(no subject)
May. 10th, 2015 11:21 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsOK, guys, as you know, I've read ... a lot of Sheri Tepper. TOO MUCH Sheri Tepper. Too much by far.
I'm pretty sure Fish Tails is the worst? Maybe the actual worst. Tepper's books range wildly on the 'somewhat bizarre' to 'outright horrific' scale, but they're usually at least entertaining. Fish Tails, however, is not only ideologically horrific, but incredibly poorly plotted and badly written to boot. Triple crown!varadia and I have spent the last week texting each other in increasing levels of horror at just how bad the book actually is.
The actual plot of Fish Tails is ... what is the plot even of Fish Tails? Abasio, the protagonist of Plague of Angels, and Xulai, the protagonist of The Waters Rising, are now on a MISSION to travel the world with their adorable mermaid babies and convince humanity that joining Team Sentient Cephalopod is their only hope for survival!
Abasio and Xulai spend the first hundred pages or so hanging out in a small village getting nice gender-specific baby jackets made for their mermaid babies. The conversation in which they attempt to convince the tailor that mermaid babies need jackets happens twice, once in the prologue and then again fifty pages later, so apparently it's VERY IMPORTANT. While they're in the village, they pick up an eleven-year-old kid called Willum who decides to come with them for ADVENTURES.
XULAI: Willum seems like he might be a smart kid, but he talks all the time and never listens!
ABASIO: That's probably because he comes from a small town and therefore has never heard anything say anything important in his life! I mean, I never heard anyone in this town say anything important.
XULAI: Oh, yes, that is true. People in small towns don't really talk, they just cluck like chickens. Poor stupid chickens. :(
ABASIO: Anyway if we spend the rest of the book yelling at him to shut up, maybe there's a slim chance he'll grow into a person who gets the Tepper Stamp of Approval!
While in Willum's small town they also hear a lot of talk about a weird cult that believes that nobody who is not 100% perfect in body should be allowed to live.
SHERI S. TEPPER: And that is ablist and THAT'S TERRIBLE.
BECCA: But -- Sheri Tepper -- what about all the mountain of evil disabled people that you think should have been killed at birth?
SHERI S. TEPPER: That's different.
Anyway from the amount of times people explain about this cult to each other you would be forgiven for assuming they will go on to be plot-relevant, but they never are.
Shortly thereafter Abasio and Xulai also pick up a super-wise and special girl called Needly who comes from The Worst Town Ever, where all the men systematically abuse all the women and nobody ever does anything worthwhile ever. Needly's backstory is worth going into at greater length. Needly's grandmother Lillis, who is also super-wise and special, grew up somewhere enlightened but spent most of her adult life in The Worst Town Ever, hooking up with a series of hot men who came her way, got her pregnant, and then meandered on. (She's in the Worst Town Ever because Hot Guy #1 brought here there, for reasons.) Each time Lillis would have a Genetically Wonderful kid, who would then be taken away by mysterious persons and disappear. Lillis is pretty sure this was all for the Greater Good and Genetic Improvement of Humanity.
(SHERI S. TEPPER: There are two kinds of people in this world, people who are stupid and religious and don't believe in climate change and do illogical things because of stupid beliefs, and more evolved people who are smart and adaptable and genetically deserve to inherit the earth!
BECCA: So ... Lillis, who has spent the past thirty years of her life allowing every single iota of her reproductive and parental agency to be taken away based on a series of unproven beliefs about the Greater Good --
SHERI S. TEPPER: Definitely one of the second, better kind of people. Aren't we glad she's letting her life be steered and having so many great kids for the future of humanity!)
Alas! Lillis' last kid was not Genetically Wonderful, but mentally disabled and Bad From Birth. Nobody comes to take her away, so Lillis hangs out with her for thirteen years attempting to Improve her, until Trudis -- thirteen-year-old, mentally disabled Trudis -- sleeps with one of the Horrible Abusive Men in the Worst Town Ever and invites him into their house, which by Worst Town Ever Law gives him authority over all the women in it. Lillis is like, "Welp, guess even the Powers that Be make mistakes! You can't do anything with some people!" and bounces at last, leaving Trudis to her fate, trapped in an abusive relationship in the Worst Town Ever.
(BECCA: So Sheri Tepper, what was that about the terrible ablist cult --
SHERI S. TEPPER: I mean, I pretty much just meant it was bad to discriminate against, like, people who lost their legs in tragic accidents. Don't read too much into it, jeez.)
Trudis has a series of kids; the two girls die from neglect in infancy and the two boys grow up wild and terrible in The Worst Town Ever. Lillis fails to give even a single fuck about the tragic fates of her grandchildren. Then a mysterious hot guy, with a strange resemblance to Lillis' own string of mysterious hot guys, comes to town while all the men are out doing something dumb! Everyone gets pregnant, including Trudis! Lillis is like, "wow, I bet these kids are going to be genetically great!" and returns, because Trudis clearly can't be trusted with great children. The outcome of all this is Extra Special Genetically Wonderful Needly.
But then Lillis fake!dies and Needly poisons her terrible not!dad and runs away, which is how she meets up with Abasio and Xulai.
Abasio, Xulai, Willum and Needly amble their way along through the plot, encountering various Concerning Things. There are some mean and close-minded people! There are some gross and nasty giants! There are some Bad Technologists who are genetically engineering dangerous things! There's a leftover colony of gangsters from Plague of Angels who are continuing to be horrific! There are some intelligent griffins who are real mad about the fact that when the planet is covered in water, griffins are also going to go extinct and nobody is dealing with the problem by making mer-griffin babies or whatever!
-- actually the griffin plot is worth talking about in more detail, because it leads to a weird and hilariously Mercedes Lackey interlude where Needly and Willum are temporarily kidnapped by griffins as leverage, and then they name all the griffins things like "Sun-wings" and "Dawn-song," and the griffins are SO THRILLED to have NAMES AT LAST (except for the four genetically evil griffins but, like, let's not even get into that), and then Willum nobly jumps in front of an arrow for one of the baby griffins and spends a good half of the book petrified with stone medicine and on the verge of death. (Don't worry, though! He gets better towards the end, and Abasio and Xulai immediately start yelling at him about how he never listens and won't be worth anything unless he learns how to shut up.)
Meanwhile, during the time period that Willum and Needly are griffin-napped, Abasio and Xulai have met up again with their good friend Precious Wind from The Waters Rising.
XULAI: You know, Precious Wind, I'm getting a little tired of spending my entire life traveling around with my genetically engineered husband and babies due to the dictates of the Greater Good? I'm just, I feel like it would be nice to have a little agency in my life and choices --
PRECIOUS WIND: Oh my god, Xulai, stop whining. It makes your husband feel bad when you complain about being genetically destined for each other! Like maybe you would have picked someone else if you weren't genetically destined! And would you? Would you????
XULAI: But --
PRECIOUS WIND: I mean, if you really want, I can mind-wipe you and take you away from your husband and children and make them forget you and dump you somewhere else where you'll never have to think about your genetic destiny again!
XULAI: @____@ OK, I'll shut up and follow the dictates of the Greater Good! I get it! Agency is for the weak!
SHERI S. TEPPER: Oh, Xulai. Sweet, obviously genetically worth keeping around, but kind of a whiner, amirite?
-- but, right, the plot! So Abasio and Xulai have collected all these moderately troubling things, and are like, "huh, we really don't know how to genetically engineer griffins to survive a major flood! These giants really are troubling! The gangsters, hmm, those are a problem! Also, Willum's probably going to die! We don't really know how to fix this!"
650 pages into this 750-page book, an alien conveniently appears with some characters from the True Game series who have magic healing and shapeshifting powers, so that solves the griffin and dying!Willum problems, and the alien -- whose name, for the record, is Fixit -- then goes on to solve everything else.
FIXIT: Actually, I've been manipulating the Earth for thousands of years! FOR THE GREATER GOOD. It was I who caused the flooding of the planet! This way, we can eliminate the bad, stupid, genetically inferior kind of humans who believe in religion and don't believe in climate change, while only the superior kind of humans who are changeable and adaptable and smart enough to believe in climate change will survive!
THE GRIFFINS: Ummmm...
FIXIT: OK yes it's true there were flaws in this plan, like the extinction of most other land-based species on Earth, but, let's be real, humans were basically destroying them anyway, amirite? Anyway, I fixed the griffin problem, it's fine. It's fine.
EVERYONE ELSE: ...OK, sounds great! You're a stand-up guy, Fixit! :)
FIXIT: Also have I mentioned that I've been running human breeding programs for generations to achieve an appropriate number of genetically worthwhile humans? Hey, Lillis! Meet my partner in genetic manipulation crime, aka the father of your children!
(I forgot to mention that at this point in the plot Grandma Lillis is not dead anymore.)
THE FATHER OF LILLIS' CHILDREN: So, hey, baby, all those different guys you thought you were sleeping with? Actually, all me, after undergoing various genetic modifications to achieve slightly different but equally superior children each time. Because I love you! Sorry I could never stick around, and had to leave you to live alone in The Worst Village Ever, but, you know, the Greater Good.
LILLIS: .... so, what about the other guy who came in and fathered the next generation of genetically superior kids, including my granddaughter Needly?
THE FATHER OF LILLIS' CHILDREN: Funny story: also me!
LILLIS: Um, ew, incest?
THE FATHER OF LILLIS' CHILDREN: No, no, babe, it's cool, I didn't sleep with our one genetically subpar daughter or any of those other women in the Worst Town Ever, I just made them think I slept with them and then artificially inseminated them through non-sexual means. Totally not incest!
LILLIS: Oh, well, artificially inseminating your own mentally disabled daughter with your genetic material without her consent is totally fine. So long as it's not incest!
THE FATHER OF LILLIS' CHILDREN: ANYWAY all six of our genetically great kids have been in cold storage, and the five non-Needly kids from the next generation were raised in another village for a while but now here they are as well, so now we can settle down and raise these eleven children together! :D?
LILLIS: Twelve counting Needly. Thirteen counting Willum, who we're pretty sure is going to hook up with Needly someday and have mermaid babies.
THE FATHER OF LILLIS' CHILDREN: ...we can settle down and raise these thirteen children together! :D?
LILLIS: Works for me! I'm so glad these twenty years of mystery and total lack of agency have turned out so well for us intelligent, logic and evidence-based genetically superior people!
And then they all head off together to continue the mission of mer-baby recruitment! 'They all' now includes Grandma Lillis, the father of her children, the eleven genetically superior children -- who formed a band together so they can travel around singing catchy hymns and spreading the Tepper mer-baby gospel, I'm serious, this is the grand master plan -- Needly, Willum, the mermaid babies, and Abasio and Xulai, who despite being the ostensible protagonists have done literally nothing plot-relevant the entire book.
(Meanwhile the characters from the True Game series go home, I guess? It doesn't really matter, they were really only there for twenty pages to deus ex machina some assistance anyway.)
SO THAT'S FISH TAILS.
(I didn't even have a chance to mention the murderous teleportation machine, the evil technologist plan to build themselves giant fish bodies, the long description of the complex five-gender system by which Fixit's people create babies and/or delicious holiday dinners, or the possibly-sinister possibly-just-confused alien entity that steals machines and poops valuable metal that everyone agrees it's totally fine to enslave at the end because it's kind of annoying. There's just -- there's so much, and it's all either POINTLESS OR TERRIBLE.
At least there were no evil university professors.)
Anyway the point is that now -- I'm done? I'm free? I may never have to read another Sheri S. Tepper book again???? We can only hope!
I'm pretty sure Fish Tails is the worst? Maybe the actual worst. Tepper's books range wildly on the 'somewhat bizarre' to 'outright horrific' scale, but they're usually at least entertaining. Fish Tails, however, is not only ideologically horrific, but incredibly poorly plotted and badly written to boot. Triple crown!
varadia and I have spent the last week texting each other in increasing levels of horror at just how bad the book actually is.The actual plot of Fish Tails is ... what is the plot even of Fish Tails? Abasio, the protagonist of Plague of Angels, and Xulai, the protagonist of The Waters Rising, are now on a MISSION to travel the world with their adorable mermaid babies and convince humanity that joining Team Sentient Cephalopod is their only hope for survival!
Abasio and Xulai spend the first hundred pages or so hanging out in a small village getting nice gender-specific baby jackets made for their mermaid babies. The conversation in which they attempt to convince the tailor that mermaid babies need jackets happens twice, once in the prologue and then again fifty pages later, so apparently it's VERY IMPORTANT. While they're in the village, they pick up an eleven-year-old kid called Willum who decides to come with them for ADVENTURES.
XULAI: Willum seems like he might be a smart kid, but he talks all the time and never listens!
ABASIO: That's probably because he comes from a small town and therefore has never heard anything say anything important in his life! I mean, I never heard anyone in this town say anything important.
XULAI: Oh, yes, that is true. People in small towns don't really talk, they just cluck like chickens. Poor stupid chickens. :(
ABASIO: Anyway if we spend the rest of the book yelling at him to shut up, maybe there's a slim chance he'll grow into a person who gets the Tepper Stamp of Approval!
While in Willum's small town they also hear a lot of talk about a weird cult that believes that nobody who is not 100% perfect in body should be allowed to live.
SHERI S. TEPPER: And that is ablist and THAT'S TERRIBLE.
BECCA: But -- Sheri Tepper -- what about all the mountain of evil disabled people that you think should have been killed at birth?
SHERI S. TEPPER: That's different.
Anyway from the amount of times people explain about this cult to each other you would be forgiven for assuming they will go on to be plot-relevant, but they never are.
Shortly thereafter Abasio and Xulai also pick up a super-wise and special girl called Needly who comes from The Worst Town Ever, where all the men systematically abuse all the women and nobody ever does anything worthwhile ever. Needly's backstory is worth going into at greater length. Needly's grandmother Lillis, who is also super-wise and special, grew up somewhere enlightened but spent most of her adult life in The Worst Town Ever, hooking up with a series of hot men who came her way, got her pregnant, and then meandered on. (She's in the Worst Town Ever because Hot Guy #1 brought here there, for reasons.) Each time Lillis would have a Genetically Wonderful kid, who would then be taken away by mysterious persons and disappear. Lillis is pretty sure this was all for the Greater Good and Genetic Improvement of Humanity.
(SHERI S. TEPPER: There are two kinds of people in this world, people who are stupid and religious and don't believe in climate change and do illogical things because of stupid beliefs, and more evolved people who are smart and adaptable and genetically deserve to inherit the earth!
BECCA: So ... Lillis, who has spent the past thirty years of her life allowing every single iota of her reproductive and parental agency to be taken away based on a series of unproven beliefs about the Greater Good --
SHERI S. TEPPER: Definitely one of the second, better kind of people. Aren't we glad she's letting her life be steered and having so many great kids for the future of humanity!)
Alas! Lillis' last kid was not Genetically Wonderful, but mentally disabled and Bad From Birth. Nobody comes to take her away, so Lillis hangs out with her for thirteen years attempting to Improve her, until Trudis -- thirteen-year-old, mentally disabled Trudis -- sleeps with one of the Horrible Abusive Men in the Worst Town Ever and invites him into their house, which by Worst Town Ever Law gives him authority over all the women in it. Lillis is like, "Welp, guess even the Powers that Be make mistakes! You can't do anything with some people!" and bounces at last, leaving Trudis to her fate, trapped in an abusive relationship in the Worst Town Ever.
(BECCA: So Sheri Tepper, what was that about the terrible ablist cult --
SHERI S. TEPPER: I mean, I pretty much just meant it was bad to discriminate against, like, people who lost their legs in tragic accidents. Don't read too much into it, jeez.)
Trudis has a series of kids; the two girls die from neglect in infancy and the two boys grow up wild and terrible in The Worst Town Ever. Lillis fails to give even a single fuck about the tragic fates of her grandchildren. Then a mysterious hot guy, with a strange resemblance to Lillis' own string of mysterious hot guys, comes to town while all the men are out doing something dumb! Everyone gets pregnant, including Trudis! Lillis is like, "wow, I bet these kids are going to be genetically great!" and returns, because Trudis clearly can't be trusted with great children. The outcome of all this is Extra Special Genetically Wonderful Needly.
But then Lillis fake!dies and Needly poisons her terrible not!dad and runs away, which is how she meets up with Abasio and Xulai.
Abasio, Xulai, Willum and Needly amble their way along through the plot, encountering various Concerning Things. There are some mean and close-minded people! There are some gross and nasty giants! There are some Bad Technologists who are genetically engineering dangerous things! There's a leftover colony of gangsters from Plague of Angels who are continuing to be horrific! There are some intelligent griffins who are real mad about the fact that when the planet is covered in water, griffins are also going to go extinct and nobody is dealing with the problem by making mer-griffin babies or whatever!
-- actually the griffin plot is worth talking about in more detail, because it leads to a weird and hilariously Mercedes Lackey interlude where Needly and Willum are temporarily kidnapped by griffins as leverage, and then they name all the griffins things like "Sun-wings" and "Dawn-song," and the griffins are SO THRILLED to have NAMES AT LAST (except for the four genetically evil griffins but, like, let's not even get into that), and then Willum nobly jumps in front of an arrow for one of the baby griffins and spends a good half of the book petrified with stone medicine and on the verge of death. (Don't worry, though! He gets better towards the end, and Abasio and Xulai immediately start yelling at him about how he never listens and won't be worth anything unless he learns how to shut up.)
Meanwhile, during the time period that Willum and Needly are griffin-napped, Abasio and Xulai have met up again with their good friend Precious Wind from The Waters Rising.
XULAI: You know, Precious Wind, I'm getting a little tired of spending my entire life traveling around with my genetically engineered husband and babies due to the dictates of the Greater Good? I'm just, I feel like it would be nice to have a little agency in my life and choices --
PRECIOUS WIND: Oh my god, Xulai, stop whining. It makes your husband feel bad when you complain about being genetically destined for each other! Like maybe you would have picked someone else if you weren't genetically destined! And would you? Would you????
XULAI: But --
PRECIOUS WIND: I mean, if you really want, I can mind-wipe you and take you away from your husband and children and make them forget you and dump you somewhere else where you'll never have to think about your genetic destiny again!
XULAI: @____@ OK, I'll shut up and follow the dictates of the Greater Good! I get it! Agency is for the weak!
SHERI S. TEPPER: Oh, Xulai. Sweet, obviously genetically worth keeping around, but kind of a whiner, amirite?
-- but, right, the plot! So Abasio and Xulai have collected all these moderately troubling things, and are like, "huh, we really don't know how to genetically engineer griffins to survive a major flood! These giants really are troubling! The gangsters, hmm, those are a problem! Also, Willum's probably going to die! We don't really know how to fix this!"
650 pages into this 750-page book, an alien conveniently appears with some characters from the True Game series who have magic healing and shapeshifting powers, so that solves the griffin and dying!Willum problems, and the alien -- whose name, for the record, is Fixit -- then goes on to solve everything else.
FIXIT: Actually, I've been manipulating the Earth for thousands of years! FOR THE GREATER GOOD. It was I who caused the flooding of the planet! This way, we can eliminate the bad, stupid, genetically inferior kind of humans who believe in religion and don't believe in climate change, while only the superior kind of humans who are changeable and adaptable and smart enough to believe in climate change will survive!
THE GRIFFINS: Ummmm...
FIXIT: OK yes it's true there were flaws in this plan, like the extinction of most other land-based species on Earth, but, let's be real, humans were basically destroying them anyway, amirite? Anyway, I fixed the griffin problem, it's fine. It's fine.
EVERYONE ELSE: ...OK, sounds great! You're a stand-up guy, Fixit! :)
FIXIT: Also have I mentioned that I've been running human breeding programs for generations to achieve an appropriate number of genetically worthwhile humans? Hey, Lillis! Meet my partner in genetic manipulation crime, aka the father of your children!
(I forgot to mention that at this point in the plot Grandma Lillis is not dead anymore.)
THE FATHER OF LILLIS' CHILDREN: So, hey, baby, all those different guys you thought you were sleeping with? Actually, all me, after undergoing various genetic modifications to achieve slightly different but equally superior children each time. Because I love you! Sorry I could never stick around, and had to leave you to live alone in The Worst Village Ever, but, you know, the Greater Good.
LILLIS: .... so, what about the other guy who came in and fathered the next generation of genetically superior kids, including my granddaughter Needly?
THE FATHER OF LILLIS' CHILDREN: Funny story: also me!
LILLIS: Um, ew, incest?
THE FATHER OF LILLIS' CHILDREN: No, no, babe, it's cool, I didn't sleep with our one genetically subpar daughter or any of those other women in the Worst Town Ever, I just made them think I slept with them and then artificially inseminated them through non-sexual means. Totally not incest!
LILLIS: Oh, well, artificially inseminating your own mentally disabled daughter with your genetic material without her consent is totally fine. So long as it's not incest!
THE FATHER OF LILLIS' CHILDREN: ANYWAY all six of our genetically great kids have been in cold storage, and the five non-Needly kids from the next generation were raised in another village for a while but now here they are as well, so now we can settle down and raise these eleven children together! :D?
LILLIS: Twelve counting Needly. Thirteen counting Willum, who we're pretty sure is going to hook up with Needly someday and have mermaid babies.
THE FATHER OF LILLIS' CHILDREN: ...we can settle down and raise these thirteen children together! :D?
LILLIS: Works for me! I'm so glad these twenty years of mystery and total lack of agency have turned out so well for us intelligent, logic and evidence-based genetically superior people!
And then they all head off together to continue the mission of mer-baby recruitment! 'They all' now includes Grandma Lillis, the father of her children, the eleven genetically superior children -- who formed a band together so they can travel around singing catchy hymns and spreading the Tepper mer-baby gospel, I'm serious, this is the grand master plan -- Needly, Willum, the mermaid babies, and Abasio and Xulai, who despite being the ostensible protagonists have done literally nothing plot-relevant the entire book.
(Meanwhile the characters from the True Game series go home, I guess? It doesn't really matter, they were really only there for twenty pages to deus ex machina some assistance anyway.)
SO THAT'S FISH TAILS.
(I didn't even have a chance to mention the murderous teleportation machine, the evil technologist plan to build themselves giant fish bodies, the long description of the complex five-gender system by which Fixit's people create babies and/or delicious holiday dinners, or the possibly-sinister possibly-just-confused alien entity that steals machines and poops valuable metal that everyone agrees it's totally fine to enslave at the end because it's kind of annoying. There's just -- there's so much, and it's all either POINTLESS OR TERRIBLE.
At least there were no evil university professors.)
Anyway the point is that now -- I'm done? I'm free? I may never have to read another Sheri S. Tepper book again???? We can only hope!
no subject
Date: 2015-05-10 05:10 pm (UTC)I...
I DON'T UNDERSTAND ANYTHING. EXCEPT WORDLESS, FLAILING, UNCOMPREHENDING HORROR.
no subject
Date: 2015-05-10 05:46 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-05-10 05:12 pm (UTC). . . How is this in print?
no subject
Date: 2015-05-10 05:48 pm (UTC)(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:no subject
Date: 2015-05-10 05:54 pm (UTC)OKAY SO the first Sheri Tepper book I read was Grass? Which is actually good and only slightly WTF and is still a great favorite of mine. And then I spent years reading her back catalog, which was usually clunky and heavy-handed but often fun and/or interesting, and reading her next seven or eight books while they fell straight off a cliff of OH SHERI TEPPER NO.
Seriously, I know the seeds of the eugenicist WTFery were there in her early books, but what the hell happened to her after Grass? She seriously leveled up on that one, and then... leveled down. Way, way down.
no subject
Date: 2015-05-10 06:00 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-05-11 02:29 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-05-10 06:20 pm (UTC)But this book?
Yyyyeeeuuuuccchhhhhh. With toadstool sauce.Thanks for this summary. (The walls of my apartment also thank you.)no subject
Date: 2015-05-10 06:41 pm (UTC)(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:no subject
Date: 2015-05-10 07:00 pm (UTC)I read exactly two Tepper books when I was a preteen, because they were on my classroom bookshelf - I read The Family Tree, and thought it was amazing, and then read Six Moon Dance and was like "I notice some trends" and decided I didn't need to seek out any more of her books. I continue to have a lot of embarrassed affection for The Family Tree, though on my most recent reread I skimmed through most of it and only focused on the bits about Dora and/or Cory as being the only parts of interest.
It's good to know I was right in not seeking out more of Tepper's books. Congratulations on finishing with her!
no subject
Date: 2015-05-10 07:50 pm (UTC)(no subject)
From:no subject
Date: 2015-05-10 09:15 pm (UTC)(I'd start her books, and they'd be interesting, and then she'd be like, WELP, here's some evil moustache-twirling Christian misogynists!" And I'd be like, "But I know lots of Christian misogynists, and most of them seem like really good guys at first! THIS IS SIMPLISTIC! FEMINISM IS TERRIBLE!"
(I got over that latter part.)
no subject
Date: 2015-05-10 09:41 pm (UTC)(At twelve, I was like, 'oh, gosh, feminism in my science fiction! How exciting! SIGN ME UP!' But, I mean, some of the other stuff I was reading at twelve was, like, Piers Anthony. THE FLIP SIDE OF THE HORRIFIC COIN.)
(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:no subject
Date: 2015-05-10 10:57 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-05-11 01:27 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-05-11 12:58 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-05-11 01:32 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-05-11 01:11 am (UTC)Well, I'll say this for Tepper: her ideology is incomprehensible, but it is at least . . . unique.
no subject
Date: 2015-05-11 01:33 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-05-11 02:10 am (UTC)(thank you for this review it is great) (as are all your reviews)
no subject
Date: 2015-05-11 10:32 pm (UTC)(no subject)
From:no subject
Date: 2015-05-11 02:50 am (UTC)...yes.
Looking on the bright side, as someone with a sentimental attachment to the True Game series I'm pleased that apparently it got out of this largely unscathed?
no subject
Date: 2015-05-11 10:33 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-05-11 03:17 am (UTC)When this is the least terrible thing about the book, that says quite a lot.
Not as much as noncon incest eugenics, of course, but!
no subject
Date: 2015-05-11 10:36 pm (UTC)...with eugenics and genocide.
(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:no subject
Date: 2015-05-11 05:36 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-05-11 10:37 pm (UTC)(Also, I mean, the 'climate change' analogue here is: 'aliens are pouring water into our planet through a wormhole to drown us all.' SCIENCE!!!! *jazz hands*)
no subject
Date: 2015-05-11 01:36 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-05-11 10:38 pm (UTC)(no subject)
From:no subject
Date: 2015-05-11 04:12 pm (UTC)Is there a reason it's called Fish Tails, anyhow? I can't tell if there's any rationale from having read your summary, and am sort of curious. Is it that genetically perfect people are all mermaids, or something? I may have missed a memo. :P
no subject
Date: 2015-05-11 10:38 pm (UTC)(no subject)
From:no subject
Date: 2015-05-11 05:41 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-05-11 05:41 pm (UTC)(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:no subject
Date: 2015-05-12 01:54 am (UTC)::handflap::
::flail::
She wrote worse books than Beauty. Oh, my God.
no subject
Date: 2015-05-12 04:04 am (UTC)(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:no subject
Date: 2015-05-12 02:42 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-05-12 04:05 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-05-12 03:10 am (UTC)But she will reliably pick up and read any book by Sheri S. Tepper!
no subject
Date: 2015-05-12 04:07 am (UTC)Well, I mean. To be fair. Sheri Tepper also doesn't like dark media! She thinks horror is terrible and corrosive to the human spirit!
That's why she wrote the book where all the horror writers end up in a lovingly-described version of Hell.
(no subject)
From:no subject
Date: 2015-05-12 06:01 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-05-13 03:34 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-10-27 03:13 pm (UTC)