Ethan of Athos
Ethan of Athos by Lois McMaster Bujold
My review
rating: 4 of 5 stars
This story is set in the Miles Vorkosigan world, but really happens completely apart from those characters save for one member of the Dendarii Mercenaries joining forces with the protagonist as part of her own investigation.
One of the key technologies of this universe is the uterine replicator, a piece of equipment that lets people make babies without a women carrying the baby to term herself. So the idea of a bunch of religious nuts deciding women are evil and settling a remote planet with a bunch of uterine replicators and their own ovarian cultures seems like a logical and believable next step.
In any case, faced with the collapse of the ovarian cultures several generations later, this backwater world (Athos) has to extend its head out of its proverbial shell of isolation to obtain new samples since the ones they had contracted to deliver were sabotaged. Enter Ethan, one of the supervisors of the reproduction facilities, picked for his can-do attitude and medical ability to "Go get us some eggs!". Take his naive world views and mix with agents of intrigue on a space station, and Bujold spins a yarn of adventure and misadventure with enough plot twists to keep anyone happy.
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