The Vorkosigan Companion - Lillian Stewart Carl [76]
(2007: I think the generalizations of the foregoing three paragraphs were far too simplistic even in 2003, when I wrote this; mea culpa. As of four years later, they seem downright quaint; gender bending, gender blending, and reimagining masculinity is where it's at, culturally and SFnally—and we're all richer for it.)
But of course it's not quite that simple, and it is that important. While there is no shortage of women, freed by technological and cultural change from confinement to "women's work," doing the things that we traditionally think of as masculinely adventurous and powerful in Bujold's fiction, she never neglects the other side of the coin. When women are no longer biologically bound to childbearing, and to the home-based service role that this bio-logic seems invariably to create, men are no longer biologically bound to "not childbearing," nor to the "men's work" that we consider appropriate for those appointed to the supporting role in human evolution.
When reproduction and parenting and love are no longer inexorably linked to either gender or sex, the possible consequences for gender relations, sexuality, love, and partnership are almost limitless. In Ethan of Athos, Lois sets out to explore two basic, but much-neglected, aspects of the gender-role question as it relates to SF—what happens to men's roles, and to women's work, when technology sets them free of biological sex?
(Remembering the title of a certain high-school class in which, as a suburban substitute for a more solemn Initiation Into Womanhood, we were taught the "mysteries of womanhood"—mostly menstruation, meatloaf, mending, IUDs, and ironing—I want to say that this book belongs to an entirely new genre: Domestic Science Fiction—but that would be reductionist as well as, frankly, kind of lame. I do want to say, however, that it is partly as a result of reading Bujold that I have reconsidered my disdain both for the title of the course, which at the time I considered pretentious, and for the curriculum, which I considered deeply inferior to Shop, where one was given access to power tools.)
One of the central and most fascinating pieces of technology in Lois's writing is the uterine replicator. This seemingly innocuous piece of equipment, which had its beginnings as a bit of convenient handwaving in Shards of Honor, has gone on to become one of the greatest agents of social change in the Nexus (the series of star systems which provide the context for Ethan of Athos, as well as for the Vorkosigan adventures) on each planet according to its cultural assumptions. In Ethan of Athos we see Lois's early consideration of the impact that the uterine replicator will have on gender roles, still sketchy in spots, but full of hints as to the directions she will later take—in particular, we get a sense of the genre (and gender) conventions she proposes to play the best sort of merry hell with.
The most obvious form that this consideration takes is the social structure of Athos, a planet with no women and a great many children. There is also the evolving understanding and partnership between Elli Quinn and Ethan Urquhart—the woman who wants to be a mercenary fleet commander, and the man who wants to go home, settle down, and raise a bunch of kids. There is the very proper Athosian Ethan's progress from terror at the mere thought of a woman to understanding and acceptance of the human women—the mothers, in a sense—whose ovarian cultures helped build his world, to real friendship with Elli. There is Elli's sideways look at the paths she has rejected, and her own coming to terms with them. Biology is not destiny in a Bujold story; destiny is destiny, and when it comes for you it looks at what's in your heart, not what's in your pants.
So we have the bones of genre, and the skin of gender, but what of the flesh, our common humanity? (And it is, always, a question of humanity—Lois has commented