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Oct. 26th, 2021 09:28 pmI made the tactical error of saying on ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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.
( tl;dr cool worldbuilding still eugenics )
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.
( tl;dr cool worldbuilding still eugenics )
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