Reading: Ethan of Athos

[white_hart]

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book was first published more than 30 years ago, it does show its age rather, in this case not just in things like the outdated communications technology but in the assumption that gender is purely biological and that society in the far future will exhibit similar levels of homophobia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.

Comments

[the_rck]

I remember approaching this with extreme trepidation in the late 80s when it was the one Bujold book, out of the four available, that I hadn't read.

It cleared the very low bar that I had set in as much as I had feared a focus on almost pornographic heterosexual exploration. As I recall, I finished it and called my best friend (who had also been eying the book with trepidation) and led with, "Ethan of Athos-- He doesn't get laid!"

Such a very, very low bar. But past experience at that point made clearing it seem like an amazing feat.

[white_hart]

Yes, I was a bit worried that he might end up discovering the delights of heterosexual sex and not wanting to go back home, and was quite pleased to find that actually he got a sweet if rather understated romance with another man.

[hilarita]

My headcanoning of why bits of the future are homophobic is that the evangelical US christians won the space race, and took this with them.

I should re-read it - I haven't read it for a decade or so.

[white_hart]

Heh, that wouldn't surprise me. (I'm pretty sure they were the founders of Athos, though clearly somewhere along the line the Athosians dropped the homophobia.)

[tree_and_leaf]

Given the choice of name for the planet, I think they're more likely to be an exaggerated version of the type of paleo-conservative Orthodox American convert from Evangelicalism - like Rod Dreher* - who seem to be, um, more motivated by the fact they perceive what they have left to be soft on the culture wars than a deep understanding of the tradition; and in any case I imagine Athosian society would have evolved fairly swiftly, as you really can't run an entire planet like a monastery. It just wouldn't work.

*Dreher, author of "The Benedict Option", suggesting a withdrawal of Christians into some kind of weird fusion of monastic communities and shtetls**, is a convert to Orthodoxy via Roman Catholicism. He left the Catholic Church because of his horror at the child abuse scandals, which you might say was to his credit if somewhat over-optimistic about the chances of an even more secretive and authoritarian ecclesial community being any better - except he came to the conclusion that the RCC's problems were nothing to do with paedophila as such, but rather their willingness to tolerate a Sekrit Conspiracy of gay priests, which, no.

** Having looked at his wiki entry, I find that whoever put it together has chosen to describe the book with a quote from the Rowan Williams review in the New Statesman, which has been very carefully selected, as the review boiled down to 'some interesting ideas but on the whole, lol no, and also this is absolutely not what St Benedict was actually arguing for."

[white_hart]

I bow to your superior knowledge of Christian denominations!