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May. 2nd, 2015 05:54 pmOh, lord. OK. So for winter holidays last year, my VERY DEAR FRIEND ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
varadia bought me a copy of Fish Tails, Sheri Tepper's recently published magnum opus, which is a COMBINED SEQUEL to the True Game books, The Waters Rising -- both of which I'd read within the last five years -- and A Plague of Angels, which I hadn't read since I was a teenager.
This is the post about A Plague of Angels. Fish Tails is coming. I had to prepare myself.
A Plague of Angels takes place in a post-apocalyptic Midwest and begins with several initially-separate plotlines centering around:
1. ABASIO, a FARMBOY who goes off to the BIG CITY and joins a gang. In the BIG CITY literally every single person is in a gang, takes lots of drugs, and has a fatal immunodeficiency disease because this book came out in 1994 and AIDS, children, AIDS! We know Abasio is special because he's the only person that we meet in the city who is smart enough not to take drugs or have lots of unprotected sex. Well done, Abasio! (As far as Sheri S. Tepper is concerned, everyone else deserves what they get. More on this later.)
2. ORPHAN, a MYSTERIOUS YOUNG GIRL who lives in an ARCHETYPAL VILLAGE with a TALKING GUARDIAN ANGEL BIRD along with, for ex., a Hero, an Oracle, a Poet and his Spinster Sister. The archetypal village is at least 75% of why I liked this book as a kid. "It's just like Into the Woods!" thought I. (No. No it is not.) Anyway, Orphan is plucky, rescues a baby griffin, gets Hero to teach her to fight, and gets into trouble with her semi-guardian Oracle when she's not bedraggled and disheveled enough because That Is How Orphans Are Supposed To Be, and it's all relatively charming.
3. QUINCE ELLEL, an EVIL WITCH who commands an army of walking nuclear bombs and is hunting for Orphan because she thinks Orphan has the mystical power to pilot a spaceship, for reasons. Evil Quince Ellel lives with a bunch of other people who still have some technology and records from pre-apocalypse: the Ellels, the Anders, the Mitties and the Berklis. This frustrated me throughout the whole book, because clearly the Mitties ("they're so technological!") were supposed to be the last remnants of MIT, and the Berklis ("they just can't make up their minds about anything!") were referencing Berkeley, but who are the Ellels and the Anders? WHAT AM I MISSING? I'm assuming they're references to universities of some kind because Sheri S. Tepper does really love her evil inbred university professors. All we know about the Anders is that they're fancy and revere craftsmen, and all we know about the Ellels is that they are evil. Internet, I implore you, PLEASE HELP ME DECIPHER SHERI TEPPER'S BRAIN.
4. Oh, also, meanwhile, in another sort of half-a-plot, a sweet old man named Seoca with mysterious powers is attempting to thwart Quince Ellel in vague and unspecified ways.
Anyway, the plots finally start to converge about halfway through the book when evil walking nuclear bombs come hunting for Orphan, she gets kicked out of her village for being too old to be an orphan ("Orphans can't be nineteen and pretty," Oracle tells her sadly, to which I say, Oracle, have you ever read a Gothic novel?) and decides to go seek out the ~mystery~ of her ~past~ in the famous library of Utopian Artemisia. Abasio comes along with her because he and Oracle fell in love at first sight despite the fact that she thinks he's a testosterone-laden ass --
(-- well, technically it's not at first sight because he met her briefly when she was two and he was fourteen and running away from home, but I DIGRESS --)
-- and because he's on the run from his gang because of a subplot about being drugged and tricked into sleeping with the gang leader's girlfriend, which is almost entirely irrelevant except that it leaves him impotent for most of the rest of the book, and also might accidentally lead to the entire city being wiped out, which is really all for the GREATER GOOD so nobody really cares. ( Their journey is when the fun REALLY starts. )
So that's Plague of Angels. And now I feel ... at least slightly more ready to tackle Fish Tails? I'M AS BRACED AS A HUMAN CAN BE BRACED.
varadia bought me a copy of Fish Tails, Sheri Tepper's recently published magnum opus, which is a COMBINED SEQUEL to the True Game books, The Waters Rising -- both of which I'd read within the last five years -- and A Plague of Angels, which I hadn't read since I was a teenager.This is the post about A Plague of Angels. Fish Tails is coming. I had to prepare myself.
A Plague of Angels takes place in a post-apocalyptic Midwest and begins with several initially-separate plotlines centering around:
1. ABASIO, a FARMBOY who goes off to the BIG CITY and joins a gang. In the BIG CITY literally every single person is in a gang, takes lots of drugs, and has a fatal immunodeficiency disease because this book came out in 1994 and AIDS, children, AIDS! We know Abasio is special because he's the only person that we meet in the city who is smart enough not to take drugs or have lots of unprotected sex. Well done, Abasio! (As far as Sheri S. Tepper is concerned, everyone else deserves what they get. More on this later.)
2. ORPHAN, a MYSTERIOUS YOUNG GIRL who lives in an ARCHETYPAL VILLAGE with a TALKING GUARDIAN ANGEL BIRD along with, for ex., a Hero, an Oracle, a Poet and his Spinster Sister. The archetypal village is at least 75% of why I liked this book as a kid. "It's just like Into the Woods!" thought I. (No. No it is not.) Anyway, Orphan is plucky, rescues a baby griffin, gets Hero to teach her to fight, and gets into trouble with her semi-guardian Oracle when she's not bedraggled and disheveled enough because That Is How Orphans Are Supposed To Be, and it's all relatively charming.
3. QUINCE ELLEL, an EVIL WITCH who commands an army of walking nuclear bombs and is hunting for Orphan because she thinks Orphan has the mystical power to pilot a spaceship, for reasons. Evil Quince Ellel lives with a bunch of other people who still have some technology and records from pre-apocalypse: the Ellels, the Anders, the Mitties and the Berklis. This frustrated me throughout the whole book, because clearly the Mitties ("they're so technological!") were supposed to be the last remnants of MIT, and the Berklis ("they just can't make up their minds about anything!") were referencing Berkeley, but who are the Ellels and the Anders? WHAT AM I MISSING? I'm assuming they're references to universities of some kind because Sheri S. Tepper does really love her evil inbred university professors. All we know about the Anders is that they're fancy and revere craftsmen, and all we know about the Ellels is that they are evil. Internet, I implore you, PLEASE HELP ME DECIPHER SHERI TEPPER'S BRAIN.
4. Oh, also, meanwhile, in another sort of half-a-plot, a sweet old man named Seoca with mysterious powers is attempting to thwart Quince Ellel in vague and unspecified ways.
Anyway, the plots finally start to converge about halfway through the book when evil walking nuclear bombs come hunting for Orphan, she gets kicked out of her village for being too old to be an orphan ("Orphans can't be nineteen and pretty," Oracle tells her sadly, to which I say, Oracle, have you ever read a Gothic novel?) and decides to go seek out the ~mystery~ of her ~past~ in the famous library of Utopian Artemisia. Abasio comes along with her because he and Oracle fell in love at first sight despite the fact that she thinks he's a testosterone-laden ass --
(-- well, technically it's not at first sight because he met her briefly when she was two and he was fourteen and running away from home, but I DIGRESS --)
-- and because he's on the run from his gang because of a subplot about being drugged and tricked into sleeping with the gang leader's girlfriend, which is almost entirely irrelevant except that it leaves him impotent for most of the rest of the book, and also might accidentally lead to the entire city being wiped out, which is really all for the GREATER GOOD so nobody really cares. ( Their journey is when the fun REALLY starts. )
So that's Plague of Angels. And now I feel ... at least slightly more ready to tackle Fish Tails? I'M AS BRACED AS A HUMAN CAN BE BRACED.
