and indeed actually responsible was the interesting thing. This was a poem (http://www.bluejo/demon/co.uk/poetry/poems/sword.htm) and it became two novels, and the hardest thing was actually coming up with a background in which it was possible for a woman to say that. I had to completely deform biology with magic to get there. Nobody who has read the books has actually noticed this, or anyway, commented. They all go on saying "never shrill" and "post feminist" (huh?) but not that I had to eliminate infant mortality, with consequent effects on general health, and make nobody have more than four babies ever by divine fiat, and make unmarried women 99% infertile. It's not what the story's about. The story's about keeping fighting after it stops being fun, as I said.

[coffeeandink.livejournal.com]

You mean Kushner and Sherman have a female pirate and it isn't a big deal?

Hth's point is that gender does matter in that world, except that in FotK it doesn't stop any of the female characters from doing whatever they want to, which makes it all feel fantastical and unreal, in a bad way. I do agree with this, and it is part of my problem with the book, although not my major dissatisfaction.

Truepenny, the book oddly enough does support Richard as Alec's Great Love, if not Only. But it's not a love story, which is the main if not only reason I don't love it the way I love Swordspoint, or even like it the way I do the source novella. It's also not urban in some significant respects, which is the other big reason I was unhappy with it.

I hadn't noticed the four children limit until The Prize in the Game, though I was more nonplussed by then at the existence of queens and the ambiguity around homosexuality. But to the degree I did get what you were doing with gender, I'm still confused by the whole issue about writing women as distinct from writing men--because the Sulien books do seem like a good example of trying to take a traditional hero tale and fit it around a woman, and doing it thoughtfully and honestly enough that it ends up altering the worldbuilding so the plot can follow generic conventions without violating character.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

I haven't been able to read The Fall of the Kings, because I got to the point where they have Alec (Duke Whatever-he-is) having affairs with all these people, both men and women, and the part of my brain that has been madly in love with Swordspoint since I first read it just howled, That's not Alec!, and refused to go on with the story. Rationally, I can agree that I am overinvested in Richard and Alec's relationship, but I still can't make myself read TFotK.

The two "men with tits" characters I'm particularly thinking of are Honor Harrington (David Weber) and Kerowyn (Mercedes Lackey). In both cases, it's all too clear that the author has said, I will take this masculine archetype and make it FEMALE. Which means that the characters behave like men except when the authors want to remind us that they're women--and those are always moments of emotional tension and general sappiness, rather than, oh, say, what do you do if you've got menstrual cramps on the day of the Big Battle?

Buffy is quite different. BtVS is all about the ways in which Buffy's gender role--emphatically girly--does and does not mesh with her narrative role as a Hero. Firefly is also quite good in this regard, especially with Kaylee, who's a mechanical genius--the domain of men (as "Shindig" points out)--but also unrepentantly girly with her silly pink layer-cake of a dress.

Oh, good lord, where's my point? I don't know. Maybe I don't have one. Maybe these are just random thoughts on the subject of gender and Heroes. And overinvestment in books that came as epiphanies when one was 18.

[yonmei.livejournal.com]

It would have been a very strange book if that had happened, and everyone would have hated it. People tend to get very crabby with books that renounce their generic allegiance. But it would have been interesting.

Well, not everyone. Any more than everyone hates Have His Carcase. I would have loved it, and would probably have been so desperate to read the sequel that I'd have bought the hardback. (I had a similiar feeding-frenzy reaction to HHC when I first read it, more than twenty years ago.)

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Okay, true. I mean, obviously I would have liked it, and you would have and Papersky would have and most likely a great many other people. Mine was a ruthless overgeneralization, and I should know better.

But it would definitely have been a more difficult book, and while Bujold's books are intelligent and interesting, they aren't difficult. I don't know if that distinction makes sense to anyone but me. I reread her books when I'm sick, because they're comforting, the same way I reread Georgette Heyer. So what I was talking about wasn't popularity at all, but something quite different. Sometimes that happens. Thanks for making me clarify my thoughts.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

Re-read, sure, because you know what's going to happen.
I'll re-read Sayers as comfort reading, and I have comfort read Cyteen.

Mirror Dance is a difficult book, on first read, at least it was for me, and so was Barrayar. They don't duck.

I thought, before Memory (and what about Memory? The only book that's ever got me to cry three times at three different places in the same scene? The book that got me to cry at "Ivan, you idiot, what are you doing here?") that she was doing something long and complex that would end up with Miles as a villain, being Miles, doing what Miles does, sure he's right, but actually wrong and entirely ruining a complex diplomatic something and maybe starting another Cetagandan war. You know where he locks up the three commanding officers in The Vor Game? Like that, only without the author being on his side, and then afterwards he would realise at last what he had done and that he had become the cackling evil mutant of Barrayaran legend.

I'd have loved that book with all my heart, even while Zorinth was hating it.

[coffeeandink.livejournal.com]

I'd like to say I would have liked it, but I'm not sure I would have. The generic conventions of ACC are one reason why I find them comforting; and A Civil Contract is one of my least favorite Heyers. (I suppose you could say that Bujold was following Heyer's model in that she subsumed the heroine's interests to the hero's, but I think she'd have produced a more striking work if she'd followed Heyer's model in that particular case, because it would have involved looking at what the heroine had to sacrifice to become a perfect wife. And I wouldn't have wanted Miles to end up with someone practical whom he wasn't in love with, but it might have worked better.)

Then again I have deliberately sought out romances panned by regular romance sites for not following genre conventions, and liked them quite a lot; but I did have that warning. The warning and the expectations help. So maybe I would have liked your phantom Bujold novel better on rereads, even if the first one left me cranky.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

A Civil Contract is not my favorite Heyer (I think my favorite Heyer is Venetia, at least this week), but it's one that I disliked intensely the first time I read it and then--kind of like with A College of Magics, I guess--have become fonder and fonder of it with each rereading. I like it for being a romance novel that says True Love isn't all it's cracked up to be. It's quite clear that Julia would make both Adam and herself intensely miserable, and in fact that Julia's True Love is only the person she thinks Adam is. I like it because it is an intensely practical book, and every once in a while, I need to read one of those.

And I think the key difference between Jenny and Ekaterin is that Jenny interest is in becoming the Perfect Wife (which includes of course being the Perfect Chateleine, which entails a good deal of responsibility and power). That's the only thing she wants to do, and the weird thing about it is that, at least when I'm reading A Civil Contract, I don't find her boring because of it. Ekaterin, on the other hand, has this other thing that we're told she wants to do, but we never see her doing it and it seems to get reified uncomplicatedly into that poor bonsai'd skellytum, sacrificed, like everything else, to make Miles happy.

Gah. I sound more and more like I hate A Civil Campaign, and I really didn't. And, I should add, Kareen is quite clearly not being steam-rollered by Mark. Mark is much more sensitive to other people than Miles, and have I mentioned I want him back as a viewpoint character very badly. I guess I can hope for (a.) the other shoe to drop with the Dendarii and (b.) an eventual comparison between Mark & Kareen and Miles & Ekaterin, with the second pair being forced to wonder where it is that they've gone wrong.

[coffeeandink.livejournal.com]

Mark is much more sensitive to other people than Miles, and have I mentioned I want him back as a viewpoint character very badly.

Mark. Or Ivan, or Gregor. I would love a Gregor novel, because I do love Gregor. But I suspect his intersection of problems doesn't interest Bujold particularly.

Mark was extremely abused as a child, which inclines him to be sensitive to others, to say the least; manipulation was survival. Miles was pampered in a culture that hated him, with some significant conflict (i.e., Piotr) in his own household, which meant that he had to develop a certain overbearing insensitivity to survive sane. (As sane as he is, which is open to debate.) He's dangerous because he actually is good at manipulating people despite that, he's of course quite brilliant, and he's extremely powerful without many external constraints on his power (as you pointed out in the initial post), and with fewer internal constraints than one might wish.

I just thought that it might be terribly interesting if Ekaterin divorced Miles; but no. She wouldn't. Unless he threatened a child, and Bujold would have to go a long way to convince me that Miles was capable of that particular offense.

Or treason. Ekaterin would refuse that. But he'd have to end up Emperor, or dead. And he decided in Memory, which is not to say that he wouldn't have to decide again, and again, and again, because that's what temptation is.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

I adore A Civil Contract it's my favourite Heyer by several fathoms, but I read it after I read ACC because I read the whole of Heyer for the first time in the summer of 2001. (They did not look like something I wanted to read, OK?) I love Venetia too, and Cotillion and let's suppress the rest of this list.

The difference between Jenny and Ekaterin is really that what Jenny wants is believably on stage, whereas we are asked to take on trust what Ekaterin wants and not shown it. Even when she is making the Barrayaran garden, we don't see it with attention. Consider the attention we see her give the glorious bugs, in comparison.

And she lies to herself. At the end of Komarr she knows what she's doing, she knows Miles wants her, she says a mourning year, and gosh does she need that year to be herself in. The first time we get her POV in ACC she has convinced herself that that was joking. She can't be as naive about Miles wanting her as she was in ACC without lying to herself. When she gets the apology she had already sold herself to him in her heart, she wants the rough drafts. That's someone stupid in love (or similar obsession) even at that point.

Peter gave Harriet space to be Harriet. I love Harriet's refusal on the postcard and how it gives him hope. Miles didn't give Ekaterin that space, and she'll never have it now. She is Lady Vorkosigan in exactly the way Cordelia wasn't when she climbed down the shaft with a stunner in each hand.

Once, on rasfw, someone asked for SF books that showed marriage well. The first two recommendations were The Gameplayers of Zan and Courtship Rite.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Peter gave Harriet space to be Harriet. I love Harriet's refusal on the postcard and how it gives him hope. Miles didn't give Ekaterin that space, and she'll never have it now. She is Lady Vorkosigan in exactly the way Cordelia wasn't when she climbed down the shaft with a stunner in each hand.

I was just thinking something like this earlier. Gaudy Night is the document of Peter realizing that not everything is about him, that Harriet's decision is her decision, that he can't make it for her and has been doing a very shabby thing for the past five years in assuming that her answer (like Ekaterin's) is a given. He really does mean it on the roofs when he says that if she says no, he'll accept it. Miles--who we've been shown before does not know how to give up--would never walk away like that. It would always be part of a long-term strategy to get what he wants.

And I think Sayers has much more sympathy for Harriet than Bujold does for Ekaterin. She'd intended to end the series with Strong Poison after all (thank god she didn't!), until she discovered that she'd put Harriet in this dreadful situation of marrying the man who just saved her life. Sayers recognizes that this looks terribly romantic, but really really isn't. And she gives Harriet those two very long books to work through things, and--my contradictory but clinching proof--she lets Harriet be a real human being with actual flaws and bad qualities. (Another thing that Gaudy Night is about is reducing the god-like detective into a man whom a real woman might actually want to marry, but that's a different and complicated post about Peter's progress through the novels.) It takes far more sympathy to write Harriet being a bitch than it does to write Ekaterin being a martyr.

Science Fiction

[psikeyhackr.livejournal.com]

The thing about Komarr is that it is a science fiction story. You compare it to other books which I haven't read on the basis of similar behavior by the characters. I admit that Bujold is exceptionally good at creating characters and in general that is not the forte of sci-fi writers and for decades sci-fi readers did not care much. Maybe the ones that do aren't REALLY sci-fi readers. Can't trust those mundanes, they are really sneaky.

But Komarr has a similarity to a famous, or possibly infamous, science fiction short story, The Cold Equations by Tom Godwin.

The point of the story is that the physics of the universe does not care about us measly humans. Make a stupid mistake and reality will kill you with total indifference and without remorse. Is that redundant and repetitive? Tough!

This is somewhat of a spoiler but it is necessary to explain. A Komarran scientist comes up with a theory about how wormholes work and intends to develop technology to use the information to serve political purposes. But his theory is WRONG! The wormhole kills him for his mistake but his comrades don't understand the problem. They almost repeat it.

But in all of the talk about characters in this story the lesson about physics and reality is ignored by almost all of the reviewers. Who cares about "science" in fiction. Trivial blinking lights and widgets until you need a heart transplant and the Frankenstein technology must save your sorry ass. Ha ha ha ha ha ha! Die foolish mortal. LOL

Next time read your sci-fi on a tablet computer.