Alone and Unobserved

I don’t know whether to recommend this author or warn readers away from her–my own feelings about her are so ambivalent. What I can say, up front, is that Tepper is intelligent and has obviously thought long and hard about many difficult social and philosophical problems that face humans. The characters in her books struggle with weighty issues with no clear right or wrong answer, and they just as often make the wrong choice as the right one. On the other hand, she tends to be somewhat heavy-handed–each of her novels has a definite message, a message usually pounded none-too-subtly home over the course of the narrative. She has definite problems with today’s male-dominated society, with religion, and with morality, and sometimes her answers to these problems are not very satisfying or logical.

A Plague of Angels (1993)
This is the first book by Sheri S. Tepper that I ever read, and I don’t remember it very well–I was probably in my early teens, and I remember being very disturbed by the story and especially by the ending. Mostly, I was disappointed that it wasn’t the fantasy novel it had seemed to be from the title and inside jacket cover. I liked the milieu and premise of this novel more than the novel itself.

The Visitor (2002)
About ten years after my first Tepper encounter, I picked this book up in my college bookstore and couldn’t put it down. Unfortunately, it was again a case of mistaken identity. I didn’t dislike it (I had become much harder to disturb in those ten years), but I was still disappointed that all the cooler mysteries turned out to have such prosaic explanations. I mean, come on. Why use up a cool premise like that just for a religious/philosophical rant? Somewhat recommended.

The True Game: King’s Blood Four, Necromancer Nine, Wizard’s Eleven (1983, 1984, 1985)
I was much more satisfied with this novel–it’s the third of Tepper’s works that I’ve read, and the first one I actually liked. (Note: It is actually an omnibus of the first three books in a nine-book series.) While Tepper does not completely abandon social commentary, she is much truer to her premise in this story, and does not force the story to suddenly change into a morality play or neo-evolutionaristic thought exercise. I look forward to reading the other books in the series. Recommended.

The Awakeners: Northshore, Southshore (1987, 1988)
I’m not sure why these two were ever released as separate volumes, since there is absolutely no natural division between them. Read the omnibus edition. Somewhat recommended–this book is just set in what I can only describe as a very uncomfortable world. I really liked the ending, and I liked the beginning well enough, but the middle just bogged down and frustrated me. This is the first book where I noticed Tepper’s overt “anti-violent male” evolutionary stance, more explicitly explored in The Gate to Women’s Country. Somewhat recommended.

The Fresco (2000)
One of my favorite Tepper novels, this book actually has a heroine I like. How revolutionary! Other strengths this book has:

• A more light-hearted tone, for instance when an alien race decides to end female subjugation in Afghanistan by smiting all the women with an Ugly Plague.
• Again, a main character that I identified with and liked. Well, since she is middle-aged, uneducated, Hispanic, female and has children, I’m not sure how much I actually have in common with her. But she comes across as a real person nonetheless.
• A deus ex machina that can also be identified with. In most of her books that use dei ex machina, they are mostly ravening forces or incomprehensible beings, but the aliens we meet in The Fresco are almost, almost human.

Where this book goes wrong is with the male characters. The heroine’s deadbeat, abusive husband and deadbeat, manipulative son are the only males with personalities (all others are completely two-dimensional), and they are completely negative. The aliens don’t count, as the heroine says several times–they aren’t male. The ending is also a little weird, having to do with a childish religious sophistry that probably would have ended in galactic war instead of peace, but oh well. Recommended.

Shadow’s End (1994)
Again, more anti-male propaganda. I believed much more in the ritualized tribal subjugation of women than in the race of bigoted, intellectually snobbish, religiously fanatical, human-centric empaths. Wouldn’t being an empath make it much less likely that you would be bigoted/snobbish/fanatical/human-centric? Not buying it. And the ending is not to be believed–the story degenerates into a mystical/religious/environmentalist apocolypse scenario that just left me cold. Since I am an atheist, I don’t think we need a vast, vengeful God of Nature to punish us for hurting the environment, and the methods used for punishment were beyond weird. Not recommended.

The Gate to Women’s Country (1988)
Very effective. If only the characters were more likeable/believable! The women–even the grown women–even the grown, intelligent, independent women–behave like complete idiots around men, and the men behave like complete hair-brained fools all the time. The scenario was much more believable than the people inhabiting the scenario. Recommended.

Grass (1989)
An interesting novel about the first contact between two species, neither of which has reason to trust the other. The main character is a frigid middle-aged woman with an oversexed, volatile, extremely hard-to-like husband. In true Tepper fashion, the real nature of the conflict is hidden, with the author throwing out tantalizing hints every other chapter before blowing it wide open in the big end-of-book reveal. Note to Tepper: This method becomes predictable and frustrating very quickly. Recommended with some reservations.

Beauty (1991)
I am not yet done with this book, but I’m not really sure I care anymore. It just drags on and on, and the hints Tepper has planted have stopped satisfying me. I don’t care what the big secret is anymore! Just end the damn book already!