The Vorkosigan Companion - Lillian Stewart Carl [77]
We are thinking creatures and tool-using mammals, we are usually (2007: not always—mea culpa again) either men or women, but beyond the first and underneath the second, we are members of the human race. (Another word for race, from the same root as genre and gender, is genus; to speak of ourselves as "members of the human race" is to make yet another series of statements—about the kind or type of being we think we are, and about who we do and do not think counts as a member.)
Because this is science fiction, Bujold considers the question of humanity through the mechanism of technological change; because this is a book about gender and sex, the particular focus is reproductive technology. And because this is a book about how we create, become, remain, designate, and treat members of the human race, Lois's use of the advantages and perils of biotech's capacity to give us almost total control over the creation, prevention, and form of human life never degenerates into the easy and cheap answers so common in science fiction and in our own society.
Bujold never makes technology the villain, destroying our humanity, nor does she cast it as the hero—which is why, at this reprinting, Ethan of Athos is one of that rarest of science fiction stories: a story which instead of becoming dated as time has passed and the breakthroughs it discusses have come nearer to or reached fruition in the real world—in 1986, the year Ethan was published, ovum donation was experimental; now (2007) it is commonplace—has become more relevant, more timely, because it relies for its power on eternal, increasingly urgent human questions instead of on rapidly changing technological answers.
The question is a basic theme of science fiction, given a quarter turn—when she asks, in Ethan of Athos and elsewhere, how far we can go in redesigning ourselves before we cease to be human, the question is not only, or even primarily, for the products of replicator gestation and precision genetic design. The question is for those already alive: the progenitors, the choosers, the parents.
As we follow the adventures of Terrence Cee we see what his creators and their technology have made of him—and what they have made of themselves in the process. As we watch Ethan chase frantically around the galaxy to retrieve his—and all of Athos's—future offspring, or as Elli Quinn considers her options, we see how their choices about parenting change them forever. And just to make sure we haven't mislaid the point under all the futuristic machinery, Ecotech Helda and her absent son are there to remind us that our worst nightmares about biotech are probably no worse than the things we've been doing to our children for centuries.
Lois has commented that her early works have mostly, often unbeknownst to her, turned out to at least touch on "the price of parenthood" on the way to wherever else they were going—most overtly in Ethan and Barrayar, most painfully in "Aftermaths," which chilling little tale you may find at the end of Shards of Honor. I'd add to that that she has one of the most clear-eyed views of the sins of the fathers—and mothers—I've ever encountered. (2007: In the original version of this foreword that read "to be about the price of parenthood," a misquote and a terrible oversimplification that I am pleased to have the chance to correct.)
Whatever tools we may have at our disposal when we set out to create and raise children, the issue most central to our success or failure remains the same—are we using our things to make people, or are we trying to make people into things? The crucial difference is in us, not in our offspring: what is important about the notion of a "superhuman" versus the notion of a "subhuman" is not the difference but the similarity—to label a person as either is to label them not-quite-human, and that makes it terrifyingly easy for us to think of them as a thing.
This is not a question only for parents; not everyone, after all, experiences