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Oct. 26th, 2021 09:28 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsI made the tactical error of saying on rachelmanija's post about Sheri S. Tepper's Awakeners duology that despite my long history in the Tepper mines I had never actually read these particular books.
Shortly thereafter, of course, I found them in my mailbox, which is why, despite having sworn that Fish Tails would be my last Tepper, here I am again, once again grappling with Sheri S. Tepper's problematic philosophics around genetics, morality, and ecofeminism.
This particular set of Tepper books is set on a world bounded by an enormous river (Northshore) where everyone is religiously forbidden from ever going east. If you travel west to the next town, and you decide you want to go home again, you just gotta keep going! It will take you fifteen years! Good luck!!
In large part this is because whenever anyone dies they get brought to a body pit in the next town over, where, theoretically, they will get Sorted by priests called Awakeners; the virtuous get immediately raptured up to God, and the wicked get turned into zombie slave corpses that shuffle along doing hard labor until eventually getting eaten by the local sentient avian aliens. (Aliens is the wrong term -- the bird aliens are the ones actually native to the planet and humans got here in an indeterminate way from somewhere indeterminately else -- but we will use it anyway, for convenience.) This all has to take place in everyone's next town over so that the sorting is pure and impartial and no one ever has to suffer the distressing experience of seeing somebody they knew and loved shuffling around as a zombie corpse slave, and definitely not for any sinister reasons like global religious conspiracy. If you don't want to run the risk of getting sorted into being a zombie corpse slave, the other option is to do an end run round the Awakeners and throw yourself in the river, which is afflicted by a blight that turns things into wood. (Did Robin Hobb repurpose this idea for her Liveship trilogy or am I misremembering?)
Protagonist A is Thrasne, a young sailor of dubious religious principles who one day fishes a young pregnant woman out of the river into which she threw herself. She is now wood. This does not stop Thrasne from being very into her, romantically. Over the course of several years she is able to convey in a kind of wooden stop-motion animation fashion that Thrasne should look after the daughter she left behind.
Protagonist B is Pamra, the aforementioned daughter, who after her mother's suicide decides to rebel by joining the Awakeners and becoming a religious zealot, until she accidentally learns The Horrible Truth that all religion is oppressive and bad.
The Horrible Truth, to nobody's surprise, is that nobody ever gets raptured and everyone gets turned into zombie corpse bird-alien fodder in exchange for an eternal-life mixture that the bird aliens trade to high-ranked officials in the theocratic government. The zombification occurs via a plant called Tears, which is necessary because it turns human corpses from bird-alien poison into something the bird aliens can digest; the reason the bird need to digest zombies in the first place is because before the arrival of humans they overpopulated themselves in a surge of go-forth-and-multiply religious zealotry and killed off all their native herbivores. The bird-aliens can eat fish, but if they do so they lose the ability to fly, which they find religiously abhorrent. Also, eating fish makes female bird-aliens smarter and they also find that religiously abhorrent.
At this point we are introduced to a whole slew of evil theocratic officials whom I could not possibly tell apart except for the fact that some of them are just generic evil and some of them are not just evil but also predatory bisexuals; we also meet deep-cover theocratic officials Tharius and Kesseret, who are working from within to stage a coup against the current system of forced zombie-corpsification.
THARIUS: I believe that if they have no choice, the bird aliens will come to understand the necessity of eating fish and become peaceful and we can live together in harmony!
OUR ONE POV EVIL BIRD ALIEN: If anything happened to threaten our current lifestyle we would kill every human here and then ourselves, because that's what God would want.
Meanwhile, Pamra has fled the priests and discovered Thrasne and her wooden mother. Immediately upon encountering Pamra, Wood Mom gives birth to a slow-motion wooden baby and crumbles into dust. Nobody is really sure what to do with this, so Pamra just kind of carries the slo-mo wooden baby around as a prop for the rest of the book.
THRASNE: Pamra, you look exactly like your wooden mother, whom I have lusted impossibly after for decades, and I'm so excited for us to settle down on this boat and build a future together.
PAMRA: Mmmmmmm. Hmmm. Well. Lukewarm on this proposition I have to say.
For reasons, Thrasne has to temporarily leave Pamra on an island while he does some boat repairs; there, Pamra meets some descendants of the good flightless fish-eating bird people, including a hot teen fish-eating bird-man.
THE LOCALS: Pamra, you shouldn't hang out with that hot teen fish-eating bird-man.
PAMRA: Why?
THE LOCALS: uhhhhh you know ... cultural taboos ........
PAMRA: what I have learned from my reformed-zealot past is: fuck cultural taboos! I'm gonna go sneak out on Big Bird Dance Night and say hi to my hot teen bird buddy!
HOT TEEN FISH-EATING BIRD MAN: [ejaculates on Pamra, screams in horror and despair, and dies]
PAMRA: ......?!?!?!?!?!
THE LOCALS: so the thing we probably should have explained is, young male fish-eating bird-aliens get one chance to mate upon hitting puberty, on Big Bird Dance Night, and then immediately die. But they die happy knowing that their lineage will be carried on! Except for your friend. Your friend died miserable, because of you. Sorry.
THRASNE: Hey Pamra sorry to leave you on this island for so long! Hope nothing traumatic happened! looking forward to the rest of our life together!
PAMRA: sorry Thrasne, thanks for all the help but I only talk to ghosts now bye!
And Pamra, newly re-zealotized in a different direction and constantly hallucinating the tragic ghost of a hot teen bird-man, leaves Thrasne behind and takes off to start a religious crusade!
THRASNE: >:((((
MEDOOR BABJI: Hey Thrasne, I am here, and I am hot, and for some reason I am very into middle-aged sailors?
THRASNE: but do you look exactly like a wooden woman I have been lusting over for twenty years? No? Then I am not sure it is going to work out between us.
Medoor Babji is a new secret protagonist introduced 2/3 of the way through the first book of the duology; she is an undercover Noor princess in disguise as a wandering mendicant!
SHERI TEPPER: The Noor are a persecuted nomadic minority within this society whom the theocrats keep kidnapping and enslaving ... but their skin is so dark it somehow protects them from Tears, so they can't be turned into zombie aliens! isn't that great? you see what I did there? also they're not an evil theocracy, they have a compassionate ruling queen! and they're just culturally and genetically more sensible than everyone else here!! stan the Noor!!!
ME: Sheri Tepper, it is the seventies, and you are trying very hard to be anti-racist, and ... well ..... you are trying very hard. One must, I suppose, see and acknowledge this.
Anyway, Medoor Babji has a secret mission to try and find a way across the river to see if it would be a suitable land for the Noor to migrate to and escape their constant persecution, and as the second book begins she hires Thrasne to take her and her party on a perilous cross-river journey. Medoor continues to pine after Thrasne, for unclear reasons, while Thrasne continues to pine after Pamra, for equally unclear reasons. Pamra is not pining. Pamra has the ghost of her dead hot teen bird-alien and her plot-irrelevant slow wooden baby and an entire crusade of dedicated zealots following her across the land and is perfectly happy with her lot.
MEANWHILE, in the evil theocratic capital, as a bunch of interchangeable evil theocrats plot and scheme for power in subplots I absolutely could not follow:
KESSERET: hey uhhh Tharius isn't it about time for the revolution?
THARIUS: hold on I kind of want to see how this Crusade plays out???
Tharius is coincidentally Pamra's great-great-grandfather, by the way. This doesn't matter much but it does mean he has a sort of fond spot for her.
Anyway, Medoor Babji and Thrasne bang it out, but Thrasne still will not stop talking about Pamra, so Medoor Babji irritably goes to fix a difficult bit of the boat in a storm and gets accidentally blown away from everybody else onto a different mid-river island with a different set of good flightless fish-eating bird people.
GOOD FLIGHTLESS FISH-EATING BIRD PEOPLE: oh sure, Southshore is completely uninhabited! feel free to move your entire persecuted population there, there is literally no downside
[at approximately this point]
genarti: Ah, I see you're reading Tepper! Good luck!!
ME: It could be worse! This seems to be early Tepper ... the world-building is kind of neat and while she is spinning a morality play about overpopulation she hasn't actually gotten eugenics-y yet!
[two pages later]
THE GOOD FLIGHTLESS FISH-EATING BIRD PEOPLE: So because the bird aliens on Northshore are all descended from bird aliens who chose selfish religious zombie-eating over virtuous and ecologically conscious fish-eating, we're pretty sure they've been selectively breeding for evil for generations and are now unredeemable as a species. Too bad!
ME: goddammit Sheri!!!
MEDOOR BABJI: great, fantastic. I will not worry at all about the hypothetical genocide of the bird aliens of Northshore. Do you have any other wisdom to drop on me, good flightless fish-eating bird people?
GOOD FLIGHTLESS FISH-EATING BIRD PEOPLE: yes, as a matter of fact! our wisdom is: it's actually a good thing, societally speaking, that all of our young men tragically die right after hitting puberty and mating, because if they survived they would turn into murderous sociopaths, and as it is we can have a pleasant matriarchal society without any of that literally toxic masculiity
MEDOOR BABJI: hmmm I see I see
Then Medoor Babji hooks back up with Thrasne and the rest of the boat on an island where all of the wood-people who got thrown into the river have ended up and are now living very slow tree-lives. Credit where it's due, this sequence is absolutely not plot-relevant but is pretty cool in a sort of Annihilation fashion.
WHALE ALIENS: hey! FYI, we're the ones who caused the wood blight. We thought being trees would be more fun for you than being zombies.
THRASNE: ... cool ....??
WHALE ALIENS: incidentally, we came here from another planet to study you poor suckers but we're probably going to go home eventually. We'd like our slow wooden baby back first, though.
THRASNE: .... well, she's in another half the plot now, but good luck with that!
MEANWHILE, Pamra has made her way to the evil theocratic capital and converted the chief general to her cause of Generalized Zealotry; meanwhile meanwhile, Pamra's second-in-command, who is developmentally disabled and also (unrelatedly?) evil, has in her absence started turning the crusade towards policies of ABSOLUTE CHASTITY and GENOCIDAL RACISM. It is unclear which of those things Sheri Tepper thinks is worse but one thing that is certain is that she has never heard of ablism!
THARIUS: hey Pamra is such a convincing zealot! I bet she could just convince the evil bird aliens that they should stop eating zombies and adapt to become good fish-eating aliens instead! we might not even need the revolution!
TEPPER: Just so you know, readers, this kind of compassionate thinking is soft and weak. You cannot convince your oppressors to stop being oppressive through talk --
ME: okay, I see your argument here --
TEPPER: -- especially when they're genetically evil after centuries of selective evil breeding. Genetically evil people have no capacity for change and the only solution is to cause their destruction without mercy.
ME: ah.
Anyway. To the surprise of no one except Tharius and Pamra, Pamra does not convince the evil bird aliens to stop eating zombies, and instead the evil bird aliens decide to burn her at the stake. Pamra alas does not survive this experience, but in the heat of the fire her slow wooden baby does hatch into a whale alien and flip herself out to sea, so ... good for her .....
THARIUS: ... well that ... all sure happened ..... uhhhhh I guess it's time to start the revolution!!
As the book concludes, the humans have rebelliously destroyed all the zombie-corpses; the genetically evil bird-aliens have all starved or fought each other to death rather than learning to peacefully eat fish; the two halves of the crusade (one half led by the general Pamra converted and the other by the racist second-in-command) are fighting it out because they both blame the other for Pamra's death; and the Noor, genetically more sensible than everybody else, are taking off for Southshore with the few enlightened white people they've allowed to accompany them but without a bunch of Noor warriors who decided to stay on Northshore to charge into the general battle chaos.
MEDOOR BABJI: also I am pregnant!
THRASNE: I love our baby, and I have realized that I do also love Medoor Babji, but sometimes I do still think wistfully about Pamra ....
A WHALE ALIEN WHO USED TO BE A SLOW WOODEN BABY: hey. hey. Thrasne. listen to me
THRASNE: omg!! is it you, slow wooden baby??? GREAT to see you!!
A WHALE ALIEN WHO USED TO BE A SLOW WOODEN BABY: Thrasne, listen to me closely: fuck Pamra. She was a stupid, selfish zealot. Move on. Okay bye!
THRASNE: ... okay then!
MEANWHILE, MEDOOR BABJI'S MOTHER, QUEEN OF THE NOOR: well kiddo it seems like everything's worked out for us! I'm sad about all the warriors of our people who decided to stay in Northshore though.
MEDOOR BABJI: should I tell her what the good fish-eating bird-people taught me ... that some people are just inherently violent and toxically masculine and they have to die for the good of society or they will metaphorically lead us down the path of eating zombies ......
MEDOOR BABJI: no I think it'll just depress her.
And that's what we call: A Classic Tepper! What can I say, it was better than Fish Tails.
rachelmanija's post about Sheri S. Tepper's Awakeners duology that despite my long history in the Tepper mines I had never actually read these particular books. Shortly thereafter, of course, I found them in my mailbox, which is why, despite having sworn that Fish Tails would be my last Tepper, here I am again, once again grappling with Sheri S. Tepper's problematic philosophics around genetics, morality, and ecofeminism.
This particular set of Tepper books is set on a world bounded by an enormous river (Northshore) where everyone is religiously forbidden from ever going east. If you travel west to the next town, and you decide you want to go home again, you just gotta keep going! It will take you fifteen years! Good luck!!
In large part this is because whenever anyone dies they get brought to a body pit in the next town over, where, theoretically, they will get Sorted by priests called Awakeners; the virtuous get immediately raptured up to God, and the wicked get turned into zombie slave corpses that shuffle along doing hard labor until eventually getting eaten by the local sentient avian aliens. (Aliens is the wrong term -- the bird aliens are the ones actually native to the planet and humans got here in an indeterminate way from somewhere indeterminately else -- but we will use it anyway, for convenience.) This all has to take place in everyone's next town over so that the sorting is pure and impartial and no one ever has to suffer the distressing experience of seeing somebody they knew and loved shuffling around as a zombie corpse slave, and definitely not for any sinister reasons like global religious conspiracy. If you don't want to run the risk of getting sorted into being a zombie corpse slave, the other option is to do an end run round the Awakeners and throw yourself in the river, which is afflicted by a blight that turns things into wood. (Did Robin Hobb repurpose this idea for her Liveship trilogy or am I misremembering?)
Protagonist A is Thrasne, a young sailor of dubious religious principles who one day fishes a young pregnant woman out of the river into which she threw herself. She is now wood. This does not stop Thrasne from being very into her, romantically. Over the course of several years she is able to convey in a kind of wooden stop-motion animation fashion that Thrasne should look after the daughter she left behind.
Protagonist B is Pamra, the aforementioned daughter, who after her mother's suicide decides to rebel by joining the Awakeners and becoming a religious zealot, until she accidentally learns The Horrible Truth that all religion is oppressive and bad.
The Horrible Truth, to nobody's surprise, is that nobody ever gets raptured and everyone gets turned into zombie corpse bird-alien fodder in exchange for an eternal-life mixture that the bird aliens trade to high-ranked officials in the theocratic government. The zombification occurs via a plant called Tears, which is necessary because it turns human corpses from bird-alien poison into something the bird aliens can digest; the reason the bird need to digest zombies in the first place is because before the arrival of humans they overpopulated themselves in a surge of go-forth-and-multiply religious zealotry and killed off all their native herbivores. The bird-aliens can eat fish, but if they do so they lose the ability to fly, which they find religiously abhorrent. Also, eating fish makes female bird-aliens smarter and they also find that religiously abhorrent.
At this point we are introduced to a whole slew of evil theocratic officials whom I could not possibly tell apart except for the fact that some of them are just generic evil and some of them are not just evil but also predatory bisexuals; we also meet deep-cover theocratic officials Tharius and Kesseret, who are working from within to stage a coup against the current system of forced zombie-corpsification.
THARIUS: I believe that if they have no choice, the bird aliens will come to understand the necessity of eating fish and become peaceful and we can live together in harmony!
OUR ONE POV EVIL BIRD ALIEN: If anything happened to threaten our current lifestyle we would kill every human here and then ourselves, because that's what God would want.
Meanwhile, Pamra has fled the priests and discovered Thrasne and her wooden mother. Immediately upon encountering Pamra, Wood Mom gives birth to a slow-motion wooden baby and crumbles into dust. Nobody is really sure what to do with this, so Pamra just kind of carries the slo-mo wooden baby around as a prop for the rest of the book.
THRASNE: Pamra, you look exactly like your wooden mother, whom I have lusted impossibly after for decades, and I'm so excited for us to settle down on this boat and build a future together.
PAMRA: Mmmmmmm. Hmmm. Well. Lukewarm on this proposition I have to say.
For reasons, Thrasne has to temporarily leave Pamra on an island while he does some boat repairs; there, Pamra meets some descendants of the good flightless fish-eating bird people, including a hot teen fish-eating bird-man.
THE LOCALS: Pamra, you shouldn't hang out with that hot teen fish-eating bird-man.
PAMRA: Why?
THE LOCALS: uhhhhh you know ... cultural taboos ........
PAMRA: what I have learned from my reformed-zealot past is: fuck cultural taboos! I'm gonna go sneak out on Big Bird Dance Night and say hi to my hot teen bird buddy!
HOT TEEN FISH-EATING BIRD MAN: [ejaculates on Pamra, screams in horror and despair, and dies]
PAMRA: ......?!?!?!?!?!
THE LOCALS: so the thing we probably should have explained is, young male fish-eating bird-aliens get one chance to mate upon hitting puberty, on Big Bird Dance Night, and then immediately die. But they die happy knowing that their lineage will be carried on! Except for your friend. Your friend died miserable, because of you. Sorry.
THRASNE: Hey Pamra sorry to leave you on this island for so long! Hope nothing traumatic happened! looking forward to the rest of our life together!
PAMRA: sorry Thrasne, thanks for all the help but I only talk to ghosts now bye!
And Pamra, newly re-zealotized in a different direction and constantly hallucinating the tragic ghost of a hot teen bird-man, leaves Thrasne behind and takes off to start a religious crusade!
THRASNE: >:((((
MEDOOR BABJI: Hey Thrasne, I am here, and I am hot, and for some reason I am very into middle-aged sailors?
THRASNE: but do you look exactly like a wooden woman I have been lusting over for twenty years? No? Then I am not sure it is going to work out between us.
Medoor Babji is a new secret protagonist introduced 2/3 of the way through the first book of the duology; she is an undercover Noor princess in disguise as a wandering mendicant!
SHERI TEPPER: The Noor are a persecuted nomadic minority within this society whom the theocrats keep kidnapping and enslaving ... but their skin is so dark it somehow protects them from Tears, so they can't be turned into zombie aliens! isn't that great? you see what I did there? also they're not an evil theocracy, they have a compassionate ruling queen! and they're just culturally and genetically more sensible than everyone else here!! stan the Noor!!!
ME: Sheri Tepper, it is the seventies, and you are trying very hard to be anti-racist, and ... well ..... you are trying very hard. One must, I suppose, see and acknowledge this.
Anyway, Medoor Babji has a secret mission to try and find a way across the river to see if it would be a suitable land for the Noor to migrate to and escape their constant persecution, and as the second book begins she hires Thrasne to take her and her party on a perilous cross-river journey. Medoor continues to pine after Thrasne, for unclear reasons, while Thrasne continues to pine after Pamra, for equally unclear reasons. Pamra is not pining. Pamra has the ghost of her dead hot teen bird-alien and her plot-irrelevant slow wooden baby and an entire crusade of dedicated zealots following her across the land and is perfectly happy with her lot.
MEANWHILE, in the evil theocratic capital, as a bunch of interchangeable evil theocrats plot and scheme for power in subplots I absolutely could not follow:
KESSERET: hey uhhh Tharius isn't it about time for the revolution?
THARIUS: hold on I kind of want to see how this Crusade plays out???
Tharius is coincidentally Pamra's great-great-grandfather, by the way. This doesn't matter much but it does mean he has a sort of fond spot for her.
Anyway, Medoor Babji and Thrasne bang it out, but Thrasne still will not stop talking about Pamra, so Medoor Babji irritably goes to fix a difficult bit of the boat in a storm and gets accidentally blown away from everybody else onto a different mid-river island with a different set of good flightless fish-eating bird people.
GOOD FLIGHTLESS FISH-EATING BIRD PEOPLE: oh sure, Southshore is completely uninhabited! feel free to move your entire persecuted population there, there is literally no downside
[at approximately this point]
genarti: Ah, I see you're reading Tepper! Good luck!!ME: It could be worse! This seems to be early Tepper ... the world-building is kind of neat and while she is spinning a morality play about overpopulation she hasn't actually gotten eugenics-y yet!
[two pages later]
THE GOOD FLIGHTLESS FISH-EATING BIRD PEOPLE: So because the bird aliens on Northshore are all descended from bird aliens who chose selfish religious zombie-eating over virtuous and ecologically conscious fish-eating, we're pretty sure they've been selectively breeding for evil for generations and are now unredeemable as a species. Too bad!
ME: goddammit Sheri!!!
MEDOOR BABJI: great, fantastic. I will not worry at all about the hypothetical genocide of the bird aliens of Northshore. Do you have any other wisdom to drop on me, good flightless fish-eating bird people?
GOOD FLIGHTLESS FISH-EATING BIRD PEOPLE: yes, as a matter of fact! our wisdom is: it's actually a good thing, societally speaking, that all of our young men tragically die right after hitting puberty and mating, because if they survived they would turn into murderous sociopaths, and as it is we can have a pleasant matriarchal society without any of that literally toxic masculiity
MEDOOR BABJI: hmmm I see I see
Then Medoor Babji hooks back up with Thrasne and the rest of the boat on an island where all of the wood-people who got thrown into the river have ended up and are now living very slow tree-lives. Credit where it's due, this sequence is absolutely not plot-relevant but is pretty cool in a sort of Annihilation fashion.
WHALE ALIENS: hey! FYI, we're the ones who caused the wood blight. We thought being trees would be more fun for you than being zombies.
THRASNE: ... cool ....??
WHALE ALIENS: incidentally, we came here from another planet to study you poor suckers but we're probably going to go home eventually. We'd like our slow wooden baby back first, though.
THRASNE: .... well, she's in another half the plot now, but good luck with that!
MEANWHILE, Pamra has made her way to the evil theocratic capital and converted the chief general to her cause of Generalized Zealotry; meanwhile meanwhile, Pamra's second-in-command, who is developmentally disabled and also (unrelatedly?) evil, has in her absence started turning the crusade towards policies of ABSOLUTE CHASTITY and GENOCIDAL RACISM. It is unclear which of those things Sheri Tepper thinks is worse but one thing that is certain is that she has never heard of ablism!
THARIUS: hey Pamra is such a convincing zealot! I bet she could just convince the evil bird aliens that they should stop eating zombies and adapt to become good fish-eating aliens instead! we might not even need the revolution!
TEPPER: Just so you know, readers, this kind of compassionate thinking is soft and weak. You cannot convince your oppressors to stop being oppressive through talk --
ME: okay, I see your argument here --
TEPPER: -- especially when they're genetically evil after centuries of selective evil breeding. Genetically evil people have no capacity for change and the only solution is to cause their destruction without mercy.
ME: ah.
Anyway. To the surprise of no one except Tharius and Pamra, Pamra does not convince the evil bird aliens to stop eating zombies, and instead the evil bird aliens decide to burn her at the stake. Pamra alas does not survive this experience, but in the heat of the fire her slow wooden baby does hatch into a whale alien and flip herself out to sea, so ... good for her .....
THARIUS: ... well that ... all sure happened ..... uhhhhh I guess it's time to start the revolution!!
As the book concludes, the humans have rebelliously destroyed all the zombie-corpses; the genetically evil bird-aliens have all starved or fought each other to death rather than learning to peacefully eat fish; the two halves of the crusade (one half led by the general Pamra converted and the other by the racist second-in-command) are fighting it out because they both blame the other for Pamra's death; and the Noor, genetically more sensible than everybody else, are taking off for Southshore with the few enlightened white people they've allowed to accompany them but without a bunch of Noor warriors who decided to stay on Northshore to charge into the general battle chaos.
MEDOOR BABJI: also I am pregnant!
THRASNE: I love our baby, and I have realized that I do also love Medoor Babji, but sometimes I do still think wistfully about Pamra ....
A WHALE ALIEN WHO USED TO BE A SLOW WOODEN BABY: hey. hey. Thrasne. listen to me
THRASNE: omg!! is it you, slow wooden baby??? GREAT to see you!!
A WHALE ALIEN WHO USED TO BE A SLOW WOODEN BABY: Thrasne, listen to me closely: fuck Pamra. She was a stupid, selfish zealot. Move on. Okay bye!
THRASNE: ... okay then!
MEANWHILE, MEDOOR BABJI'S MOTHER, QUEEN OF THE NOOR: well kiddo it seems like everything's worked out for us! I'm sad about all the warriors of our people who decided to stay in Northshore though.
MEDOOR BABJI: should I tell her what the good fish-eating bird-people taught me ... that some people are just inherently violent and toxically masculine and they have to die for the good of society or they will metaphorically lead us down the path of eating zombies ......
MEDOOR BABJI: no I think it'll just depress her.
And that's what we call: A Classic Tepper! What can I say, it was better than Fish Tails.
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Date: 2021-10-27 03:47 am (UTC)Also, this one actually sounds more or less coherent? Bizarre! And unexpectedly genocidal in places! (Well, it's not really unexpected because it's Tepper, but still.) And there is that bit with the interchangeable theocrats scheming for power in unfollowable subplots. But it sounds like the book mostly managed to keep the incomprehensibility to that part alone, whereas in your other Tepper reviews it seems to slowly take over the whole book?
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Date: 2021-10-27 04:22 am (UTC)Out of curiosity, is that normal for wooden babies in this world or emoji shrug on the part of the narrative?
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Date: 2021-10-27 02:16 pm (UTC)I swear I have a minor breakdown any time I see someone mainstream-ish praising her work without mentioning the genocidal stuff. Like. How do you gloss over that?
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Date: 2021-10-30 07:51 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-10-27 02:21 pm (UTC)man I remember the True Game series, these things are ABSOLUTELY related in Tepper's view.
but hey, pleasantly surprised the old dude doesn't actually end up with the daughter who looks suspiciously like her mother he weirdly had the hots for!
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Date: 2021-10-30 07:54 pm (UTC)... and speaking of small mercies, yes, thank GOD. Although Tepper clearly thinks that staying with Thrasne would have been a better fate for Pamra, and, like, I guess 'better than leading a crusade and being burned at the stake,' sure, maybe, AND YET.
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Date: 2021-10-27 03:16 pm (UTC)My main reaction to this (besides WTF?, obviously) is that it's a shame that someone with an imagination this bonkers uses it to write gross books instead of good ones? Like, imagine if this power was used for good!
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Date: 2021-10-27 07:26 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-10-30 08:06 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-10-27 09:11 pm (UTC)It was at this moment that I opened a new tab and googled "sherri s tepper terf". You know. Just checking.
(The answer was, she died in 2016 and wasn't on social media so who knows, but also yeah, probably.)
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Date: 2021-10-29 06:22 am (UTC)(no subject)
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Date: 2021-10-27 10:03 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-10-30 08:23 pm (UTC)(no subject)
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Date: 2021-10-27 11:41 pm (UTC)Pamra has the ghost of her dead hot teen bird-alien and her plot-irrelevant slow wooden baby and an entire crusade of dedicated zealots following her across the land and is perfectly happy with her lot. -- I think this was my favorite line from the review!
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Date: 2021-10-30 08:23 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-10-28 03:31 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-10-30 08:26 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-10-28 06:37 am (UTC)that was an experience.
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Date: 2021-10-30 08:27 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-10-28 08:14 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-10-30 08:28 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-10-29 04:31 am (UTC)The Hobb Liveships had to have either been inspired by or arisen from the same zeitgeisty backwater.
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Date: 2021-10-30 08:30 pm (UTC)Now I'm horribly tempted to reread the Hobb Liveships, but hopefully I will be able to conquer this impulse ...
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Date: 2021-10-29 06:21 am (UTC)I actually really liked the worldbuilding (to a point), especially early on when it had this very eerie, otherworldly feel.
The aliens were so sudden! Boom, aliens-are-running-an-experiment-oh-here-we'll-take-your-slow-wooden-baby-bye!
HOT TEEN FISH-EATING BIRD MAN: [ejaculates on Pamra, screams in horror and despair, and dies]
PAMRA: ......?!?!?!?!?!
LOCALS: All. Your. Fault!
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Date: 2021-10-30 08:37 pm (UTC)Yeah, I actually thought the Story of Thrasne and his Wooden Lady would have made quite a reasonable and moderately haunting novella if it stood alone -- as soon as it introduced a bigger plot (and, tbh, eugenicist fish-eating bird-aliens) things started falling apart.
The wise and enlightened aliens in Tepper who are hanging around running an experiment on humanity are ALWAYS so sudden though. They [not the same aliens, but thematically related] show up in Gibbon's Decline and Fall, the whole Sideshow/Plague of Angels/Fish Tails/etc. sequence, and ... maybe also in Beauty but I could be making that up, a lot happens in Beauty ....
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Date: 2021-11-03 01:08 am (UTC)