Sheri S. TepperRecensioni

Somehow I missed this when it came out in 2000. I loved that it looked at so many problems that are unfortunately still huge issues. I can't help but think Tepper was so underappreciated because of her feminism and care about the environment. Looking her up, I was shocked to see had won no Hugo or Nebula awards but she was writing when even more of a majority of folks voting for the awards were male.

F/SF

F/SF

This is a book that seems weirdly current. We have a character that changes gender in his/her sleep. We get homosexual characters. We have different races and shapes of people that try to survive in a world where this religious organization is trying to separate everyone by appearance. Our group of heroes becomes all outsiders in one way or another.

The story seems very typical. Each hero is following a quest, looking for a certain artifact. Believe me, it's not going to be typical.

I really loved the world-building. It goes quite deep for a standalone. Besides the separation of religion, we have local religions and beliefs. And quite a bit of history that plays a big part in the book.

It might not be a strong book in all its length, but it has brought up some questions that made me think.

The ending made me a bit mad at first, but in the end, I found it fitting.

This book is hard to rate. 3.5 going to 4 because it's something I will carry with me for a while and because I feel like I could get more out of it on re-read.

(Sheri S. Tepper) mystery. Very good, intelligent. Main character Jason Lynx, an antique dealer/expert. Tepper well known as Science fiction author.

Deep world building, highly intriguing and thought provoking social themes.

Surprisingly good. The concept was interesting from the start and the story was really not bad. I had some moments of impatience, particularly when some of the girls fall for the deceptions of the boys, but the ending was quite good. I read this too fast to see it coming, but there was a nice symmetry to it all. I didn't like the thing Tepper was doing with the play at first, but in the end, it did fit quite well.

I am so glad Jininan was in this book! I don’t think I would have liked it as much otherwise.
I did enjoy Wizard’s Eleven quite a lot - excellent writing, wonderful characters (see above), the world was still interesting, Peter did grow up a bit, and it was a nice blend of fantasy and sci-fi.
But:
- the main villain was a caricature
- all the bad guys were relatively easy to deal with
- the revelations about “the Great Plan” and the ending felt rushed and not really thought through = unsatisfying.

I am interested in reading Sheri S. Tepper’s later books, though. Apparently, there are also other books set in the same universe, I might give these a try at some point.

I like to drown in long novels, but I also appreciate when authors create an interesting universe, great plot and believable characters - with subtle means and all in the space of 200 pages. Savouring the rest of the Land of the True Game is going to be a lot of fun.

For a while, I thought that the book suffered from the “second book in a trilogy disease”. Peter was being a teenager. Peter went somewhere. Peter went somewhere again. And again... and again. (Still wonderfully written, though.) Then we started veering off into sci-fi territory and things got really exciting. So I ended up gulping Necromancer Nine down, more or less :-)

Like a lot of this author's science fiction it borders rather on fantasy and at some points severely strains the suspension of disbelief. Briefly, it is set in the far future on a human colony world where certain behaviour contravenes the moral code of the wider inter-galactic society, a code which is policed by a sort-of supermachine which is inhabited by three human brains, all with a tragic past. This Questioner arrives, bringing an entourage that includes two dancers as its human-derived intution has indicated that dancers will be useful. This is the case because certain indiginous folk called Timmys communicate largely by dancing and singing, and it transpires eventually that both of these are vital to the continued existence of the planet.

The story is very complex with a multiplicity of lifeforms and a strange and quite well realised society based around the artificially createdshortage of girls/women. There are several main characters, and the narrative switches between them. Some are better realised than others, or more sympathetic. There are a number of villains also, and their origin is quite complex, but the anticipated climax where these villains might be expected to make the crisis of impending planetary destruction even worse, fizzles out entirely and is resolved far too easily. The book struck me as an ambitious mess on the whole and although there were good aspects to it, I can only award a middle of the road 3 stars.

This is the follow up to 'Blood Heritage'. Unfortunately, for me it didn't come up to the same standard. I had a few issues with the first book but in this they were compounded. The female lead from book 1, Mahlia, returns and now she is married to Badger and they have a child Elaine as well as the five year old son from Badger's first marriage, Robby. Badger is not in this story very much, apart from a few cameos where he makes one flying visit and makes a few phone calls from where he is working abroad, and that is just as well. He was rather annoying in book 1 and is beyond annoying in this sequel as he has made Mahlia promise to put aside her psychic abilities - as if that would be possible - and to cut off all contact with the three witches, led by Molly, who previously saved the lives of himself, Mahlia, Robby and their book 1 helper, the Professor.

Not only that, but despite Mahila working on a doctorate, he insists that she moves to the wilds of New England, find a suitable house and have it done up ready for his return! In another more realistic story, the resulting chaos, building site mess and general stress would take up most of the book, but here is skated over as Mahlia finds a really nice realtor (estate agent in UK parlance) who happens to be connected via marriage to various craftsmen who are all really helpful and can turn up at a moment's notice to do any work, plus get it done in no time flat. Also superhelpful is the spry old lady and her children/grandchildren who can come by to do any cleaning or garden work that Mahlia needs done. Just as well, considering her childcare duties.

Mahlia suffers from headaches caused by bottling up her psychic abilities - though I don't really see how she could - and worries that Badger will blame her for Robby's increasing absorption in a couple of "imaginary friends", a little girl called Cynthia and a sea captain called Captain Bone, both of whom seem to have told Robby quite a bit about the disturbing history of the area in which they live.

The book has a very longwinded build-up and consists for about two thirds of people having conversations. Eventually a couple of really nasty scenes appear: unlike book 1, where I had been sure that the Professor was 'for the chop', in this book being a nice person is no guarantee that you won't come to a nasty end. Book 1 had reserved that fate for various villains alone. Then after Mahlia finally admits that Badger's insistence on putting the supernatural at bay is endangering herself and her family, and gets back in contact with her witch friends, they decide that Mahlia has to go to Haiti and get advice from a priestess called Mambo Livone. At that point, things start to motor and the book's pace and involvement picks up. But that is really late in the story.

I liked the sequence in Haiti and the character of Mambo Livone. However, unlike book 1, the characters of the witches, Molly in particular, didn't come over as well as before. Perhaps there were just too many characters in this story, with umpteen different ones in the community into which Mahlia had moved. And if a lot of development is spent on one in particular who is then killed off, that does tend to leave a hole in things as far less time was spent developing others, who remained ciphers.

The story is more grisly than book 1 and has a real trigger warning, stronger than the first book's, in the scene in Haiti set in a graveyard. I had a continuing problem with Mahlia also; if anything, she comes across as more of a wimp than in book 1. So I'm afraid this could only reach a 2 star "OK" rating as far as I'm concerned.

I found this novel, the first of Tepper's I've come across that I would classify as horror or dark fantasy, a bit of a mixed bag. On the one hand, I liked the focus on female characters, especially Molly the farmer's wife who turns out to be a lot more, and also the eccentric Professor with his dogs named after famous Buddhist scholars. Mahlia, the female lead, a pyschic who is half Polynesian and half French, is a bit weak, mooning about the male lead, Badger Ettison, who is rather a chauvinist. The fact that his wife Carolyn and son Robby are supposedly dead should make him more sympathetic, but most of the time I found him annoying.

There are some interesting twists though I did rather anticipate the one where Roger Bacon, the famous medieval scholar/friar turned out to be responsible for the present troubles. In essence, a field has been dedicated to a labyrinth or maze for generations, with gates that have to be kept locked: a contrivance which is a prison for a very dangerous entity.

Badger's mother-in-law, wife and son are implicated, and the quest by Badger, Mahlia, the Prof and Molly to find out if Carolyn and Robby are still alive, and to combat the danger threatening all of them, leads them to an old friend of Carolyn's with links to the first location. Michael Shiel leads a strange colony up in the mountains with an odd temple and very disturbing 'religious' practices based upon - trigger warning - rape and murder of young girls . That whole section left a lot unexplained, such as how would apparently ancient images of a Hindu style deity or demon be engraved within caverns in the Colorado area of the USA?

On the whole the book balanced out at a 3 star rating for me; it had enough likeable characters and elements, but also sufficiently annoying ones such as Badger to end up as a middle of the road read.

I have in the past enjoyed some of this author's novels, but thoroughly disliked others. This one almost scraped into the 'OK' category because there are some aspects which were enjoyable. The trouble is, these are outweighed by the Mary Sue nature of the protagonist Benita (abused dormat wife turns into confident articulate representative after suitable 'adjustment' by benevolent and powerful aliens), and the wish fulfilment which resolves all the world's problems by the intervention of those same aliens.

There are a couple of subplots dealing with other, inimical aliens and their alliance with a small coterie of reactionary anti-feminist, anti-environment politicians, but those difficulties are fairly easily swept aside. And the central connundrum of a civilisation which has based its peaceful interventionist stance on a false reading of a work that has been deliberately obscured - the Fresco of the title - is satisfied by a solution in which the ends satisfy the means.

There are some attempts to be satirical/humorous - for example, the misogynism shown to women in a Middle Eastern country is dealt with by making the women appear ugly and smelly so that the men no longer feel the need to imprison them - but those I found clumsy.

The book isn't badly written as such, but it is unrelentingly didatic and has quite a bit of infodumping especially at the start where we are given Benita's background. And after being told very clearly that the alien emissaries are non sexual (their race differentiates at age thirteen and only some individuals can reproduce) the whole ending seems to turn this on its head. My basic problem with it is that it is a 'magic wand' way of solving all the world's problems, including many still with us today, suggesting that humanity is incapable of bettering itself - an update to the theme of the Erich von Daniken bestsellers of the 1970s. In other words, we are doomed unless beneficient aliens step in to bail us out. So I'm afraid I didn't like it, hence the one star rating.

This is connected with her Raising the Stones novel about the Hobb gods, and also late on features a character from 'Grass', both of which I've read earlier.

Sadly, about halfway through, she piles too many impossible things on top of each other and the book collapses for me.

Sadly this one fell to bits before the end. The resolution didn't really make sense - *god* creates huge evil smelling jellyfish that eliminate people on worlds in one sector then proceed to eat up all the native life left ... and then brings back all the creatures people have selfishly killed off earlier and stored as patterns in a computer. I also didn't believe that the male songfathers would see 'living on' as big bats with big teeth as a type of immortality and make a 'bargain' with god to hand over their pregnant women to same ... not a keeper I'm afraid.

I really liked a lot about this book - great world-building, characters with interesting internal lives, interesting moral introspection - but something didn't quite click for me. I'd still recommend it.

A natural choice for this LeGuin fan. Interesting, unsettling, and full of the everyday details of living in a different world.

Good sci-fi about the ecology of an Earth-like planet.

Plotting and accomplished writing felt thin on the ground. Something of a fantasy-sci-fi cross seemingly aimed at the YA audience, the story had less development than expected. I wasn't enthralled by such cavalier use of the chess-game attributes as a storyline. Probably more appealing to the YA gaming teenagers.

2019 reread: No real change in my opinion though I think that I appreciated Mavin and Himaggery's relationship more this time around.
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This second trilogy in the Land of the True Game series goes back in time to give us, as the title says, the chronicles of Mavin Manyshaped (Peter's mother). Not quite as enthralling as the first trilogy but it does show the beginnings of a more feminist viewpoint which was the hallmark of many of Tepper's later works.

2019 reread: No real change in my opinion.
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At first I wasn't sure that I was liking this last trilogy of the Land of True Game series, but as I got deeper into the story, it came together. I do think that the first trilogy was the best but it was satisfying to reach the conclusion.

While I enjoyed this fantasy, the book didn't live up to my expectations based upon Tepper's later books.

I liked many of the concepts and some of the characters, but the storytelling was a bit clunky and rudimentary. I gave it three stars anyway, perhaps just because I really like the other Tepper book I read.

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