oyceter. Tepper, Sheri S.

A plague threatens humanity throughout the universe, save on the planet Grass. Sanctity, the church that rules Earth, sends the Yrarier family to Grass in hopes that their affinity for horses and horseriding will somehow allow them to get closer with the aristocracy on Grass (the bons) to hopefully find a cure for the plague. However, the humans on Grass are limited to a small area due to the bons' unwillingness to kill too much of the ubiquitous grass that covers the planet. Unsurprisingly, there's a surprise regarding the planet and the bons' strange predilection for hunting, albeit not quite with horses, hounds, and foxes.

Meanwhile, Marjorie Westriding Yrarier's marriage is falling apart and the trip to Grass stresses it further.

I thought this was all right, albeit with frustrating characters, until the big reveal. Marjorie is almost never wrong, her husband is a two-dimensional ass, her daughter is just like her husband, and the son who resembles her is just like her. The brothers and elders at the Grassian Church are more interesting at least.

Also, much of this felt like Speaker for the Dead to me, only less interesting.

Spoilers for Grass and Speaker

I suspect I would have been more into the slug-things to hounds to Hippae to foxen reveal had I not read Speaker before, with its central transformation from pequenino to tree. However, I haven't read a lot of SF, so this could very well be a trope that I don't know, so I was willing to give that a pass. And then, the big reveal is that... the Hippae are malevolent and evil! Just like they are hinted to be from the very beginning of the book! Not only that, there is no reason for them to be malevolent and evil except for the fact that it was a random mutation down the line. Unimpressed!

Also, when I can predict that the Hippae are spreading the plague in the form of the dead bats about a hundred pages before the characters have figured it out, something is wrong. I normally am terrible at figuring out things ahead of the big reveal, so I am fairly sure this was pretty obvious.

I did like the message about the foxen's fence-sitting being damaging and the metaphor of humans as viruses, but mostly I was incredibly annoyed that there wasn't a big reveal behind why the peeper-hound-Hippae-foxen transformation was the way it was (no explanatory planetary trauma sparked by a DNA-unraveling virus), and no larger reveal to why the Hunt save that the foxen would eat peepers.

So... did I miss something really huge? I do not understand why this is supposed to be groundbreaking ecological SF? (My copy has a quote saying "a subtle, complex meditation on ecological disaster.")