(2007 note: I am grateful to Suford Lewis of NESFA Press for asking me to write this introduction in 2003 and for her stalwart support while I did so, to Lillian Stewart Carl for giving me the opportunity to revisit and revise it for this new volume, and to Lois McMaster Bujold for providing occasion for both.)
Those of us who are loud, joyous, unabashed lovers and partisans of science fiction—that is to say, nearly everybody reading these words—have learned to greet the remark that a book or a writer "transcends the genre" with narrowed eyes and brusque demands to be told exactly what the speaker means by that. Our response is remarkably similar to the one which used to baffle and sometimes hurt the well-meaning souls who once roamed the earth telling especially bright or competent women that they thought "just like men." We've learned to see the dismissal beneath some "compliments"—to ask, what's wrong with being a science fiction writer? What's wrong with being a woman?
The analogy I am drawing—between gender and genre—is not accidental, and it's not casual. The words are almost the same for a reason—genre is the French word for kind or type, and our word gender comes from the same root: a genre book is a certain kind of book. A genre writer is a certain kind of writer. A gendered person is a particular type of person—and there's nothing wrong with that. Genre is important, though not all-important—it's the bones under the flesh, the underlying structure.
Ethan of Athos could not be what it is, could not ask the questions it asks in the way it asks them, and be anything but a science-fiction novel, a supremely good one: herein are fascinating new technologies, space adventure, and mystery. Here are richly textured cultures at once alien and recognizable, endlessly surprising and at the same time inevitably and always products of their particular intersection of basic axioms and advanced technology. Ethan of Athos has suspense and trouble, people shooting at each other, and people in love with each other. It's got spaceships and space stations. It's got genetically engineered superhumans, heroes, villains, nice normal folks just trying to get through the day. It's got a wonderfully twisty plot, as Bujold books always do. It's even got a Mad Scientist (and a few who are just really annoyed).
(This is as good a time as any for a few public service announcements. First of all, if you're wondering whether you came in halfway through, you should know that Ethan of Athos is, as are all of the fourteen books of the Vorkosigan Saga, intentionally freestanding—in theory, you can read just one—though in practice, there are no known cases of this occurring. Secondly, this foreword therefore contains no series synopsis or anything like that. If you want to, you can skip the rest of it and dive straight into the book, maybe drop by here again after if you care to. I promised to get up here and juggle, but you're under no obligation to hang around and watch. Lastly, you may wish to know that there is a mailing list for fans of Lois' work, which you can find out about by going to www.dendarii.com. This may come in handy once you've finished reading every single bit of Bujold published to date and need some understanding people to keep you good company until the next book comes out.)
Where was I? Right. If genre is the bones of a story, the fundamental understanding of gender which a story reveals might be described as a look at the skin that covers the flesh of our common humanity. I would be grievously underrating the potential capacities of men to say that Ethan of Athos could only have been written by a woman, but it is fair to say that it could only have been written by someone who has a deep knowledge of and respect for that half of the human experience—the skills and the collective knowledge—which we have until recently regarded as the almost-exclusive province of women.
The question of gender in science fiction has had a long but curiously tame history, remarkably similar to the treatment of gender in that other would-be-time-traveler's delight, historical fiction: everything else about a novel's setting may be rich and strange and suited to the time in which the novel is set, but the gender roles portrayed generally fall safely within at least the broad limits of what is acceptable to the time in which the author is living—at least by the end of the book. Exceptions exist, but they are rare enough to be memorable: Herland. The Left Hand of Darkness. The Gate to Women's Country. The Darkover books. And Ethan of Athos.
With the exception of The Left Hand of Darkness, which concerns itself primarily with beings who are both men and women, and the partial exception of The Gate to Women's Country, however, even in writing which seriously discusses gender roles in science fiction we're generally talking about women's roles, and for good reason—women's roles have been a social preoccupation and source of anxiety in the West for as long as there have been novels. Still, there it is again, that assumption that women are the troublesome—and troubled—gender, the gender that needs to "transcend their type" if we're ever going to get anywhere.
These days most science fiction—in lockstep with most of Western society—at least takes it for granted that women can transcend "their type," that women's options should and will be expanded, but that expansion is to come in very specific directions, toward greater access to "men's stuff." Problematic female characters, now, are not the ones who try to be more like men, but the ones who do not.
And the men? Well, there they are, doing pretty much what fictitious men have usually done (and wanted to do), and actual men have generally done and at least pretended to enjoy, conquering new worlds, getting into fights, working at the office, running the country, or the planet, seducing women, all that. Sometimes we might get a world where war and competition have been abolished, or farmed out somehow, but those are dystopic tales, and if the question is even raised, the effect on the male role is not to change it, but to transfer it—the warriors, whoever they are, become the new real men, the ones to be reckoned with, while the "original" men become something else, something less, at least until they see the error of their ways.
In these new takes on gender roles, it's not just the potential for male change which is largely ignored; all that messy "womanstuff" is generally left behind, too—some way is found to get the meals cooked and the children raised, the clothes made, washed and ironed, the relationships maintained, and so forth—some machine will be built or some inferior race or underclass will be there, economically created or conquered, or maybe cloned. Possibly the underclass will be made up of those problematic women who just can't, or won't, learn to play a man's game by the men's rules. It's a simple enough bit of handwaving, and after all, it's really not very important, right?
(2007: I think the generalizations of the foregoing three paragraphs were far too simplistic even in 2003, when I wrote this; mea culpa. As of four years later, they seem downright quaint; gender bending, gender blending, and reimagining masculinity is where it's at, culturally and SFnally—and we're all richer for it.)
But of course it's not quite that simple, and it is that important. While there is no shortage of women, freed by technological and cultural change from confinement to "women's work," doing the things that we traditionally think of as masculinely adventurous and powerful in Bujold's fiction, she never neglects the other side of the coin. When women are no longer biologically bound to childbearing, and to the home-based service role that this bio-logic seems invariably to create, men are no longer biologically bound to "not childbearing," nor to the "men's work" that we consider appropriate for those appointed to the supporting role in human evolution.
When reproduction and parenting and love are no longer inexorably linked to either gender or sex, the possible consequences for gender relations, sexuality, love, and partnership are almost limitless. In Ethan of Athos, Lois sets out to explore two basic, but much-neglected, aspects of the gender-role question as it relates to SF—what happens to men's roles, and to women's work, when technology sets them free of biological sex?
(Remembering the title of a certain high-school class in which, as a suburban substitute for a more solemn Initiation Into Womanhood, we were taught the "mysteries of womanhood"—mostly menstruation, meatloaf, mending, IUDs, and ironing—I want to say that this book belongs to an entirely new genre: Domestic Science Fiction—but that would be reductionist as well as, frankly, kind of lame. I do want to say, however, that it is partly as a result of reading Bujold that I have reconsidered my disdain both for the title of the course, which at the time I considered pretentious, and for the curriculum, which I considered deeply inferior to Shop, where one was given access to power tools.)
One of the central and most fascinating pieces of technology in Lois's writing is the uterine replicator. This seemingly innocuous piece of equipment, which had its beginnings as a bit of convenient handwaving in Shards of Honor, has gone on to become one of the greatest agents of social change in the Nexus (the series of star systems which provide the context for Ethan of Athos, as well as for the Vorkosigan adventures) on each planet according to its cultural assumptions. In Ethan of Athos we see Lois's early consideration of the impact that the uterine replicator will have on gender roles, still sketchy in spots, but full of hints as to the directions she will later take—in particular, we get a sense of the genre (and gender) conventions she proposes to play the best sort of merry hell with.
The most obvious form that this consideration takes is the social structure of Athos, a planet with no women and a great many children. There is also the evolving understanding and partnership between Elli Quinn and Ethan Urquhart—the woman who wants to be a mercenary fleet commander, and the man who wants to go home, settle down, and raise a bunch of kids. There is the very proper Athosian Ethan's progress from terror at the mere thought of a woman to understanding and acceptance of the human women—the mothers, in a sense—whose ovarian cultures helped build his world, to real friendship with Elli. There is Elli's sideways look at the paths she has rejected, and her own coming to terms with them. Biology is not destiny in a Bujold story; destiny is destiny, and when it comes for you it looks at what's in your heart, not what's in your pants.
So we have the bones of genre, and the skin of gender, but what of the flesh, our common humanity? (And it is, always, a question of humanity—Lois has commented a number of times that she deliberately chose not to have aliens in the Nexus; the aliens, she says, are us.)
We are thinking creatures and tool-using mammals, we are usually (2007: not always—mea culpa again) either men or women, but beyond the first and underneath the second, we are members of the human race. (Another word for race, from the same root as genre and gender, is genus; to speak of ourselves as "members of the human race" is to make yet another series of statements—about the kind or type of being we think we are, and about who we do and do not think counts as a member.)
Because this is science fiction, Bujold considers the question of humanity through the mechanism of technological change; because this is a book about gender and sex, the particular focus is reproductive technology. And because this is a book about how we create, become, remain, designate, and treat members of the human race, Lois's use of the advantages and perils of biotech's capacity to give us almost total control over the creation, prevention, and form of human life never degenerates into the easy and cheap answers so common in science fiction and in our own society.
Bujold never makes technology the villain, destroying our humanity, nor does she cast it as the hero—which is why, at this reprinting, Ethan of Athos is one of that rarest of science fiction stories: a story which instead of becoming dated as time has passed and the breakthroughs it discusses have come nearer to or reached fruition in the real world—in 1986, the year Ethan was published, ovum donation was experimental; now (2007) it is commonplace—has become more relevant, more timely, because it relies for its power on eternal, increasingly urgent human questions instead of on rapidly changing technological answers.
The question is a basic theme of science fiction, given a quarter turn—when she asks, in Ethan of Athos and elsewhere, how far we can go in redesigning ourselves before we cease to be human, the question is not only, or even primarily, for the products of replicator gestation and precision genetic design. The question is for those already alive: the progenitors, the choosers, the parents.
As we follow the adventures of Terrence Cee we see what his creators and their technology have made of him—and what they have made of themselves in the process. As we watch Ethan chase frantically around the galaxy to retrieve his—and all of Athos's—future offspring, or as Elli Quinn considers her options, we see how their choices about parenting change them forever. And just to make sure we haven't mislaid the point under all the futuristic machinery, Ecotech Helda and her absent son are there to remind us that our worst nightmares about biotech are probably no worse than the things we've been doing to our children for centuries.
Lois has commented that her early works have mostly, often unbeknownst to her, turned out to at least touch on "the price of parenthood" on the way to wherever else they were going—most overtly in Ethan and Barrayar, most painfully in "Aftermaths," which chilling little tale you may find at the end of Shards of Honor. I'd add to that that she has one of the most clear-eyed views of the sins of the fathers—and mothers—I've ever encountered. (2007: In the original version of this foreword that read "to be about the price of parenthood," a misquote and a terrible oversimplification that I am pleased to have the chance to correct.)
Whatever tools we may have at our disposal when we set out to create and raise children, the issue most central to our success or failure remains the same—are we using our things to make people, or are we trying to make people into things? The crucial difference is in us, not in our offspring: what is important about the notion of a "superhuman" versus the notion of a "subhuman" is not the difference but the similarity—to label a person as either is to label them not-quite-human, and that makes it terrifyingly easy for us to think of them as a thing.
This is not a question only for parents; not everyone, after all, experiences or desires parenthood, but we all have a stake in humanity nonetheless, and some degree of influence thereof, and so in Bujold's fiction; whenever we have power over others, we have a responsibility to them as well, and not even our most private decisions about who and what we are going to be exist in a vacuum. And so what is most intriguing, and in the end most important, about Terrence Cee is not what his progenitors designed and intended him to be—a genetically advanced, fanatically loyal super-spy—but the person he himself decides to become.
Being human, it turns out, is simple, though not easy: you become a human when you choose to be human—and keep choosing it, over and over. And so Terrence Cee both fulfills and overturns another science-fiction trope: he is the genetically engineered ultimate weapon who becomes something far beyond his creators' wildest dreams.
As do we all, sooner or later, for better or worse—for better and worse, generally. Because under and above it all, animating the bones, skin, and flesh of any creation—a novel or a human being or anything—is one more thing, the most important thing: the unique spark of life that properly belongs to any creation—and, of course, there is a phrase from the same root as genre, gender, and genus for that as well—sui generis, one of a kind, the only of its type. The aspect of a story that no analysis can capture; the part that turns A Great Book into A Life-Changing Story. The piece of a human being that neither nature nor nurture can account for. The inexplicable, unlooked-for capacity within us that makes us the species that commits atrocities and makes miracles happen; that can inspire a woman named Lois to create an Ethan, provincial, frightened, out of his depth—and able to respond to someone as completely outside of his experience as Elli Quinn with respect, and to all the promise and peril of a Terrence Cee by seeing him, and naming him, as exactly what he is: "You are my brother, of course."
Of course.
—
Marna Nightingale
May 2003 (September 2007)