I’m attempting the first draft of a fanfic novella/novel for NaNoWriMo this year. It’s more Ursula Le Guin fic; it’s set on the world of O, the original setting for the sedoretu concept. There’s quite a few sedoretu AUs, but not as far as I can tell any fic set on O.
I don’t want to spend too much time here when I could be making word count there, but in my last big writing project (a dissertation) I did find inconsequential blogging a little bit helpful.
So, a few things.
First, I’m a bit shy of 5000 words right now, which means of course that I need to up my daily word count. As of today, it needs to be 1800.
Second, I need to work out how a technologically advanced civilisation that apparently still uses upwards of 90% of its population on agriculture and completely lacks cities works, at least to some degree. There’s mention of Centers rather than cities, I’m not clear on what the distinction is. I think they may be universities without townships attached to them.
Third, why does Le Guin bother to specify in Another Story that brother-sister marriages are taboo? They’re actually a special case of the moiety taboo: all siblings and half-siblings would share a moiety (absent an moiety-incest violation, even half-siblings that share a father would be born to different women who share a moiety and therefore also share that moiety). I thought for a time she meant that a brother and sister cannot be on the same side of a sedoretu, but in that very same story, that’s what goes on to happen: Hideo and Koneko, full siblings, are the Evening spouses in their sedoretu. So that half-sentence bugs me every time. The moiety taboo is a society-wide sibling-marriage taboo to the point where you don’t need to separately specify things.
Fourth, it seems unlikely to me that there is really no word in the ki’O language(s) for one’s not-spouse, as in, the other person in the sedoretu with your own moiety. This person would be one of the most significant people in your life. They are married to the same two people as you. The potential for both teamwork and jealousy is beyond saying.
Le Guin doesn’t give a word, and the Mountain Ways introduction says “The forbidden relationships are between the Morning woman and the Morning man, and between the Evening woman and the Evening man, and they aren’t called anything, except sacrilege.” Funny to not acknowledge the intense and fraught social relationship there, especially since that story has the only example of it shown from the point of view character. (Hideo and Koneko in Another Story, per above, are siblings already. Hadri and Sasni in Unchosen Love are never seen to speak.)
And there would be two of these highly charged non-romantic relationships in every sedoretu. It almost makes me wish my story was about an established one. Perhaps some other time.
Leaf Litter 
OMG yay! I am eagerly looking forward to this story. If you need a beta, I am your woman. : )
Fourth, it seems unlikely to me that there is really no word in the ki’O language(s) for one’s not-spouse, as in, the other person in the sedoretu with your own moiety. This person would be one of the most significant people in your life. They are married to the same two people as you. The potential for both teamwork and jealousy is beyond saying.
Le Guin doesn’t give a word, and the Mountain Ways introduction says “The forbidden relationships are between the Morning woman and the Morning man, and between the Evening woman and the Evening man, and they aren’t called anything, except sacrilege.”
I don’t quite agree with you here. I read her as saying that there’s no word for the forbidden sexual relationships between the Morning man and woman and the Evening man and woman, because they’re just sacrilege. That doesn’t mean there’s no word for the non-sexual relationship that they have, though Le Guin doesn’t give one. The natural thing would be to call it the Morning and Evening relationships, I guess? I agree that they would be interesting relationships to explore. : )
I do agree about the weirdness of the special taboo on brother-sister relationships. I would probably just pretend that bit wasn’t there. La la la.
I wrote a due South sedoretu AU a while ago, and it was a lot of fun. In that story, there was a bit about what trashy romance novels would look like on sedoretu-AU Earth, and I guess that’s the part I’d most like to go back to in that story. *g*
ETA: This also sounds completely fascinating to explore: Second, I need to work out how a technologically advanced civilisation that apparently still uses upwards of 90% of its population on agriculture and completely lacks cities works, at least to some degree. There’s mention of Centers rather than cities, I’m not clear on what the distinction is. I think they may be universities without townships attached to them.
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I probably should come up with something. Even in this pre-sedoretu fic, there needs to be a word for it, because in one case it’s going to involve an Evening person using his Evening not-(potential)-spouse as a sounding board regarding his Morning love interest(s). Which would again be something that would be pretty common. I think one would be pretty tempted to use members of one’s own moiety as agony aunts and/or wingmen (“wingpeople” doesn’t have the same sense!), generally.
The heterosexual marriages are already called the Morning marriage and Evening marriage in canon, so I probably won’t call the non-sexual relationships anything that is too easily confused with those terms. It’s bad enough that in that same section about sibling marriage taboos she uses the word “cousin” in two slightly different senses (our sense and the ki’O sense, which is something like “half sibling through one parent and first cousins through the other”) in, I think, consecutive paragraphs!
I saw your sedoretu fic. I am not very familiar with due South (I’ve seen some of the first season, I think), but intended to check it out once the first draft of this is done. However, I am going to skim for that bit right now š
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The heterosexual marriages are already called the Morning marriage and Evening marriage in canon
Oh right, I forgot about that. *facepalm* Yeah, I agree the non-sexual relationships need a good name.
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Found it!
I bet!
Thinking of other romance tropes, hrm. I wonder how Regency would go? Here’s a comedy romance: two notorious rakes and famous rivals, of the Morning and Evening, make a bet with each other that they’re the one who can hold out on making a suitable match first. Each of them, naturally, falls in love with a delightful lady within days, and each spends the bulk of the novel trying to woo his beloved and scramble to put a sedoretu together while concealing her existence from his nosy friend. In the climax, it emerges that the two women have been lovers for years, and have been filling each other in on the whole thing. Not to mention waiting more and more impatiently the two men to FINALLY realise their undying love and lust for each other and complete the foursome.
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Oh, awesome! I’d read that. : )
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A romance trope one of my characters just invoked herself: the characters who seem to be members of the same moiety due to secret parentage/adoption or being undercover or something like that, but fall in love, much to the horror of them both (or at least whichever isn’t party to the secret identity), and presumably scandalising their lover of the other gender too. Of course, in the final act, all is revealed and their love isn’t incestuous after all.
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Ha, yeah, that one seems easy to transplant.
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Re: the advanced technology. It’s been a while since I read these stories, but do you think they rely on the other Hainish civilizations for trade and technological know-how?
I do like the idea of a old civilization which is stable and has honed its (still advanced) technology down to something that works and is sustainable. Like, our society is locked into (unsustainable) technologies that are not actually the best possible because of historical contingencies and the way our economic system works. For example, it’s a bad idea to drive refrigerators with high-grade energy such as electricity. You could do it with just heat, and when refrigerators were first invented, there were such models, but the electricity companies wanted profit and backed the electric models.
I wonder though about spaceships–wouldn’t such a thing require a huge technological underpinning?
Okay, I’d love to geek out further, but now I need to work…
ETA: Gethen is also such a society, when you think about it, although perhaps on a lower technological level. Think about Chabe stoves, though! I’d certainly love to have one. : )
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The two Birthday of the World stories don’t show advanced tech at all, although one of them does suggest an academic-ish engineering or agricultural science culture in which it’s fairly normal for young adults to move around the planet on research assignments. But just based on those two, O could almost be pre-high-tech with a high tolerance for nomads.
But Another Story is about a physicist, and so goes into a fair bit of detail and a lot can be inferred. This is what I get from it.
1. O’s educational system is of the highest standard. Hideo is able to become a research student on Ve (as best I can tell, Hain has moved all research off-world onto Ve), deal with a Cetian lab leader and seriously contemplate going to the Cetian system (which seems to be the seat of mathematics and physics) for his career and there’s no mention of needing any kind of remedial coursework, nor that Hideo received a unique education on O. He also has engineering skills that are up to the standards required in his lab, which suggests he handled Ve-level tech as a student on O.
In addition, Hideo is able to maintain a churten lab on O which again suggests local labour and tech is of a near-Ve standard.
2. O has the technology and will to use large amounts of energy for some tasks, because they use the ansible and Hideo explains that it requires a lot of energy, and his standards seem to be those of Ve at that time, not O.
3. (Not just from that story.) Pretty much every other civilisation relies on Hain (or perhaps Ve) for their space technology. It’s not that the tech is so very difficult (Terra developed it independently, and I think Aka did too, and within a couple of generations) but that the Hainish are unmatched in developing liveable spacecraft. (This is noted both by Shevek and by Ren, the narrator of Solitude, neither of whom are Hainish and neither of whom are otherwise thrilled to be in contact with them.) It’s striking and suitable that in Le Guin, the difficulty of developing a home in space far exceeds the difficulty of moving it around.
4. Another Story makes mention of routine use of replacement organs and of some kind of heart surgery that can be performed in a local setting, also used routinely on people in late middle age on O. So their medical tech and practice is also advanced.
I think both O and Gethen have consciously either selectively chosen technologies or halted technological progress at some point. But I’m still missing the leap to how O ends up with so much physical agricultural labour being performed. I mean, it’s not that I can’t think of explanations, but I haven’t convinced myself of one yet. I don’t tend to think of having a really high percentage of the population engaged in farming as an especially sustainable practice, I guess.
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I don’t tend to think of having a really high percentage of the population engaged in farming as an especially sustainable practice, I guess.
I think it’s sustainable in the sense that such a civilization could last a long time and also be compatible with the rest of the ecosystem. But I don’t think it would be compatible with having lots of advanced technology and education, because that would need a fair amount of labor and education, too. Unless maybe they’ve streamlined the technology to the point where much less labor is needed than with us?
I guess in some sense they (as a society) choose to do physical labor in the fields? Because otherwise they could prioritize the energy that goes into (for example) the ansible to instead go into lessening the agricultural labor? I find it hard to imagine that there wouldn’t be conflicts over that, at least.
Now I want to reread these stories. : )
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I guess my take thinking about Another Story is that the outlet for people who’d like to have a research career or, presumably, live in a society that’s not so heavily centered on agriculture and isn’t a non-stop marriage market is to leave the planet.
Per Another Story (and, more implied, Mountain Ways), to get right out of the sedoretu treadmill and to not constantly play second-fiddle to them, you need to either become a wandering teacher or enter a specialised profession in a Centre. And, also explicit in Another Story is that people who are really set on couple-marriages often now go entirely off-world.
So, probably conflict on O over their conservative norms has been reduced in the couple of millenia they’ve been in contact with the Hainish this time around, because rebels are expected to, and often want to, leave entirely. It helps that O is near-unique in that like Hideo you can come back after as few as ten or twelve years and only be eight years younger than people who were your age-peers when you left. On O alone in this universe, you don’t have to say “Goodbye, I’m dead” when you take a ship to Hain.
Some of this is already coming out in my story in various ways. Right now one of my point-of-view characters is someone who came back. I probably don’t have time to work this all out for the Nano draft, but it’s useful to think about exploring it in the proper first draft.
How they sustain the tech in this case is still a bit of a mystery. There’s probably a lot of supply of components from Hain as you suggested, and I’d guess most of the very senior academics and specialists have actually come back, too. Ki’O who make it out as far as Terra or the Cetian system etc etc would be able to pass things back via ansible: everyone they knew would be dead, but O is so stable (by canon) that they can rely on speaking with a society essentially identical to the one they left, which would be a big advantage.
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So, probably conflict on O over their conservative norms has been reduced in the couple of millenia they’ve been in contact with the Hainish this time around, because rebels are expected to, and often want to, leave entirely. It helps that O is near-unique in that like Hideo you can come back after as few as ten or twelve years and only be eight years younger than people who were your age-peers when you left. On O alone in this universe, you don’t have to say “Goodbye, I’m dead” when you take a ship to Hain.
That makes a lot of sense, yes.
and isn’t a non-stop marriage market
Ahaha. I would probably hate that in reality, actually, no matter how much it makes for intriguing reading material.
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