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.

Comments

[philomytha]

Ooh, yes, that would have been a really good take on it all. I love the stories Bujold's told in the past about fitting babies and parenting into the world and shaping the world around them, and I would have enjoyed another book that explored something new about that. But this book wasn't it.

And yes, I loved the parenting bits of Komarr too. More mums having to find childcare before heading out to save the world, please.

[metaphortunate]

Heh. That's not sf-nal, that's what rich men do with their second and third wives.

[lotesse]

But for the woman, tho. That would be new.

Also, in the rich-men-have-many-wives historical model, those men aren't likely to be intimately involved in child-rearing. It's more like they oversee multiple cycles of women, their children, and their domestic workers. It's the active-parent part of the whole thing I'm interested in.