Ethan of Athos

Good SF doesn’t just entertain you and move you. It also makes you think. It turns a searchlight back on the society where it was created and lights up the places many would rather stayed hidden.

Lois McMaster Bujold needs no introduction. A prolific author, she’s written numerous SF and fantasy novels, the most famous probably being the Vorkosigan saga, covering what is now (with Diplomatic Immunity) four generations of Vorkosigans from the planet Barrayar. Every one of her novels is unputdownable reading. Don’t open a new Bujold late at night, with work or an early start the next day, because you will struggle to close your volume to go to bed. Just one more chapter, you say to yourself.

Most of her SF writings are inclined more towards the space opera end of the genre. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Well written space opera can be every bit as gripping as any ‘conventional’ novel, especially when the depth of characterisation and world-building is in hands of a pro like Bujold. All her works, SF and fantasy, are coloured with her belief in the fundamental decency of mankind; and in the necessity for that decency; with the widest definition of what is human. Several of her SF stories has a ‘non-human’ character, a creature created by gene splicing. She makes it very clear that these are people too. All her writing in part achieves its compulsion because it explores the essential duality of mankind, the balance between good and evil, the hard moral decisions we must make sometimes. Somebody once wrote that really compelling stories, from Homer onwards, involve hard decisions about hard issues which will break your heart whichever you choose.

Ethan of Athos is closer to the speculative fiction end of the SF spectrum. Suppose there was a planet consisting only of men. How would they maintain their population? How would it work? The idea came to her after she wrote Shards of Honor, the first of the Vorkosigan novels, in which she introduces the idea of the uterine replicator, a device for keeping a fetus alive outside the womb, a sort of mechanical womb. This has all sorts of implications, one of them being that you could (in theory) have a society consisting entirely of men. At a cocktail party she discussed this idea with two men, wondering whether men could take on the role of bringing up children, and what such a society would be like. All-male societies exist, obviously – prison, the armed forces formerly, and monasteries. She decided to try out the idea with a sort of planet-wide monastery, hence the name Athos, far from the busy populated parts of the galaxy, of men who think that women are the source of all evil, Brothers in the service of God the Father. Incidentally, the father among the men she was talking to at the party thought men could be just as good mothers as women. The single professional man on the other hand disdained the whole idea, but especially the concept of men taking on women’s roles.

Dr Ethan Urquhart is in charge of the Reproduction Center of the town he lives in. His job is to see the embryos through to birth, when they (boys all) are handed over to their proud fathers. The problem is that the wombs brought to Athos two hundred years before are starting to fail. A shipment of new wombs has been ordered, using up most of the planet’s foreign exchange (obviously they try not to have contact with women, so trade is avoided), but when Ethan inspects the shipment he finds it’s full of all sorts of material, mostly dead, and the only wombs are bovine. So with the last remaining foreign exchange reserves, he is deputised by the population council to go out with the next ship (just two a year) to Kline Station, a giant space station in orbit around Athos’ nearest neighbouring star, to buy more wombs.

When he arrives at Kline station he is utterly lost, and is ‘helped’ by a charming stranger, the very epitome of the creatures scripture has warned him against, a woman, whom he at first mistakes for a youth. Her name is Elli Quinn, and she appears in other Bujold tales. As a result of blaster damage, her face has been completely reconstructed and she is stunningly beautiful, though Ethan is quite immune to her charms. Or so it seems, at first.

Someone else is interested in the cargo of wombs sent to Athos – the Cetagandans, who are a nasty lot of militarist bullies, and whose ruling class practises widespread genetic manipulation. The reason for their interest isn’t revealed until the climax of the story and to avoid spoilers I won’t give it here. Cetagandan security pursue Ethan. So does Elli Quinn. And so does a mysterious third party, a man ‘called’ Terrence Cee, who turns out to be someone unique, and who has his own very special reasons for wanting to get to Athos.

Mayhem ensues, and the events and the people grip you and you find yourself turning page after page to find out what happens and why.

Like all really good authors, the story is neatly and very cleverly capped at the end with some moving scenes: an oddly romantic and utterly unexpected contretemps between Ethan and Elli; the obvious, but again strangely unromantic romance between Terrence and Ethan; and the return home and a final paean to women (in particular one scientist) who despite Athos being a male planet are everywhere, in the genes of the men.

Funny, moving, exciting, thought-provoking and humane, it has the status of a classic, which means lost of people have heard about it but no one has read it. Some critiques of it maintain it is misogynistic. This is odd and silly. On the contrary – the novel is full of wry feminism. For example, Athos limits the number of children a man may have, because of the cost of raising them. Elli Quinn remarks that it only costs on Athos because there are no women there. Elsewhere, raising children is women’s work, and is therefore costless. In this, as in her depictions of homophobia outside Athos, Bujold is a creature of her time – the novel is one of her first, written in the early eighties. What would she write now, when most women work for money and the cost of having children is higher than it was then; while gays have achieved rights no one thought possible twenty years ago? Homophobia is a corollary of fundamentalist Abrahamic religions, and is almost everywhere in slow retreat. I would love to have a discussion with her about some of the assumptions she didn’t question, and about where society will head as further technological change, including uterine replicators, alters our thinking about marriage, sexuality and the gender divide.

When this book was first suggested to me I was mildly repelled by the idea of an all-male planet. It just seemed silly. But Bujold makes it all completely real and realistic. Ironically, I came onto Ethan of Athos after reading Shards of Honor which is a thoroughly engaging and highly recommended heterosexual romance with a bisexual man (Aral Vorkosigan) as one of its protagonists, and I wonder what made her stop writing about gay-shaded men in subsequent episodes of the Vorkosigan saga. I suppose there was no money in it, yet she never lost her interest in society’s outcasts – for example Miles Vorkosigan, Aral’s son, is disabled.

If you’re looking for something warmly romantic, which is intriguing, funny, moving and exciting, then Ethan of Athos is for you. It will leave you happy, like Tanya Huff’s Fire’s Stone, Mary Renault’s Fire From Heaven, or Poppy Z Brite’s Drawing Blood. Unfortunately, the original edition is no longer in print, but you can still read it if you can’t find a second hand volume, by buying Miles, Mystery and Mayhem, an omnibus volume of two novels (including Ethan of Athos) and a novella. I suppose the highest praise I can offer is that I wish I had written it, and that I could write that engagingly and well.