Ethan of Athos by Lois Bujold McMaster

Hello, Stranger.

Let's talk about Lois McMaster Bujold's Ethan of Athos.

The Short of It

Plot: Ethan is sent to figure out what went awry with his (entirely male) planet's delivery of ovarian tissue, needed for the next generation.

Page Count: 237

Award: Part of Vorkosigan Saga

Worth a read: Vorkosigan completionist? Yes. Otherwise, not so much.
Primary Driver: (Plot, World, or Character)
Bechdel Test: Pass
Technobabble: Moderate to high.
Review: One of the more isolated Vorkosigan books. Lots of new characters, but not all are engaging. Protagonist has a very obvious arc and is a bit flat. Nice to have some new locations, but Athos itself feels half-baked - and is not particularly important in the series as a whole. Pacing is a bit rough: lots of exposition dumps, sporadic action, and then stalls. Enjoyable enough, but does not feel like it progresses the Vorkosigan Saga enough to make sense.

The Medium of It

Spoiler Free!

We once again find an odd quirk of the internal order vs. publication order. Ethan of Athos was published in 1986 - the same year as Shards of Honor and The Warrior's Apprentice. In a sense, then, Ethan is the third main character that McMaster wrote for the Vorkosigan universe. And it would seem that she also felt that he was a bit of a dud: Shards gave us Cordelia, who then has her story expanded in Barrayar; The Warrior's Apprentice starts the story of Miles, and all of his following books; and Ethan of Athos sets up Ethan... who does not get another book. 

All this means a few things. McMaster's writing improves noticeably over time. Dropping back to a book written much earlier is jarring. Conversely, Ethan's rather isolated adventure can be comfortably read on its own. This is one of the few books that could be read without having any other Vorkosigan knowledge. 

In lots of different ways it becomes clear that this is one of the earlier works. Athos is a fun idea: a whole planet where everyone is male. Society is structured around this, of course, and it impacts almost everything. The base plot - that there are issues with the artificial wombs used for raising a new generation - plays directly on our understanding of society, life cycle, and reproduction. Yet the planet feels bland - a lot of the organization of it are either insufficiently novel or poorly explained. It is neither radical enough nor same-y enough to quite land. And once again, the whole planet feels completely homogenous, without internal variation. 

Ethan of Athos is at its heart a fish-out-of-water story. Ethan is constantly surprised by things, overwhelmed, baffled, nonplussed, stunned, and wowed. What he is not is particularly competent. Barrayar has Cordelia in an equally airborne fish situation, but her ability to interact and impose her own order make her (and the book) totally compelling. Ethan is simply... not that. Which is an issue because the main draw for continuing to read this is that we're rooting for him.

As is the case with all of these books, I enjoyed this one. That said, it feels like a bit of a step back when read in the author-suggested order - and I don't know that it's totally worth it unless you're aiming to read the whole series. 

The Long of It

Spoilers Ahead!

So. That was a woman -- two women, in fact. He sought his own reaction; to his immense relief, he seemed to be profoundly unaffected. Indifference, even mild revulsion. The Sink of Sin did not appear to be draining his soul to perdition on sight, always presuming he had a soul. He switched off the screen with no more emotion than frustrated curiosity. As a test of his resolution, he would not indulge it further today. He put the data disk carefully away with the others...

Women. Uterine replicators with legs, as it were. He was not sure if they were supposed to be inciters to sin, or sin was inherent in them, like juice in an orange, or sin was caught from them like a virus. He should have paid more attention during his boyhood religious instruction, not that the subject had ever been anything but mysteriously talked around. And yet, when he'd read one Journal edited of names as a scientific test, he'd found the articles indistinguishable as to the sex of the author.

It's pretty fun to have an all-male planet exist because women are too full of sin. As in, a planet with only same-sex couples. Because of religious extremism. I mean, that's just delightful. Plus it's a good play on the old SF trope of planets with only women - a common theme in some extremely dated movies and books.

Plot summary of Cat-Women of the Moon, according to IMDB: Astronauts travel to the moon where they discover it is inhabited by attractive young women in black tights. 

Now that right there is what we in the biz call "a compelling plot."

Ethan of Athos is a smart twist on that formula. The single-gender planet is often the illogical extreme end of men writing women - just a wet dream turned into media. One of the unambiguous points of Ethan of Athos is to show just that: "You thought this was sexy with women, now try it out with guys!" This is one of the strongest aspects of the whole book. 

The issue is that we do not go much further than this. Usually the structure of these stories is that someone from a "normal" world ends up on a single-gender one, and has all of the wet fish/dry fish learning that one would expect. By taking Ethan out of his element and bringing him to somewhere with what we would view as normal genders and sexualities does not hit as hard. Of course we know that women do not destroy a society. All this does is lead to Ethan's confused realizations that... normal stuff is normal. 

Now if you'll excuse me, Stranger, I need to go watch Cat-Women of the Moon.

And don't forget to read a book!