![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Aug. 28th, 2009 11:17 amMiles, Mystery and Mayhem is kind of an odd collection as far as the Miles omnibi go. It's got Cetaganda packaged with Ethan of Athos, which was written ten years before it - which means that you get the interesting and complicated Cetagandan culture that Bujold came up with after rejecting the concept of Stock Cetagandan Bad Guys, followed immediately by some Stock Cetagandan Bad Guys. Which creates a little bit of cognitive dissonance.
I'd read Cetaganda before, but not Ethan of Athos or "Labyrinth", the short story that is included in the package. I liked and still mostly like what Bujold is doing in Cetaganda, though I have some issues with it, but I am not really sure how I feel about either of the other two. Ethan of Athos follows a doctor from an all-male planet on his first interaction with the wider world as he negotiates for new egg cultures to keep their society going. Bujold is trying really hard in this book to deal with a thorny issue in a thoughtful way. It's very interesting to see, and I like some of the things she does - Ethan's attraction to men does not vanish the first time he comes into contact with a woman, for example, which I was very nervous about, and he does not immediately switch all his ingrained prejudices, either - but I am sort of weirded out by the way that Ethan and everyone from his planet reads to me as a bit childlike (though Ethan does get better as the book goes on). I mean, part of that is the culture clash, and I do like how she deals with that, but his planet seems to have no twisty politicans or suspicious schemers or rule-breakers or anyone who has any kind of conception of or curiosity about the wider world AT ALL, which might fly for a small isolated village, but this is an entire planet! I don't think she's deliberately trying to say that no women ------> lack of maturity, or no women -------> A MORE INNOCENT TIME, but there's definitely a kind of 'coming of age' feel to (middle-aged) Ethan's first interactions with gendered society, and I'm not sure I like the implications there. Thoughts, if anyone has read, would be appreciated!
In less academically-overthinking news, though, I do really like how she creates a believable and well-thought-out picture of a space station community, and I love Elli Quinn and her badassery and her five zillion old friends and cousins.
"Labyrinth," on the other hand, is a well-written story about Jackson's Whole and moral dilemmas that unfortunately hits several of my DO NOT WANT buttons, involving as it does a relationship that is statutory rape on one side and not really consensual on the other and thus squicks me in two directions at once. D:
I'd read Cetaganda before, but not Ethan of Athos or "Labyrinth", the short story that is included in the package. I liked and still mostly like what Bujold is doing in Cetaganda, though I have some issues with it, but I am not really sure how I feel about either of the other two. Ethan of Athos follows a doctor from an all-male planet on his first interaction with the wider world as he negotiates for new egg cultures to keep their society going. Bujold is trying really hard in this book to deal with a thorny issue in a thoughtful way. It's very interesting to see, and I like some of the things she does - Ethan's attraction to men does not vanish the first time he comes into contact with a woman, for example, which I was very nervous about, and he does not immediately switch all his ingrained prejudices, either - but I am sort of weirded out by the way that Ethan and everyone from his planet reads to me as a bit childlike (though Ethan does get better as the book goes on). I mean, part of that is the culture clash, and I do like how she deals with that, but his planet seems to have no twisty politicans or suspicious schemers or rule-breakers or anyone who has any kind of conception of or curiosity about the wider world AT ALL, which might fly for a small isolated village, but this is an entire planet! I don't think she's deliberately trying to say that no women ------> lack of maturity, or no women -------> A MORE INNOCENT TIME, but there's definitely a kind of 'coming of age' feel to (middle-aged) Ethan's first interactions with gendered society, and I'm not sure I like the implications there. Thoughts, if anyone has read, would be appreciated!
In less academically-overthinking news, though, I do really like how she creates a believable and well-thought-out picture of a space station community, and I love Elli Quinn and her badassery and her five zillion old friends and cousins.
"Labyrinth," on the other hand, is a well-written story about Jackson's Whole and moral dilemmas that unfortunately hits several of my DO NOT WANT buttons, involving as it does a relationship that is statutory rape on one side and not really consensual on the other and thus squicks me in two directions at once. D:
