Flowers of Vashnoi
So I've got the Ekaterin fic 90% done and then randomly had a moment of staring at the screen going "...oh right, I should read her novella, shouldn't I, that would be the thing to do".
It didn't give me much for her fic, but it did help confirm details and generally be helpful for the Time Travel Gregor one where I have Piotr go out into Vashnoi. I took really detailed notes on stuff because it's a kindle book so I can't just ctrl-f whenever I need anything, I have to open the app.
Overall, I enjoyed it! At no point did I want to throw it across the room!
Book content warnings: way too many bugs, off-screen previous child death, a lot of canon-typical infanticide that is oh so tragic in the past but no one cares that it's still actually a problem with living perpetrators
Thoughts:
- the fact that the radiation bugs glowed made me think of the Signs To Deter Intrusion stuff with the glowing cats.
- I have, for no good reason, been thinking about Enrique in the last meanwhile and I came to the conclusion that he basically deliberately took advantage of Mark ("oh look, someone who doesn't know how bail works since they don't have it where he comes from, let's latch onto him and get out of here, and not actually ever tell him what bail is, Barrayar's really backward, no one will be able to get me there"), found himself stranded on Barrayar by the grace of Miles, and is making the best of it. I don't think he's canny enough to be a deliberate con man (as opposed to being good at spotting a mark, she wrote, and then realized Mark *facepalm*), but he's smart enough to keep a good thing going and he knew what he was doing when he did it. I just hope he knows that he does any financial swindling on Barrayar, they're just going to hang him or something and he's not getting out of that bail.
Also I continue to be astonished and dismayed at what the bugs in ACC indicate about Barrayaran quarantine controls. Either they don't care if anyone smuggles in random bio-engineered and very easily-manipulated biological organisms, or they just don't care when a Vorkosigan does it. I'm not sure which is worse. Barrayar is supposed to be the Planet Of Paranoid Hats that also hates mutations. What the hell is going on at customs. - Technology marches onward: now they have webcams! (this is really fun to track in a series that started in the 80s)
- omg there's a "freeze! enhance!" line straight from every procedural tv show. In this case, it's Ekaterin looking at security footage. I dearly hope Barrayaran technology makes the "enhance a tiny resolution webcam" thing less bullshit.
- NIKKI GETS A MENTION! *drinks in celebration* And Ekaterin talks to him on the phone! Off-screen, sure, this is more than we've gotten since the twins were born.
- Ah, yes, a wonderful paragraph where Ekaterin contemplates the job of managing Miles and then compares him to a toddler. Which, it should be noted, they have two of, and Ekaterin had previously wondered if Miles was on her side in the "parents feed kids now" time, rather than on the kids "no we won't be fed now, it's not food time, it's play with food time" side. That's nice.
And, frankly, Martya and Enrique's relationship doesn't sound that great; it's probably fine professionally, but I'm not sure why they got married except out of an intense case of Pair The Spare. Ugh, whatever, I'm never over it. - "Then, taking a little pity on him: “You don't need to mention it.” Which was a rather Milesean approach, come to think, and therefore cosmic justice."
LOL. I like you, Ekaterin. - There's a lot of, ah, de-personing? language that I frankly don't know if it's on purpose or not, but does a good way of getting across Ekaterin's lingering anti-mutation prejudice. It's wording like "The head tilted" and "the little eyes widened as much as they could" and "the round face scrunched" etc etc, especially with Ekaterin's horror at the medical issues, does have a good effect. (Ekaterin has the cultural conditioning; I don't know what Enrique's problem is. Maybe he's never seen anyone who looks like they weren't gene-cleaned for the last 20 generations.) But then, like, that moment where Ekaterin wonders if Enrique wants to add Jadwiga to "his large mammal collection", but it's not Enrique using those terms, it's Ekaterin, and that's actually the second time she thinks that the radiation-exposed kids fall under Enrique's "large mammal with prolonged exposure to the zone" category. There's just so much unconscious ableism in Ekaterin's POV, showing the deep societal prejudice. It's well done, I'm just not sure all of it is intentional.
There is definitely an essay to be had about the whole visible mutation vs. invisible mutation thing, and Nikki's is invisible and treatable, whereas Miles will tell everyone that he isn't a mutant, but he looks like he is. I did appreciate here that Ekaterin bit back the instinctive defense that Miles isn't actually a mutant. It's very well-done and realistic how Ekaterin, as someone who worried for so long about her son's mutation, still has a lot of cultural baggage about mutations. - Ekaterin assessing that this is going to be dumped on her lap to deal with, "another task to her overflowing plate" and having the thought of "I will cope. It's what I do." is tragic in a way I can't honestly express. Miles isn't Tien, but he sure is dumping a lot of similar thought patterns on Ekaterin.
- Ekaterin frowned into her lap. “I’m wondering if we should run DNA identifications on those bodies buried under the posts.”
“I could,” said Enrique. “What would you do with them?”
“That’s the hard question. Find the parents, plunge them into grief and guilt for a second time, when it all seemed over? To what benefit, for what change?”
Miles opened a gloved hand, full of acknowledgement, empty of solutions. One couldn’t fix the past, only the present.
Ugh, yet again they have no interest in punishing people for infanticide. Is it illegal or isn't it? (I recently parenthetically opined on MOM here, long story short, my opinion is that wasn't actually a punishment that was going to do anything other than make Ma Mattulich famous (and definitely get burnings from other people). But at least then Miles seemed to see himself in Raina. I guess in the years since Piotr's died, the threat of infanticide being a problem in his own life has faded? Ekaterin also seems to say earlier that Miles understands what it's like being a mutant in his own district which, I'm sorry, he does not.)
It all just really bothers me. These people committed murder but it's okay because they were sad when they did it. And there's no indication that the parents who abandoned their children to die of exposure (or, if it's any better, to be raised by someone else and then die of untreated radiation exposure, which is not better because it's more prolonged suffering but hey at least their own hands are technically clean? lol nope they aren't) regret it at all. They're just forgiven because it must have hurt them to kill their own kids. That's nice. I don't give a fuck about their feelings, I care about their actions.
There's a lot of times in this series where I just wonder if my reactions are heavily theological, which is hilarious, let me tell you. But yeah, sometimes I just have theological problems with the morality presented. Which is fine, it's just amusing as fuck, considering I am a Bad Jew. (Cordelia is, actually, the one I usually have theological problems with, starting straight with "tests are gifts" wtf no they are not, you don't put yourself in a place of a test.) - I am very Intrigued by Cordelia's mobile medical clinics that are going around and stopping infanticide in the lowlands or, well, to be more exact, stopping people from abandoning their children in a radiation zone. I feel like the impression we're supposed to be getting is Cordelia's doctors fly around and "fix" all the mutations, so the kids stay with their families and communities who no longer reject them. Which is already a stretch and also I feel doesn't always work with the kind of ingrained prejudices they have, they're not necessarily gonna feel like a mutie isn't always gonna be a mutie or won't have mutie babies just because they got "fixed". Even Ekaterin, when she's assessing Miles in Komarr, wonders if Miles has "normal" brothers and sisters and thinks it's a bad sign that he doesn't. I think the only way Cordelia's clinics are stopping infanticide is if they're giving everyone some kind of very magical testing during pregnancy and then providing abortions when they want them. Which is a different moral problem that the novella doesn't touch but, hey, it also doesn't touch the moral problem of there being people who, for all intents and purposes, killed their babies and got away with it. It takes the parents's side. I may have my problems with MOM, but at least there, Miles takes the baby's side.
IDK if we're supposed to imagine there's now an orphanage for mutie kids whose parents don't want them (there's always going to be cases where the parents do want them) and that the flying clinics take the kids there, but, eh, they're probably going to have to do that before birth and give birth there, or make damn sure that no one during birth or after it before the clinic can get there decides that infanticide sounds quite nice, and also they don't mention that kind of orphanage being an option for Jadwiga and Ingi.
Because magical future medicine or not, quite frankly, you aren't "fixing" some of these kids. Jagwiga seems to have been abandoned to die by her family for having a number of fingers and toes they don't like (similar to Raina who got murdered for, iirc, having a cleft palate), but Ingi has a deeper problem; he's more like Miles in that it's his physical body and appearance as a whole that people have problems with. That's not being "fixed" by mobile clinics.
Maybe it's getting fixed by the fact that Aral, apparently, when he became Viceroy of Sergyar, decided to give people in the District free one way passage. I did stare at that line for a good long time, documented it in the canon notes, and just decided, you know, I'm not gonna touch that.
This entry was originally posted at https://lannamichaels.dreamwidth.org/1030174.html.