Oh-miles-WHAT

[jmtorres]

I er, realized that there's a volume I've reread less often even than Mirror Dance--that being Borders of Infinity.

Here we have this gem in Bel's introduction in Labyrinth: Bel Thorne, the Ariel's commander, was a Betan hermaphrodite, man/woman descendant of a centuries-past genetic-social experiment every bit as bizarre, in Miles's private opinion, as anything rumored to be done for money by House Ryoval's ethics-free surgeons.

Ryoval. What.

Comments

[jmtorres]

Hah. Oh God. Match that up to Grandma Naismith's comment about the herms being a people pathologically incapable of making up their minds... wow. *facepalm*

[grey_bard]

Oh dude. That comment makes so much sense if the male and female scientists that created them expected the grown herms to choose one of the two original genders and a lot of the herms were like "Screw you I am keeping booooooth!"

That could cause long-running snide prejudice of which such a remark would only be the tip of the iceberg.

Ow ow ow.

Beta colony... not paradise! More like Planet Berkley.

[niqaeli]

Planet Berkley is a good comparison. And not, I think, unintentional. I've never read the books as in any way attempting to portray Beta Colony as a true paradise. A better place for many, than Barrayar -- but not without its idiocies and prejudices and horrors.

To wit, the methods of forcible therapy that Cordelia escapes. That little notion of post facto consent being considered acceptable for drugging people against their will to obtain purer observational data. Well, of course you can obtain consent if you keep at that sort of therapy...

[azurelunatic]

Yeah -- I believe she said more than once that Beta Colony was California on crack. In an arcology under a desert.

Given that reproduction is controlled by the state, that they've got an amazing jerkwad of a president, and how they treat their PTSD veterans, I think I stopped viewing it as a paradise before I finished reading Shards of Honor.

[niqaeli]

Their treatment of veterans with trauma seems to be to dump them all into therapy whether they want it or not. While they might sensibly be said to have a right to insist that service personnel be entirely balanced, they should damn well be able to resign and be as unbalanced as they want to be in private life if they're not harming anyone else or suicidal. Instead of, well, railroading them into it via their family as civilians, should they resign -- and the fact that Cordelia's mother's reaction to her trauma was to be worried and, oh, want her in therapy (and to hell with what Cordelia wants).

Beta Colony's a special, special place: couldn't pay *me* to live there. I suspect, personally, if I had to live in that universe, I'd rather live on Escobar. Or perhaps Komarr.

[grey_bard]

Yep. Oh, I think Beta Colony's similarities and creepy issues were entirely intentional. Beta Colony: Awesome vacation spot, wouldn't want to live there.

[azurelunatic]

I think it's possible that the absolute zeal with which they pursued Cordelia related to her proximity to Aral; I'd wager that if a mildly traumatized veteran with absolutely known cause of trauma wanted to take a break from it all, there might be no trouble, with noise about the "therapeutic value of solitude" and so forth. But the retroactive consent thing says that Cordelia was not a one-off.