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

[emceeaich]

Oh yeah, I remember reading that, and thinking "you know, if you're going to criticize Mormons, just write a contemporary novel to do it."

[tevere]

Oh, this is the book I read about fifteen years ago that I still have images in my head from! I always wondered what the hell it was. I have no memory whatsoever of a plague, which also shows what my brain prioritises: all I remember is vaguely sadomasochistic scenes where people are riding evil not-quite-horses. I don't think I'll read it again, but I'm glad to finally know who it was by.

[sanguinity]

I read it on someone's recommendation that it was ecological/biological SF. I hated it. And hated it like I hated Speaker for the Dead: how the hell do you manage to have an ecology with only two to four species? And even most of the apparent species aren't even different species!?

Bah.

And it wasn't even fun, either, just blah blah Marjorie angst blah.

...let me take that back. I kinda liked the evil Hippae. I liked them because they were evil. Which made them the best thing in the whole book.

[rachelmanija]

I was mostly interested in the fucked-up logistics of the hunt and how all the humans were being played by the Hippae and then constructed this whole society to justify it... which was only about 20% of the total book. Maybe there wasn't that much ecological sf at the time the book was written.

I tend to be annoyed by Tepper's politics (even when I agree with her!) but I read a lot of her fantasy years ago and generally enjoyed it. So Grass might have gotten extra critical attention more because it was a departure for her than because it was groundbreaking in general.

[estara]

You might like Julie Czerneda's standalone In the Company of Others, where there's a plague in connection with terraforming that empties whole planets (and the hero is the son of the terraformer genius mother whose terraforming seems to have started the plague for the first time) - and at the end they find out that it's not really a plague. It's not really transformation of the danger but proper realisation of what the danger is.

[al_zorra]

In 1993, the year Grass was published, the only really big environmental novel to have come out in the field was Dune, and that was in 1965. Though Dune did have major roles for female characters, the front and center was the young male protag -- and in many, many ways this novel is anti-female, or at least a screed about why the male is superior to the female -- the Kwisatz Hadarach can go - see where the bene gesserit cannot blahblahblah.

This means 17 years ago, if I can subtract correctly. A huge amount has happened since then; Clinton hadn't even been impeached. It also wasn't verboten to speak of overpopulation; the first female secretary of state, Madeleine Allbright (1997) hadn't yet served; the internetz not yet happening except for a few, mostly in government or the computer industry; we hadn't mapped the human genome -- dna wasn't a household word then even and the staple of crime television reveals. The book looked very different then. I didn't see the bat virii thing a hundred pp. in as you did, for instance. I loved the book because I couldn't see what was coming or the answers to the mysteries, unlike almost all the genre fiction that I was already starting to get tired of for just those reasons. Books don't stay the same over time, any more than the people who write them

Love, c

[glass_icarus]

Ahahahaha! I read Grass back in high school, along with a bunch of other Tepper books. I'm pretty sure that one left the LEAST impression on me. :P

[jinian.livejournal.com]

I hearted it, but I was in fact a teenager at the time! Haven't read it in ages; maybe this is one of the Teppers I will now avoid like the plague (which is most of them, despite my username).

[sunnyskywalker]

I liked the part where the bons were all, "Oh, it's terribly sad that sometimes our kids die on these hunts, but what can you do, it's essential!" Because as silly as it sounded in the book, there actually are plenty of real things like that - you could probably even make an argument for the ubiquity of cars as a parallel. ("How sad that so many thousands of people keep dying while driving to get milk or go to school! But what can you do, society would have serious readjustment problems if we did't let everyone start driving at 16...") But the rest wasn't as cool. Well, except the concept of a protagonist who's a middle-aged mom and still capable of doing interesting stuff, but I didn't care for Marjorie specifically.

In a way, I think The Gate to Women's Country actually works best of all the Tepper I've read (admittedly only four or five books), because in that one, the "good" side admits that yeah, they're kind of awful in their own way, and probably damned. (Plus the main character realizes that her bitchy sister is horribly constrained and frustrated by society, not just randomly bitchy.) So there's room to argue that their whole system isn't a tough but necessary choice but will not either improve anything at all, and that they've just traded one dystopia for another. I liked that (even though I got the feeling Tepper didn't intend it to go quite that far and that she expected us to buy the biological essentialism arguments).

[seraphcelene]

I haven't read Grass yet, but I did read the third book in the loose trilogy, Sideshow. I actually quite liked Sideshow although it was a little long and weary in places. I keep trying to crack Grass and just don't ever seem to make it very far.