OliveTapenade
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User ID: 1729
OliveTapenade
26m ago
It was an interesting series but one that I myself never got into. It came highly recommended to me, but I read Shards of Honour, Barrayar, and then concluded that not only was it not for me, but I didn't understand the praise for it. To me it read like, well, pulp. Bujold's prose isn't particularly impressive, her worldbuilding is formulaic, and her characters were bland. I filed them away as the sorts of novels you read in airports or on long flights - not good by any reasonable standard, but consistently tolerable, while not asking much of the reader. To this day I don't understand the love for them. I can't even really muster the energy to dislike them. The strongest opinion I have of them is... well, I should put that down-thread.
I find this particularly funny because I remember reading Barrayar and feeling that it was... er, basically a pro-life tract? As a book? This greatly offended the liberal-left friends who had recommended it to me, but I think I stand by that judgement.
Barrayar is a book in which the protagonist is a pregnant woman, Cordelia, who chooses not to use an artificial womb because she feels that the biological, bodily experience of pregnancy is of some sort of inherent value, whose child is identified early on as having significant disabilities, and who faces tremendous social pressure to abort the child, or even to give him up for infanticide after birth. She takes great personal risks to keep this child and give birth anyway, because all life is sacred, and ultimately the character most determined to abort the inferior child, count Piotr, is charmed by the child's simple goodness despite his disability.
If I were planning a book from the ground up to make the case for pro-life ethics, I could hardly do much better.
The book is, of course, critical of patriarchal and feudal Barrayar, but its depiction of Beta Colony, the enlightened liberal state, is also harshly critical! I came away from the book feeling that Beta was, if anything, more dystopian than Barrayar. At least Barrayar doesn't issue breeding licenses. I felt that Barrayar came off as something like a defense of natural, traditional parenthood. Barrayar's aristocracy are so concerned with face and honour that they will abort and murder children; Beta is so disconnected from biological life that they sever birth from the mother's body entirely, and they put mandatory state-controlled contraceptive implants in everyone. These are both deeply wrong.
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