Joshua Kronengold

August’s entry into the project of reading the entire Vorkosigan Saga was Ethan of Athos, which I read partly on the plane and partly in the hotel at a conference center approximately the size of Kline Station.

Ethan of Athos is about a doctor named Ethan Urquhart who comes from the planet Athos, which is basically what would happen if MGTOW guys were ever really serious about GTOW and also had access to terraforming and uterine replicators.

After a couple of generations, Athosian misogyny has morphed from like “normal” misogyny to a sort of superstitious belief in aliens with mind control powers, and the men of Athos have all turned real gay. Never having seen any women in real life, they imagine all sorts of weird things about them, but they do not consider them objects of attraction nor as sources of unpaid domestic or reproductive labor. The reproductive doctors on Athos, such as Ethan, know that the ovarian cultures they use for growing babies in the replicators came from women at some point, but they are expected not to think about it too hard.

Athos’ little all-male domestic utopia has a problem, however, which is that after 200 years, several of its ovarian cultures are failing. They order a bunch more from House Bharaputra on Jackson’s Whole, but the box that shows up is full of garbage–dead cancerous whole ovaries from hysterectomies, that sort of thing. Athos’ ruling committee of cranky old men then send Ethan, who is both knowledgeable about what they need and generally considered to be a scientific and level-headed character, to go out into the big bad scary outside universe and try to source some new genetic material.

Ethan’s journey to Kline Station is, for a sheltered–practically cloistered–guy from a completely fringe society with deeply bigoted religious and cultural beliefs, deeply harrowing. First, he keeps encountering women. (He at first finds this deeply unsettling but eventually gets used to it as the women in question turn out to be more or less normal people.) Second, nobody is receptive to his earnest pitches to join the all-male utopia of Athos, because, in a turn of events very surprising to him but probably surprising to nobody else, all the Kline Station misogynists are also homophobes, with no interest in going to the Planet of Fags where there are no women to subjugate. And third, Ethan almost immediately finds himself mixed up in some arcane plot involving a brutal Cetagandan counterintelligence agent, the Dendarii Mercenaries’ Ellie Quinn, a genetically engineered telepath named Terrence, House Bharaputra again, and several different departments of Kline Station bureaucracy. The plot seems to revolve around the shipment of ovarian cultures that Athos was supposed to get, as compared to the one they actually got, and it takes a lot of trickery and shenanigans before anyone even begins to figure out what might have actually happened. These shenanigans almost get Ethan killed several times for reasons that have nothing to do with him being a rank misogynist and are an effective way of building sympathy for a character with an essentially decent moral core that has been warped by an absolutely garbage fucking belief system (you can tell the moral core is decent because the garbage belief system doesn’t survive contact with the outside world). Ethan manages to not die and, despite having learned that many things about the way he was raised are false and stupid, does end up going home where he is not shot at nearly as often.

This was an interesting inversion of the “planet of women” sci-fi trope and provided an interesting deconstruction of oppositional sexism and the role of unpaid “women’s work” in “normal” patriarchal societies. It was also a very fun space opera mystery, with amusing fish-out-of-water dynamics and lots of cloak-and-dagger (or cloak-and-stunner) stuff getting tangled up with other cloak-and-dagger stuff. It was also fun to spend time with Elli Quinn absent the overpowering presence of Miles, although occasionally his presence can still be felt in absentia because he is this series’ most special crazy intel boy. Overall I enjoyed it very much, although after this and Falling Free I am excited to hopefully get back to the crew of main characters next month.