Reading: Ethan of Athos

Although Ethan of Athos is the third book in Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan saga in publication order, and the seventh in internal chronological order, unlike the others it doesn't actually feature anyone called Vorkosigan, even as a supporting character. Instead, it's the story of Ethan, a reproductive technician from the planet Athos, which - like its Earth namesake, Mount Athos - is inhabited solely by men, with women prohibited from visiting or even communicating with the inhabitants. Unlike Mount Athos, whose population is maintained by new recruits to the monastic life, the inhabitants of the planet Athos father their own children, via in vitro fertilisation of eggs produced from ovarian cultured brought by the original settlers and the use of uterine replicators for the embryos to grow in. However, after two hundred years the original ovarian cultures are wearing out, and when a shipment of replacements turns out to contain unusable rubbish Ethan is sent to investigate and acquire replacements in person, bringing him into contact with wider galactic society for the first time, including women in general and Commander Elli Quinn of the Dendarii Free Mercenaries (the only link between this book and the rest of the series) in particular. Arrived on Kline Station, the nearest interchange to Athos, Ethan finds that he isn't the only person interested in finding out what happened to the real ovarian cultures, and the others are predictably not very nice people.

It took me quite a long time to get round to reading this book because I wasn't sure about a Vorkosigan saga book without any of the Vorkosigans in - maybe it was the familiar characters I liked most - but in fact, I enjoyed this a lot. I found Bujold's depiction of Athosian society really interesting, particularly the formalised structure of co-parenting and recognition of the work involved in childrearing, and liked that the rest of the galaxy (or at least the people he meets) clearly have as much to learn from Ethan as he has to learn from them. I liked the rather bewildered and sweetly naive Ethan and the competent, wisecracking Elli a lot, and thought they made excellent foils for each other, and the plot romped along much as the plot of all the other Vorkosigan books I've read so far. As the book was first published more than 30 years ago, it does show its age rather, in this case not just in things like the outdated communications technology but in the assumption that gender is purely biological and that society in the far future will exhibit similar levels of homophobia to our society in the 1980s, but generally I enjoyed this a lot more than I thought I might.