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May. 2nd, 2015 05:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsOh, lord. OK. So for winter holidays last year, my VERY DEAR FRIEND 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 where the fun REALLY begins.
BLACK OWL: Hello and welcome to our beautiful faux-Native American Utopia!
(BECCA: ...oh here we go.)
BLACK OWL: You can't travel here without being sterilized or wearing a really strict chastity belt.
ABASIO: a.) ughhhh b.) um, this is sort of embarrassing, but I'm temporarily impotent anyway, sooooooo c.) ......why?
BLACK OWL: Let me tell you why Artemisia is a Utopia! First of all it's because we are vaguely Native American and therefore feel responsible for taking care of Earth! Second of all it's because we've just given up on having men and women even try to live together, they're fundamentally different in almost every way, so why bother! Third, it's because we practice strict population control! Only appropriate and approved people are allowed to breed and then only for a short period of their lives! AND THAT'S WHY ARTEMISIA IS A UTOPIA.
ABASIO: Um, I have my doubts about this system ...
BLACK OWL: That's just because you're a testosterone-laden ass who only thinks about sex and procreation! :D
ABASIO: ... Touche.
BLACK OWL: Hey, want to hear a story about old Earth? There were women in the olden times, greatly revered by our foremothers, who were called "feminists --"
BECCA: Actually, let's just pause here and quote this directly from the book. Women fought a great battle and refused to be men's mommies anymore. The women declared war on the old men and on their God. The oldest women among the feminists, some who had been thrown away by their menfolk and many who had little time to live anyhow, took secret weapons and poisons and began killing the men. Their battle cries were 'Tit for Tat,' and 'Sauce for the gander.'
BLACK OWL: Right, yes, that. And that's why we have a eugenicist gender-separationist Utopia! So, you ready for you vasectomy?
HOWEVER, fortunately for Abasio, they decide that he's impotent enough to pass without an actual vasectomy, and therefore Abasio and Orphan are allowed to check out the great library of Artemisia.
COYOTE: Hey I'm a talking coyote and I'm coming too!
ABASIO AND ORPHAN: Why?
COYOTE: Why am I a talking coyote or why am I coming?
ABASIO AND ORPHAN: .... both?
COYOTE: Eh, reasons.
Abasio and Orphan also pick up an Artemisian librarian called Arakny. Don't ask me why all the Artemisian men have names like "Black Owl" and the women have names like "Arakny." Probably because of testosterone. WHO KNOWS.
However then Abasio gets kidnapped by gang members. Sorry, Abasio!
ORPHAN: ...so, uh, huge favor to ask, but can you guys go rescue Abasio? I'd do it myself, but the library told me my quest was hella important, so, you know, I could not love you, dude, so much, loved I not honor more, etc. ONWARD! Thanks, dudes, really appreciate it.
So Coyote goes off to rescue Abasio, and along the way they pick up a talking bear and then set off after Orphan again. However as soon as Orphan leaves the company of everybody else, she promptly gets kidnapped by walking nuclear bombs. Sorry, Orphan!
The walking nuclear bombs drop Orphan off with Quince Ellel and the presumably evil inbred university professors, where Orphan finally learns THE TRUTH about her heritage: she is a descendent of kindly old Seoca and his buddies Hunagor and Werra ... aka SICKNESS, HUNGER AND WAR, who have been hanging out since the apocalypse engineering the demise of all the bits of humanity that Sheri Tepper thinks are pointless! A short and incomplete list of the things these three horsemen of the apocalypse have been doing behind the scenes:
- supplying the cities with a constant stream of drugs and weapons so that all the people in them will wipe each other out, because anyone stupid enough to live in a city deserves what they get!
- selecting people they think are dangerously volatile elements and forcibly resettling them into the archetypal village, because anyone who might stir up humans into doing stupid and warlike things deserves what they get!
- making sure all written books are destroyed after a maximum of fifty years so people can't put together any reliable historical data! Because this means people can't hold grudges, see? SEE?
SEOCA: It's all for the greater good of the planet, you see! THE GREATER GOOD.
ORPHAN: Sure, seems reasonable.
BECCA: ... DOES IT, THOUGH? DOES IT?
SEOCA: Also we created you as part of a plan to trick Evil Quince Ellel into going off into space never to return! Of course in order for this plan to come to fruition, you had to be chased your whole life, and now you're going to have to nobly achieve a transcendent state and sacrifice yourself for humanity.
ORPHAN: Well, I mean ... if it's for the greater good ...
Fortunately by this point Abasio's plot-convenient impotence has at last worn off, so they at least get to have one night of great sex before Orphan shoots herself off into space and nobly sacrifices herself for the sake of the planet. Why this whole convoluted plan required an actual sentient human, and couldn't be performed with, like, a mechanical MacGuffin for Quince Ellel to chase after is EXTREMELY UNCLEAR.
It's OK though because Orphan uploaded her personality into a magic library helmet! And Abasio can still have virtual sex with her recorded personality! And now that all the cities are completely wiped out, Seoca doesn't need to project manage the arms and drug dealers anymore! IT'S FINE. EVERYTHING'S FINE.
(There's also a kind of pointless epic Battle of Five Armies in which all the other plotlines that Orphan and Abasio have interacted with over the course of the book, such as the last surviving gang members and the talking animals and the griffins etc., converge to wipe out the walking nuclear bombs, but eh, no one really cares.)
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 where the fun REALLY begins.
BLACK OWL: Hello and welcome to our beautiful faux-Native American Utopia!
(BECCA: ...oh here we go.)
BLACK OWL: You can't travel here without being sterilized or wearing a really strict chastity belt.
ABASIO: a.) ughhhh b.) um, this is sort of embarrassing, but I'm temporarily impotent anyway, sooooooo c.) ......why?
BLACK OWL: Let me tell you why Artemisia is a Utopia! First of all it's because we are vaguely Native American and therefore feel responsible for taking care of Earth! Second of all it's because we've just given up on having men and women even try to live together, they're fundamentally different in almost every way, so why bother! Third, it's because we practice strict population control! Only appropriate and approved people are allowed to breed and then only for a short period of their lives! AND THAT'S WHY ARTEMISIA IS A UTOPIA.
ABASIO: Um, I have my doubts about this system ...
BLACK OWL: That's just because you're a testosterone-laden ass who only thinks about sex and procreation! :D
ABASIO: ... Touche.
BLACK OWL: Hey, want to hear a story about old Earth? There were women in the olden times, greatly revered by our foremothers, who were called "feminists --"
BECCA: Actually, let's just pause here and quote this directly from the book. Women fought a great battle and refused to be men's mommies anymore. The women declared war on the old men and on their God. The oldest women among the feminists, some who had been thrown away by their menfolk and many who had little time to live anyhow, took secret weapons and poisons and began killing the men. Their battle cries were 'Tit for Tat,' and 'Sauce for the gander.'
BLACK OWL: Right, yes, that. And that's why we have a eugenicist gender-separationist Utopia! So, you ready for you vasectomy?
HOWEVER, fortunately for Abasio, they decide that he's impotent enough to pass without an actual vasectomy, and therefore Abasio and Orphan are allowed to check out the great library of Artemisia.
COYOTE: Hey I'm a talking coyote and I'm coming too!
ABASIO AND ORPHAN: Why?
COYOTE: Why am I a talking coyote or why am I coming?
ABASIO AND ORPHAN: .... both?
COYOTE: Eh, reasons.
Abasio and Orphan also pick up an Artemisian librarian called Arakny. Don't ask me why all the Artemisian men have names like "Black Owl" and the women have names like "Arakny." Probably because of testosterone. WHO KNOWS.
However then Abasio gets kidnapped by gang members. Sorry, Abasio!
ORPHAN: ...so, uh, huge favor to ask, but can you guys go rescue Abasio? I'd do it myself, but the library told me my quest was hella important, so, you know, I could not love you, dude, so much, loved I not honor more, etc. ONWARD! Thanks, dudes, really appreciate it.
So Coyote goes off to rescue Abasio, and along the way they pick up a talking bear and then set off after Orphan again. However as soon as Orphan leaves the company of everybody else, she promptly gets kidnapped by walking nuclear bombs. Sorry, Orphan!
The walking nuclear bombs drop Orphan off with Quince Ellel and the presumably evil inbred university professors, where Orphan finally learns THE TRUTH about her heritage: she is a descendent of kindly old Seoca and his buddies Hunagor and Werra ... aka SICKNESS, HUNGER AND WAR, who have been hanging out since the apocalypse engineering the demise of all the bits of humanity that Sheri Tepper thinks are pointless! A short and incomplete list of the things these three horsemen of the apocalypse have been doing behind the scenes:
- supplying the cities with a constant stream of drugs and weapons so that all the people in them will wipe each other out, because anyone stupid enough to live in a city deserves what they get!
- selecting people they think are dangerously volatile elements and forcibly resettling them into the archetypal village, because anyone who might stir up humans into doing stupid and warlike things deserves what they get!
- making sure all written books are destroyed after a maximum of fifty years so people can't put together any reliable historical data! Because this means people can't hold grudges, see? SEE?
SEOCA: It's all for the greater good of the planet, you see! THE GREATER GOOD.
ORPHAN: Sure, seems reasonable.
BECCA: ... DOES IT, THOUGH? DOES IT?
SEOCA: Also we created you as part of a plan to trick Evil Quince Ellel into going off into space never to return! Of course in order for this plan to come to fruition, you had to be chased your whole life, and now you're going to have to nobly achieve a transcendent state and sacrifice yourself for humanity.
ORPHAN: Well, I mean ... if it's for the greater good ...
Fortunately by this point Abasio's plot-convenient impotence has at last worn off, so they at least get to have one night of great sex before Orphan shoots herself off into space and nobly sacrifices herself for the sake of the planet. Why this whole convoluted plan required an actual sentient human, and couldn't be performed with, like, a mechanical MacGuffin for Quince Ellel to chase after is EXTREMELY UNCLEAR.
It's OK though because Orphan uploaded her personality into a magic library helmet! And Abasio can still have virtual sex with her recorded personality! And now that all the cities are completely wiped out, Seoca doesn't need to project manage the arms and drug dealers anymore! IT'S FINE. EVERYTHING'S FINE.
(There's also a kind of pointless epic Battle of Five Armies in which all the other plotlines that Orphan and Abasio have interacted with over the course of the book, such as the last surviving gang members and the talking animals and the griffins etc., converge to wipe out the walking nuclear bombs, but eh, no one really cares.)
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.
no subject
Date: 2015-05-02 11:07 pm (UTC)making sure all written books are destroyed after a maximum of fifty years so people can't put together any reliable historical data!
It is a product of my own intellectual upbringing that I consider this the biggest plot hole in this book. NOT LIKE THERE'S A FEW THOUSAND YEARS' WORTH OF TRADITION INVOLVING THE MEMORIZATION AND RECITATION OF GENEALOGIES AND EVENTS IN MULTIPLE CULTURES ON THIS PLANET OR ANYTHING, BECAUSE EVERYBODY KNOWS THE ONLY REAL HISTORY IS WRITTEN HISTORY.
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Date: 2015-05-02 11:12 pm (UTC)...of course then it's stated that the spaceship never actually left (THE MOON LANDING IS A GIANT HOAX!) but from other indicators I'm assuming all the people who were supposed to leave in the spaceship were included in the subset of people murdered by feminists. FEMINISTS KILLED ALL THE LAWYERS.
Also: yes? Right?? Seriously. Sheri Tepper also thinks that taking away place names from all contested locations means the locations won't be contested anymore. Which, ummmmm.
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Date: 2015-05-02 11:15 pm (UTC)Everything of hers that I tried after that just seemed to get progressively more batshit, and I couldn't deal with it.
I do have friends who still love the Marianne books, though.
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Date: 2015-05-02 11:20 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-05-02 11:36 pm (UTC)omg
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Date: 2015-05-02 11:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-05-03 12:06 am (UTC)The last Tepper I've read is Grass, the year it was published. I do not regret stopping there. (I actually remember contemplating Plague, then putting it back on the library shelf.)
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Date: 2015-05-03 12:14 am (UTC)That was probably a wise call.
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Date: 2015-05-03 02:45 am (UTC)I think I read about half this book in high school, skimmed everything but the Archetypal Village, and then gave up when Orphan left the Archetypal Village.
Uh... so the feminists kill all the lawyers... and does Tepper think this is a good thing or a bad thing? (Serious question!)
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Date: 2015-05-03 02:51 am (UTC)Tepper definitely thinks it's a good thing that the feminist killed all the lawyers (and judges and priests.) Our murderous feminist foremothers are heroes!
(If she hadn't been writing for decades, I would seriously consider the possibility that Sheri S. Tepper is a strawman creation of men's rights activists.)
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Date: 2015-05-03 02:52 am (UTC)(Gibbons' Decline and Fall really is THE WORST, though. Even my thirteen-year-old self thought it was sledgehammery.)
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Date: 2015-05-03 03:14 am (UTC)"Anders" is harder, but at a guess might refer to a group formerly associated with a National Data Repository, or NDR (per Wikipedia, this usage refers specifically to data associated with natural resources, often even more specifically to natural gas and/or oil reserves).
I think I'm in pretty much the same ballpark when it comes to Tepper; I quite liked the original True Game books (with some reservations relative to the last trilogy), and one or two of her other early books were Really Interesting (see esp. After Long Silence). But her SF went off the rails for me at about the point of The Gate to Women's Country and never came back. The mysteries she was writing (as, let's see, A.J. Orde and B. J. Oliphant) mostly stayed readable, but one gathers either that she lost interest in those or possibly they simply stopped selling well enough for her publishers.
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Date: 2015-05-03 03:28 am (UTC)I have no idea how to react to this.
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Date: 2015-05-03 04:09 am (UTC)You know, a few years back I tried a couple of Tepper novels -- Grass, and something else -- on strong recommendations from random people. And while I didn't quite say that I would never again read Tepper, I find that my bias against taking another Tepper recommendation is fairly high.
I have to say, there is nothing about this write-up that is causing me to rethink that position.
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Date: 2015-05-03 04:49 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-05-03 06:39 am (UTC)