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Sep. 14th, 2011 10:56 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsA few months ago I went to stay chez ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
varadia, and we got into a long discussion about Sheri S. Tepper, as you do. When I left, she pressed a Tepper book into my hands and announced, "It's the one with CEPHALOPOD MERBABIES."
So I read The Waters Rising!
The weird thing about The Waters Rising is not actually the cephalopod merbabies. . . . All right, it is the cephalopod merbabies, because those arrive at the end and are incredibly weird. But the weirdest thing is how for half a book it actually seems . . . totally postapocalyptic-world-turned-fantasy-world normal? There is a helpful hero with a sarcastic talking horse, and a ten-year-old ingenue of mysterious parentage who gets sent with some faithful and mysterious companions on an equally mysterious quest to reach AU Post-Apocalyptic China, and some villains engaged in political plotting to take over the kingdom by marriage, and it all feels . . . weirdly not-bizarre! Like, anybody could have written this book!
And then you get about three-quarters of the way through and you realize, NO, IT WAS BIZARRE ALL ALONG AND YOU JUST DIDN'T NOTICE.
Things that are sort of set up early but don't play out until after the middle of the book:
1. Xulai, our ten-year-old ingenue, turns out to have been SECRETLY POST-PUBESCENT THE WHOLE TIME. She goes to bed one morning and wakes up suddenly with breasts and a bigger vocabulary and everyone is just like "oh, well, we thought you would be safer if we magicked you into being ten for the past decade!"
2. Then she lays an egg and keeps doing so at monthly intervals for the rest of the book. WHICH DOESN'T SEEM TO BOTHER HER AT ALL.
3. Meanwhile, the sort-of-hero Abasio is like "oh, thank goodness, I thought I was creepy for being totally attracted to you in the sexy way when you were ten! But now I know MY BODY knew you were not really ten!"
4. And then of course they have the sex even though she was just ten, like, yesterday.
5. Then he introduces her to the VR hologram of his tragically dead girlfriend in a memory-repository helmet. The dead girlfriend is like, "hey, it's cool, we're all polyamorous in dead VR-land!"
6. While Xulai and Abasio are off having their idyllic romance, Xulai's mysterious lady mentor Precious Wind runs around pretty much taking care of the entire bad-guy portion of the plot by cheerfully poisoning various people, sending assassins off to take care of some others, and feeding the rest to the wolves.
7. She also befriends a pack of wolves and subsequently insists on taking the whole pack with her EVERYWHERE THEY GO, including ACROSS THE PACIFIC OCEAN. AND BACK AGAIN. "They'll come in useful later on!" she says. Spoiler: THEY NEVER COME IN USEFUL. (The owner of the boat that eventually takes them across the ocean is not pleased with this and complains that they'll poop all over his deck. Precious Wind says, "THEY'LL POOP WHERE I TELL THEM TO POOP." Precious Wind is totally awesome, for the record, but her pack of wolves is still hilariously pointless.)
8. Meanwhile, the villainness poisons her mom, steals her mom's boyfriend, and pines for her dad, whom she was having sexy thoughts about at the age of SIX. Thanks, Sheri Tepper.
9. At the end, everyone reaches Post-Apocalyptic China, The Most Enlightened Civilization On Earth, and reveals that the entire plot and quest and political maneuvering has been about making everybody swallow the eggs Xulai has been laying so that they can join the civilization of sentient cephalopods under the ocean when the melting polar ice caps drown the earth, as they are shortly about to do.
10. Everyone angsts for a while about the fact that they have to be were-cephalopods and their babies are going to be sentient squids. Surprisingly, nobody angsts about the fact that Xulai and Abasio's True Love was biologically engineered because they are genetically compatible, which is what would piss ME off.
11. But that's okay! ACTUALLY their babies will be MERMAIDS. Humanity is saved!
. . . thanks . . . Sheri S. Tepper . . .?
I was thinking most of the way through the book that Xulai was inevitably going to achieve a transcendent state to save humanity while Abasio looked sadly on, but then once we got to the dead girlfriend in the VR helmet I remembered that Abasio had already been in a Sheri Tepper book WHERE THAT HAPPENED. (Hilariously, he then spends the rest of the book worrying that it's going to happen twice. HE KNOWS WHAT KIND OF NOVEL HE'S IN.)
So the question is, am I free of Tepper now, or do I have to reread the prequel before Abasio started hitting on ten-year-olds? ONLY TIME AND MY OWN WILLPOWER WILL TELL.
varadia, and we got into a long discussion about Sheri S. Tepper, as you do. When I left, she pressed a Tepper book into my hands and announced, "It's the one with CEPHALOPOD MERBABIES."So I read The Waters Rising!
The weird thing about The Waters Rising is not actually the cephalopod merbabies. . . . All right, it is the cephalopod merbabies, because those arrive at the end and are incredibly weird. But the weirdest thing is how for half a book it actually seems . . . totally postapocalyptic-world-turned-fantasy-world normal? There is a helpful hero with a sarcastic talking horse, and a ten-year-old ingenue of mysterious parentage who gets sent with some faithful and mysterious companions on an equally mysterious quest to reach AU Post-Apocalyptic China, and some villains engaged in political plotting to take over the kingdom by marriage, and it all feels . . . weirdly not-bizarre! Like, anybody could have written this book!
And then you get about three-quarters of the way through and you realize, NO, IT WAS BIZARRE ALL ALONG AND YOU JUST DIDN'T NOTICE.
Things that are sort of set up early but don't play out until after the middle of the book:
1. Xulai, our ten-year-old ingenue, turns out to have been SECRETLY POST-PUBESCENT THE WHOLE TIME. She goes to bed one morning and wakes up suddenly with breasts and a bigger vocabulary and everyone is just like "oh, well, we thought you would be safer if we magicked you into being ten for the past decade!"
2. Then she lays an egg and keeps doing so at monthly intervals for the rest of the book. WHICH DOESN'T SEEM TO BOTHER HER AT ALL.
3. Meanwhile, the sort-of-hero Abasio is like "oh, thank goodness, I thought I was creepy for being totally attracted to you in the sexy way when you were ten! But now I know MY BODY knew you were not really ten!"
4. And then of course they have the sex even though she was just ten, like, yesterday.
5. Then he introduces her to the VR hologram of his tragically dead girlfriend in a memory-repository helmet. The dead girlfriend is like, "hey, it's cool, we're all polyamorous in dead VR-land!"
6. While Xulai and Abasio are off having their idyllic romance, Xulai's mysterious lady mentor Precious Wind runs around pretty much taking care of the entire bad-guy portion of the plot by cheerfully poisoning various people, sending assassins off to take care of some others, and feeding the rest to the wolves.
7. She also befriends a pack of wolves and subsequently insists on taking the whole pack with her EVERYWHERE THEY GO, including ACROSS THE PACIFIC OCEAN. AND BACK AGAIN. "They'll come in useful later on!" she says. Spoiler: THEY NEVER COME IN USEFUL. (The owner of the boat that eventually takes them across the ocean is not pleased with this and complains that they'll poop all over his deck. Precious Wind says, "THEY'LL POOP WHERE I TELL THEM TO POOP." Precious Wind is totally awesome, for the record, but her pack of wolves is still hilariously pointless.)
8. Meanwhile, the villainness poisons her mom, steals her mom's boyfriend, and pines for her dad, whom she was having sexy thoughts about at the age of SIX. Thanks, Sheri Tepper.
9. At the end, everyone reaches Post-Apocalyptic China, The Most Enlightened Civilization On Earth, and reveals that the entire plot and quest and political maneuvering has been about making everybody swallow the eggs Xulai has been laying so that they can join the civilization of sentient cephalopods under the ocean when the melting polar ice caps drown the earth, as they are shortly about to do.
10. Everyone angsts for a while about the fact that they have to be were-cephalopods and their babies are going to be sentient squids. Surprisingly, nobody angsts about the fact that Xulai and Abasio's True Love was biologically engineered because they are genetically compatible, which is what would piss ME off.
11. But that's okay! ACTUALLY their babies will be MERMAIDS. Humanity is saved!
. . . thanks . . . Sheri S. Tepper . . .?
I was thinking most of the way through the book that Xulai was inevitably going to achieve a transcendent state to save humanity while Abasio looked sadly on, but then once we got to the dead girlfriend in the VR helmet I remembered that Abasio had already been in a Sheri Tepper book WHERE THAT HAPPENED. (Hilariously, he then spends the rest of the book worrying that it's going to happen twice. HE KNOWS WHAT KIND OF NOVEL HE'S IN.)
So the question is, am I free of Tepper now, or do I have to reread the prequel before Abasio started hitting on ten-year-olds? ONLY TIME AND MY OWN WILLPOWER WILL TELL.
no subject
Date: 2011-09-14 08:57 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-09-14 10:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-09-15 12:30 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-09-15 12:33 am (UTC)Welll, technically this is a sequel to another book, A Plague of Angels, so that might be a good place to start! Or there's always the opportunity to dive right into pure ESSENCE OF TEPPER with Sideshow.
no subject
Date: 2011-09-15 12:38 am (UTC)YOU TEMPT ME.
no subject
Date: 2011-09-15 04:09 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-09-16 02:11 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-09-16 02:12 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-05-10 10:20 pm (UTC)It really saddens me that there is a book in this world about were-cephalopods and this is it.
no subject
Date: 2015-05-11 01:35 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-05-11 04:56 pm (UTC)I can't think of another one! (Outside of cuttle-shifter erotica, obviously.) And I don't think I have the time to write it.