Tepper, Sheri S. - Grass

[oyceter]

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.")

Comments

[oyceter]

I know! I really wanted to Ike Marjorie a lot more than I actually did because i like having moms and housewives as the stars of sf books, especially when it looks at the limitations of their roles, but it was so heavy handed and poorly handled that i was really disappointed.

[al_zorra]

All that said, yes, Tepper has an agenda, as much as Ayn Rand does, but whereas Rand is all about the superiority of people, Tepper is about the effects of overpopulation and religious / political power upon women, children and the environment. Also, she began her writing career after menopause, I think, which isn't how most of us manage, after working, as a women, in the grinders of all kinds of sausage factories, as well as for Planned Parenthood. She saw up front, close and very personal the consequences of what she continues to warn us about. How much more sfnal can you get than "If this continues to happen ....""?
Her agenda seems deeply unpopular, but so was Orwell's and Huxley's yet they are still highly admired. Again, its as if we judge women by different standards than male writers, even we who are women.

That said (again) I gave up mostly reading Tepper too because it was so depressing, and the state of the earth, of women and everything is what I'm so aware of it didn't seeem that I needed to torture myself even more. Sometimes, for the state of one's ability to actually function, you have to limit the intake of bad news.

That said (third time said! :) I very much liked Three Margarets. It was as though she'd gotten back to form. And a bit of light-heartedness.

Love, C.