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A Soldier Like My Mother

The military has traditionally been a male preserve, and military SF, coming from the traditions of military fiction, has tended the same way. There’s no reason an army of the future need be a male army, and there’s no reason honour and duty and loyalty are exclusively male virtues, but that’s the way things have tended to be.

Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosigan Saga is more than military science fiction, but it started off firmly within MilSF. It’s also solidly feminist and written from a female perspective, while being about all the things military SF is about. Bujold constantly holds these things in tension — masculine, military mad Barrayar against feminine social controlled Beta; the glory of war against the reality of messy death; duty and honor against expedience and compromise. It’s partly these tensions that make the series so compelling. You can have the fun and excitement of galactic mercenary adventures, with a matchless depth of thought and character development.

“You have the competence one would look for in a mother of warriors,” Aral says to Cordelia in Shards of Honor, the first book of the series. She’s military herself, she’s an astrocartographer and the commander of a Betan exploration ship, she is his prisoner and and he means it as a compliment. She replies: “Save me from that! To pour yourself into sons for eighteen or twenty years and then have the government take them away and waste them cleaning up after some failure of politics — no thanks.” This is central to what Bujold’s doing with showing the human cost of war. She’s just as good at the rest of it — the honour and the glory — but she never forgets or lets you forget that the lights blinking on the screens represent ships full of human lives, and every one of them with a mother.

via A Soldier Like My Mother. Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosigan Saga | Tor.com.