![]() ![]() Tepper does know how to write a plot and create a sense of suspense that keep the story moving forward, making it hard to put the book down. I liked them, wanted to like them, and didn't like them to varying degrees. And now I've read them as part of my ongoing category challenge to eliminate my fiction TBR piles. I had heard great things about the Arbai trilogy and finally managed to round up copies of Grass, Raising the Stones, and Sideshow. I can sympathize with that kind of liberal fantasy about how to cure what ails mankind (and it is very much *man*kind in Tepper's stories) even as I dislike some of her presentations of how that would work. She tends to rely rather too much on deus ex machina for my taste in the form of some sort of benevolent ultimate power, whether that's in the form of aliens with superior technology (Fresco) or a sentient planet (True Game) in the best animist sense of early modern ecological theories a la Clements or colonization by a fungal network that bestows collective empathy (Raising the Stones). ![]() Her books explore themes of patriarchy, religion, misogyny, ecological destruction, the paradox of tolerance, and how do societies deal with bad actors, as individuals or as a class or as a whole society (to keep going up levels of analysis)-in other words questions of morality and ethics. ![]() ![]() Tepper is very much a second wave ecofeminist speculative fiction author. ![]()
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