At this point, Sanctity's forthcoming despots don't want to stop this species-destroying plague as much as they just want to survive it. Nothing is acknowledged to die'(p.37), Sanctity's cheap labor force is being euthanized by this inexorable pestilence. But with the stagnation implied by the quip, 'Nothing grows. Then there's the 'Moldies'(Bantam PB, ISBN 0553285653, 1993 ed., p.40), extremists who want to cull the population very, very drastically and in opposition to Sanctity's enslavement policy of the overpopulated masses. Ironically, it calls itself Sanctity and offers its acolytes community and comfort with buzzword slogans like 'Sanctity/Unity/Immortality', baked in typical Orwellian dissimulation. She's in a subservient marriage to Roderigo 'Rigo' Yrarier, the sent ambassador and representative of the civilized worlds dominated by a religious/political ultra-conservatism inundated with reactionary, para-military philosophy and ruthlessness. The plot is similar to Griffith's 1992 Ammonite and dozens of others, in that observers are sent to figure out why Grass is the only planet in the human, one-hundred world universe that doesn't contain the plague that's been decimating mankind for the last twenty years.

She's got Nurture, Motherhood, Determination, Communication and Facilitation tags pinned to her lapels. The settled protagonist is Marjorie Westriding Yrarier. And Grass' hunt-addicted aristocracy on their estates called estancias is certainly a glib-tipped dart at the historically-suffocating patriarchy of the Medieval Ages. Befittingly, father figures are adversarial and/or deluded, drawn by their hate and bigotry. There's usually a pillow fight going on in the subtext flavoring an ecofeminist PoV without the pithy seasonings sometimes affecting the sex wars. But everyone should read at least one of her novels. More often than naught, however, it seems these complex mixings of sidebar stories into the arterial plotting, plus a shaker or two of excess characters with a modicum of personality peppering landscapes that are divergent, alien, and elusive to visualize -well, it tastes overly-spiced, leaving the climax and resolution heavy with feeling mere accomplishment for just finishing the novel.īut I wouldn't change a single, solitary word of the marvelous alphabet soup of Grass. She's always stirring the word cauldron for a variation on the standard recipes, and using a fanciful spoon like broomsticks from Fantasia to give us one delightful taste after another. Then she sat down and put her head between her trembling knees and tried to think of nothing at all. She put the dry, crumbling thing on Lees Bergrem's table.

Grass by sheri s tepper