rachelmanija | Entries tagged with author: tepper sheri

Marianne is a young woman whose parents were from the tiny country Alphenlicht, but was raised in America. After her parents died when she was a teenager, she found that her traditional father had left his substantial estate to her... in a trust controlled by her horrible half-brother Harvey, who attempted to rape her when she was thirteen. He withholds the money from her, forcing her to squeeze every penny. However, she sells her mother's jewels to buy an old house, which she lovingly restores by herself, in between studying for a graduate degree and working in the campus library.

Marianne meets Makr Avehl, the Prime Minister and Magus of Alphenlicht, when he comes to campus for a lecture series. (Alphenlicht is so tiny that "Prime Minister" doesn't have quite the usual meaning or importance.) He looks exactly like Harvey but is much nicer. Realizing that they must be distantly related, they immediately bond and flirt.

He discovers that Harvey has been attempting to work evil magic on her by sending her unpleasant gifts, such as a painting of a girl being menaced alone at night and a Japanese wood carving of a creepy ghost, and replaces them with similar but positive ones, like a painting by the same artist of happy girls lighting up the night and a Japanese wood carving of two mice gnawing a nut, to break the spell in a way that won't alert Harvey that it's been brokem.

Marianne begins learning more about Alphenlicht and its magic and her heritage, while she and Makr Avehl try to figure out who's been teaching Harvey magic...

The first half of this book, which is the part I described above, is a favorite comfort read of mine, and I've re-read it many times. Despite the dark elements, it has a powerful atmosphere of coziness and healing.

Sometimes a book strikes a chord with me that doesn't have much to do with its objective merits. Writing out the story of the first part of this book, it has a weird quasi-incestuous theme with her love interest looking just like her abusive half-brother, and being related to her albeit distantly. No idea what's up with that. But Marianne is charming, I could read forever about her restoring the house she loves, I adore her getting taken out for dinner and lavished with affection and good food, and the Alphenlicht lore and magic is fascinating.

Halfway through the book, Marianne is whisked into a series of bizarre, surreal, dreamlike otherworlds. Until now, I never managed to get very far into the second half of the book, despite re-reading the first half multiple times, even though the entire book is under 200 pages long. This time I determinedly plowed through to see if it ever gets back to the charm of the first half. The answer is no. It ends very abruptly with a transfer to a different timeline, which I assume is picked up in one of the sequels which I've never read.

So this is an extremely odd book, only half of which I even find readable let alone good. And yet I can't tell you how many times I've taken it off the shelf to re-read Marianne's date with Makr Avehl, or the box of evil gifts and its replacement box of similar good ones, or her happiness at waking up in a house she's made beautiful.

Do you have any books that you love only in part, but you love the parts a LOT?

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The colonized planet Jubal is full of Presences: immense and beautiful crystal formations that shatter into deadly shards when people come near them. People can only travel past them when accompanied by Tripsingers, who sing melodies that either calm them down (if you believe the Presences are alive) or resonate at frequencies that prevent shattering (if you believe they're just rocks.)

A bereft Tripsinger whose wife and brother died trying to tame the one Presence that has never been successfully sung goes on a quest to find out what happened, joined by two apprentices and a woman who knows a secret that will change everything. They're pursued by a ridiculous number of assassins, some who are religious fanatics who want people to leave the Presences alone, and some who are sent by a corporation that wants to destroy the Presences so they can make more money off the planet.

There's also the beings native to the planet, the Viggies, who were my favorite characters - a convincingly alien race with its own culture, biology, and factions, sketched out fascinatingly in a relatively small amount of page time.

After Long Silence focuses on what Tepper does best, which is to create a weird, mysterious world and explore it. The plot is kind of wobbly and several plotlines and mysteries are either dropped or given somewhat unsatisfactory explanations, and the human characters are 50-50 between fine, and boring or annoying. The batshit quotient is relatively small and there's no eugenics, though Tepper does shoehorn in her favorite villains, misogynist religious fanatics.

I enjoyed this for the world, the Presences, and the Viggies, but Tepper has written both better books and books which make for better book reviews.

Content notes: rape, misogyny, ableism.

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Does "bonkers even for Sheri Tepper" have any meaning? If so, let me just attempt to describe the plot of this book.

Thrasne is a young boatman in a terraformed world split by a great river which no one is allowed to cross. You can travel up and down, but not across. Also, no one is allowed to travel east. West only. If you leave your village and go east to another village, you can never go back. You can make a full-circle pilgrimage but it takes fifteen years. These are all religious prohibitions.

The river is contaminated with a blight which turns all organic matter to wood, so you need to fish very carefully because if you touch a wood fish, you become wood too unless you decontaminate it first. It's inhabited by many bizarre creatures, including strangeys which I thought were giant floating jellyfish but disappointingly turned out to be more like whales, which spit out bones which are ground up and made into a spice. I was so sure that bone-spice would turn out to have some sinister and/or revelatory meaning since practically everything else does, but no.

People are "selected" after they die, supposedly by God, and the unlucky ones are made into zombies that work till they fall apart; due to this, there is a secret society of people who will throw your body in the river so you can become a wood statue rather than a zombie.

And all that's not even the plot! That's just the world. The plot is that Thrasne has been obsessed since childhood with the image of a perfect woman, and carves hundreds of images of her in wood. He is shocked when he finds the body of a drowned woman who became a wood statue who looks just like his statues, and fishes her out and decontaminates her and keeps her in his cabin. He eventually discovers by drawing thousands of images of her and making a flip-book that she's alive, just very slowed-down, and is asking him to check on her daughter.

MEANWHILE the daughter has joined the world's main religion which is of course a sinister front for a terrible secret (religions in Tepper are always sinister fronts for terrible secrets) that the avian natives of the planet can only eat people once they're zombified with a fungus and that's why the zombies. This part is neatly set up by it being generally known that humans are not native to this world, and can only eat stuff native to the world if they also eat earth-grain along with it. This turns out to go both ways.

Before I continue with the plot, I have to say that Tepper's worldbuilding, minus the evil religions with their Nuggan-esque rules, is really neat. She's very good at creating fascinatingly bizarre worlds and the intricate and weird ways their ecologies work. Unfortunately it all tends to end in pro-environmentalist, pro-genocide, pro-eugenics, anti-religious tracts. One of these things is not like the others.

( But you probably want to hear about the extremely tragic results of cross-species premature ejaculation. )

I forgot to mention the half-alien-whale, half-human flying baby born from a wooden statue. Probably because she doesn't really have an effect on the plot.

There's WAY more worldbuilding than I mentioned. The first third of the book is basically a fever dream of an incredibly strange world, and I enjoyed that part a lot. The rest of it, while still containing enough world details to keep me interested, throws in a huge number of new characters and an allegory in a completely different tone from the rest of the book.

I love this cover. It 100% conveys the atmosphere of the book at its best.

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I re-read these recently, before the internet suddenly took notice of a bizarre interview with Sheri S. Tepper from 2008, in which she ranted about how people she doesn't like (including all mentally ill people) ought to be declared "not-human" and lose all rights, said that horror writers are evil, and seemed unaware of the fact that India is a democracy.

Yes. Tepper is very, very weird. I don't just mean politically. My own interest in her reading can be nicely summed up in this review: For those of you who have never read anything by Sheri S. Tepper, the thing about Sheri S. Tepper is that almost every one of her books is a Very Special Episode about Eco-Feminism Plus Some Other Stuff Sheri Tepper Really Wants To Talk About, As Filtered Through Enormous Amounts of Crack.

I was always in it for the crack; I stopped reading Tepper when the lecture-to-crack ratio got too high. I first read these in high school, and the first book of each of the three series has remained on my comfort re-read list. (The sequels get increasingly weird and incoherent, but the first books all more or less stand on their own.)

In the world of the True Game, some people have psychic powers, which they mostly use to “game” (fight wars and politick) against each other. If you like RPGs and intricate systems of magic powers, complete with charts and costumes and cool names like Oneiromancer, Elator, and Bonedancer, this series may well appeal to you too. I am certain that people have made it into an RPG system, if it wasn’t one to begin with. Tepper seems to realize this, because at one point someone asks why there’s all the formal names for everything, and someone else replies, “Because ‘sorceror’s spell seven!’ sounds more impressive than ‘I’m going to smash your sorcerer!’”

The Mavin books are about a female shapeshifter. I wasn’t all that into them (incoherence with rape) but the bits where Mavin learns to shapeshift are pretty cool. Oh, speaking of rape: any given Tepper novel is likely to have some. I think the Jinian books don't, though they may have some rape threats. The Peter series has one off-page rape, described in one line and so non-explicitly that I missed it when I was thirteen, and assumed the thing Peter didn't want to talk about was some sort of torture. (But while I'm on the subject, beware of Tepper's Beauty, which sucks you in with a charming fairy-tale first third, and then suddenly turns into RAPEFEST.)

The Peter books (King’s Blood Four, Necromancer Nine, Wizard’s Eleven) concern a boy in a boarding school for boys whose Talents haven’t shown up yet. It flew waaaaay over my head, when I read it at thirteen, that Peter was having an affair with one of his schoolmasters. The latter is, of course, a villain, and I wish it was only because of the pedophilia, but I think Tepper equated that with being gay. (The affair is consensual; the rape comes later.) Later Tepper seems to have forgotten all about this, because Peter acts very virginal indeed. In any case, they are a lively farrago of powers, battles, shapeshifting, rescues, kidnappings, and investigating the origins of Talents and the world.

They are the most coherent of the series, which isn’t saying all that much. Characters appear and vanish in a remarkably unexplicated manner. My favorite moment of that is when Peter’s long-lost mother makes her first appearance when she abruptly shows up in the middle of a dungeon, performs magic that does not match at all with the systems we’ve seen previously, knits two animals into existence who then transform into guys who then do stuff and then are never mentioned again, and suddenly isn’t there any more.

The best book is Jinian Footseer, in which a girl with no apparent Talent is raised by a bunch of old ladies who also have no apparent Talents, but teach her seemingly small and harmless spells. It slowly transforms from domestic fantasy to pure fairy-tale, complete with riddles and talking beasts, and then back to fantasy again, with clever rationalized (for fantasy) explanations of all the fairy-tale elements. That hangs together as a single story better than any of the others, and is still worth reading.

The second book is fine but less memorable, and the conclusion, which also concludes the whole series, is completely bizarre and features an ending which accomplished the feat of being simultaneously weird, stupid, and creepy: aliens come down and announce that they gave everyone powers but everyone misused them, so they’re taking them back now. Without magic powers, there can be no war! But they’re leaving one single magic power intact, because it will be essential to the planet’s peaceful future: the ability to foresee whether or not a newborn will turn out to be a sociopath, so that they can be murdered at birth if they are. Infanticide, just the recipe for a happy ending!

Despite the terrible series ending, I still enjoy Jinian Footseer and King’s Blood Four. They undoubtedly have the nostalgia factor working for them, but if you like psychic kids, pulp D&D adventuring, and fairy-tales, you might like these. They have comparatively little preaching, except for a hammer-to-head drugs are bad message that shows up in later books, and a hilarious bit in King’s Blood Four in which it is pointed out that the world is SO UNJUST that the very language has no words or concepts for “right,” “wrong,” “correct,” “justice,” etc. But if you value your sanity, avoid the last book. Jinian Star-Eye is the one with the “infanticide yay!” conclusion.