The Vorkosigan Companion - Lillian Stewart Carl [5]
Ethan of Athos had two mainsprings: consideration of what extra-uterine gestation might do to human society, and reaction to earlier SF works from the Fifties and Sixties, when I grew up and imprinted on the genre, that dealt with gender relations in the future, particularly the "Amazon planet" meme, which I now take (with half a century of hindsight) as that era's attempt to grapple with the impending issues of women's lib. Ethan was my contribution to the SF gender argument. The future universe in which all my SF plays out is not culturally uniform, and so I can explore more than one take on all these intertwined issues. Settings in the future also allow one to detach the underlying issues from current events and their emotional baggage, a standard useful SF hat trick.
At the time I wrote Ethan of Athos, I had not yet sold any novels, though two completed works were making the rounds of New York publishers. I had, however, made my first short story sale, and on the boost to my morale so provided, I embarked on this third novel. I was groping around for the magic trick by which I might break in, and among the advice I collected was "Try something short. The editors are less daunted by thinner manuscripts on their slush piles, and maybe they'll read it sooner!" So I was determined to keep the length under strict control. I still wasn't sure I would be able to sell the books as a series, although I quite liked the universe I had begun to develop, so I also wanted the next thing to be series-optional, not dependent on the two prior books but connectable to them if some editor did see the light. But more importantly—in the course of Shards of Honor I had tossed off as a mere sidebar the idea of the uterine replicator. Upon consideration, this appeared to me more and more a piece of technology that really did have the potential to change the world, and I wanted to explore some of those possible changes.
Extra-uterine gestation is not a new idea in SF. Aldous Huxley first used it way back in the early Thirties in Brave New World, but being who and where he was, used it mainly as part of a metaphoric exploration of specifically British class issues. I was a child of another country and time, with a very different worldview, and other issues interested me a lot more. Primary among my beliefs was that, given humanity as I knew it, there wasn't going to be just one way any new tech would be applied—and that the results were going to be even more chaotic than the causes.
One obvious consequence of the uterine replicator was the possibility of a society where women's historical monopoly on reproduction would be broken. All-male societies exist in our world—armies, prisons, and monasteries to name three—but all must resupply their populations from the larger communities in which they are embedded. This technology could break that dependence. I discarded armies and prisons as containing skewed or abnormally violent populations, and instead considered monasteries as a possible model for an all-male society both benign and, provably, viable over generations.
About this time—the winter of 1984/85—I went to a New Year's Eve party given by a nurse friend, and fell into a conversation about some of these nascent ideas with two men. One was an unmarried and notably macho surgeon, the other a hospital administrator with two children of his own. The two men took, interestingly, opposite sides of the argument of whether such an all-male colony could ever be workable. The macho surgeon rejected the notion out of hand; the man who'd actually had something to do with raising his own children was intrigued, and not so inclined to sell his gender short. (The surgeon, note, did not perceive that he was slandering his gender; in bragging about what he could not possibly do in the way of menial women's work, he was positioning himself and his fellows as ineluctably on the high-status end of human endeavor.) It was clear, in any case, that the topic was a hot one, of enormous intrinsic interest to a wide range of people.
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