Certainly not all Vors are counts. They couldn’t be. If the Vors average more than two children (common both among aristocracy and warrior cultures, throughout history), then you’ll often get a count with two or more sons, and only one of them will inherit the title. The first son would be Lord Vor-whatever, and the second and subsequent would be Lord Firstname, but then those sons will have sons, and so on, and the son of a Lord Firstname probably isn’t any sort of Lord, but they’d still be Vor. It could be that the member of each Vor family with the most senior lineage is Count Vorwhatever, a count for every family, but with a bunch more non-counts than counts.
My question is: if there’s a fellow named “Joe Vorjetson” can I conclude that somewhere on the planet there’s a Count Vorjetson ruling Vorjetson’s District, who is Joe’s relative (possibly quite a distant one). Or are there Vor-blank families not associated with a Count and District? Lois does sometimes speak of High Vor, which could mean “Vor whose families have a district/Count” or “Vor closely related to their family’s Count or to the Emperor”
I think that’s most likely.
I do recall the term “High Vor” being used a few times, by context to refer to Counts, Count’s heirs and so on. As opposed to “otherwise random family that happens to have inherited the prefix”.
“Science Fiction” is a reflection of the times, and I think the Vorkosigan books are at least partly the result of a time when women were particularly resistant to the idea of being “breeders”, used by men to create children. Bujold took Huxley’s advanced technology “hatchery”, but turned it into an idea where women were in control of their bodies, and outsourced the means of production, but not the control.
I don’t think it’s an idea that would naturally ocour to as many people today.
I think it’s an idea that would occur to practically any women who wants kids.
And gay men.
And straight men, too. It’s technology that would make things easier for everyone.
I think it’s an idea that would be especially likely to occur to a woman who has had at least one kid. The actual discomfort of pregnancy and pain of childbirth really strips away any romantic illusions about natural pregnancy, I think. Ekaterin in the books had just that experience, after all.
I suspect it’s not a coincidence that Bujold herself has two children.
Yeah, after i posted, that thought occurred to me. I have two kids. The idea of outsourcing the actual pregnancy is incredibly appealing.
If there’s a change in the times, it’s mostly in that, at that time, equality between the sexes seemed more attainable. The desire hasn’t changed, only the hope.
The increasing Barrayanization of Earth is certainly a problem.
Maybe it’s just me, but I haven’t recently talked to any women who thought that “people think women should be breeders, like livestock”.
Do you recall the Count Vormuir subplot in A Civil Campaign?
I’ll also note that, despite uterine replicators enabling true equality between the sexes, it also led to multiple societies where the sexes are far more unequal than they are in the 21st century first world (Cetaganda and Athos, at the least, though in very different ways).
Hah - yeah; having developed life threatening complications the second time around, if we’d wanted a third kid we’d have wanted a replicator for sure.
I do love the bit in Diplomatic Immunity where Ekaterin speculates that it would really be bad for the MOTHER to miss her childen’s birth…
So, somehow I’d managed to skip over The Mountains of Mourning and The Vor Game before. I’m now in the process of remedying that. Just finished Mountains. I appreciate how, even though Miles has a miracle investigative tool available to him, he doesn’t treat it as such, and puts such value on his people’s dignity.
I also think, though, that his sentence on the murderer was maybe a little too harsh… Not on the murderer, but on the victim’s mother. It’s been well established in the series, including earlier in that same story, that the Barrayaran custom of burnt offerings for the dead helps provide comfort, reconciliation, and closure for the survivors, and I don’t think prohibiting it for the murderer will do any good in the long run.
I think that if Harra decides to burn something anyway nobody will stop her, the law in Barrayar being enforced more in spirit than in letter.
She might stop herself, though. She strikes me as traditional enough to follow a command from her lord, even if that stands in the way of her own healing process.
May be, or may be if she can’t convince herself to break the lord’s command is because she doesn’t care enough, she was furious when she discovered the truth.
IIRC, he meets with the mother again in Memory (not quite sure where you are right now with the backtracking) and avoiding major spoilers, I can assure you that Miles assessment of Harra Csurik’s strength of will and character is correct.
Of course, anyone who shortly after childbirth has the grit to cross the territory to approach her Count to demand justice is made of stern stuff!