James Nicoll Reviews

Lois McMaster Bujold’s 2018 The Flowers of Vashnoi is a novella set in her Vorkosigan universe. While series protagonist Miles Vorkosigan appears briefly, the focus is on his wife Ekaterin. When Ekaterin married Miles, she married into wealth and status. However, she also married into stewardship of the Vashnoi exclusion zone.

A lifetime ago Cetaganda’s attempt to annex Barrayar ended in abject defeat for the invaders. Among the Cetagandans’ lasting legacies, the Vashnoi exclusion zone, radioactive courtesy of a nuclear strike aimed at resistance leaders. Only time could deal with the contaminants. Having no other choice available, the Barrayarans (or rather, the Vorkosigans, whose land it is) marked off the radioactive zone and discouraged settlement.

Visionary scientist Enrique Borgos offers a method to speed up decontamination.

Enrique enjoyed considerable success made his mark on Barrayar with his genetically engineered butterbugs. He proposes repurposing the bugs to cleanse the radioactive zone. The bugs can be engineered to concentrate and sequester radioactive materials within themselves. The radioactive bugs can then be collected and disposed of.

The pilot project produces an unexpected result. A week after Enrique releases two hundred modified bugs, their numbers have dwindled to ninety-five. The bugs are designed to be easily spotted, so it’s unlikely that the missing bugs are hiding. Where have the bugs gone?

The obvious possibility is that the bugs are unexpectedly palatable, and that the missing bugs were all eaten. This is an alarming possibility, particularly if the now-radioactive predators are able to escape the forbidden zone. Fortunately, this is not the correct explanation.

The bugs are not simply eye-catching. To someone ignorant of the meaning of their markings (which glow brighter the more radioactive they are), the bugs are very pretty. Someone has been collecting bugs as keepsakes.

In theory, the exclusion zone is uninhabited. As anyone familiar with Barrayar should expect, how things officially work and how they actually work are often two different things. Rather than being uninhabited, the zone hosts at least one small community of exiles.

Even when the zone was still very hot, older persons were allowed to settle there. Criminals who fled there might not be pursued. The zone is also a perfect place to discard unwanted babies. Ma Roga, for example, was a bandit who chose life in the exclusion zone. When she found abandoned children in the woods, she adopted them to raise as her own.

While it’s clear that Roga is being helped by someone outside the zone, her kids are nevertheless impoverished, ignorant, and in many cases, short-lived. This is better than what was on offer when Roga began rescuing foundlings. Barrayar had a long tradition of killing supposed mutant children.

Modern Barrayar is a very different world. Supposed mutant babies are no longer killed. Roga’s children would be better off if they could somehow be integrated into Barrayaran society. Salvaging the foundlings is exactly the sort of project that would appeal to someone like Ekaterin, an off-Barrayar product of a more civilized planet. However, convincing Roga that relocating her children is in their best interests will be difficult.

Perhaps impossible.

~oOo~

I am not even going to try to assign this a series number.

Vashnoi is the first Bujold novella that led me to wonder if Lois McMaster Bujold is familiar with the old USENET newsgroup, talk.origins. Early in the novella, there is this passage:

hungry feral chickens — which could fly,

As talk.origins veterans can attest, the subject of feral chickens and their aerodynamic (or lack thereof) properties came up frequently, courtesy of a relentless USENET kook named Ted Holden (not the actor of the same name). Is the italicization of ​‘could’ an indication that Bujold was somehow conscious of Holden? If so, my deepest sympathies.

I expect pretty that much every other reviewer will have commented by now on the parallels between Miles’ mother Cordelia and Miles’ wife Ekaterin. While Cordelia hailed from independent Beta and Ekaterin from occupied Komarr, Beta and Komarr are alike in that both are hostile planets with technologically sophisticated civilizations¹. Neither one lost contact with galactic civilization and both are in many ways far more liberal places than is Barrayar. Mind you, that last is a measure of Barrayaran backwardness.

[added later: except that whoops, Ekaterin is from Barrayar and I got confused because the happy couple met on Komarr. However, aside from being wrong, I was completely correct]

The advantage of off-world brides is that they are well situated to provide an outsider’s view of Barrayar. In its way, it’s akin to how many utopian novels feature visitors to whom the delights of local culture can be explained. Not that Barrayar is in any sense a utopia².

While it’s clear that living in the exclusion zone is a delayed death sentence, I wondered just how successful Ekaterin et al’s well-meaning efforts to rehabilitate the kids could be, given the kids’ lack of education and their health issues, as well as the entrenched prejudice against people seen as mutants [3]. Probably for the best that the story focuses on the short-term issues, because Barrayar seems like the sort of world where the happiest resolution isn’t possible. Well, maybe the surviving kids can buy passage to better planets.

That’s a lot of words on the background. That’s because the story itself, while an enjoyable entertainment, is also slight, short, and to point. More of an anecdote than a story. It was a pleasing way to fill an hour, which is what I wanted.

The Flowers of Vashnoi is available here (Barnes & Noble) and here (Kobo)

Both Bookshop US, Chapters-Indigo and Words Worth Books all offer the audiobook version only (here for Bookshop, here for Chapters-Indigo, and here for Words Worth). Seems to be on backorder at Bookshop and special order only from Words Worth. Vashnoi does not seem to be available in any form from Bookshop UK.

There was a Subterranean edition but it is out of print. The current ebook edition is from Spectrum Literary Agency but if there is a way to buy directly from them, I failed to find it.

1: Not unrelated: surviving on either world (Beta or Komarr) is much more difficult than it would be on homeworld Earth. The citizens of both worlds live in domes and rely heavily on advanced technology.

2: An unbiased observer might describe Barrayar as a backward hellhole regrettably in possession of advanced weaponry, whose militaristic rulers are keen on invading other planets when they deem it necessary, which may be the same as when possible.

This seems the appropriate spot to place the obligatory America delenta est. 

3: As I recall, Barrayar was settled by Russians, Greeks, French and Anglos of undetermined origins. I wonder how humans of non-European ethnicities fare on Barrayar?