put the pussy in a sarcophagus

[lotesse]

... I am so frustrated by the fact that the Vorkosiverse keeps giving more babies in number, when what I want is more babies in *content* - don't add any more of the dratted things, there are already plenty, just give me a real sense of what the "next generation" are like as parents! Or - what Cordelia would be like as a mother after her successes and failures with Miles, Gregor, Mark, Ivan, the Koudelka girls. That seems a legitimately sf-nal concept: when you can reproduce artificially and live for ages, you get the chance to have an entire second parenting career with the benefit of experience and hindsight, a scaled-up version of the thing that already happens in families wrt birth order and parenting. As an eldest child myself, I'd be *very* interested in a story about Miles and Cordelia having to come to terms with the realities of their earlier family psychology as a result of a new, much-younger sib. But "six daughters and three sons" is almost folkloric in its psychological distance. These are not nine people that we're going to get to know, the way that Nikki Vorsoisson was.

Gosh, I loved the parenting bits in Komarr.