The Fresco

By Sheri S. Tepper

Aliens have discovered Earth. It is quite a mixed bag of aliens, though. Some want to help us. Some want to eat us. But the ones who want to help us mainly want human beings to straighten out and be good neighbors to each other. It seems that neighborliness is the requirement for joining the galactic union. But neighborliness doesn't come easy for human beings. So the friendly aliens go about imposing their vision of proper human society upon the Earth. Jerusalem vanishes and now no one can fight over it 'cause it ain't there no more! Oppressive Muslim males suddenly find their women changed into ugly old men. And towards the end of the book, alcoholics can no longer tolerate booze, one sip makes them vomit. Human don't so much learn to be neighborly as have it forced upon them by the aliens as the aliens infiltrate the atmosphere with their invisible control mechanisms and chemicals. And that's the happy ending. The sad ending is leaving humanity to deal with its own problems and being turned into game animals to be hunted by the bad aliens, with the added promise that the predator aliens would not be allowed to exterminate us. Take about being between a rock and a hard place. Mind control versus being hunted for sport.

I did enjoy this book a lot. I thought the nice aliens were interesting even if rather creepy with their mind control and their parasitism. One race of aliens implants their eggs in the bodies of host animals and it turns out middle-aged, conservative men make ideal hosts. Those are the good aliens. The bad aliens are just a bunch of blood-thirsty killers who want to turn the Earth into a giant game park with humans as their main target. As they point out, there is a surfeit of humans on the Earth and they would be doing us a favor by thinning the herd.
Tepper imposes a new order on the world, taking away freedom of choice and using mind control to keep people from realizing what they have lost. It's a creepy and frightening vision, and one that doesn't appeal to me. So I didn't find her happy ending to be very happy but I still enjoyed the story even if I don't agree with her solution for humanities many ills.

For another review, check out http://www.bewilderingstories.com/issue160/fresco_rev.html.

Gibbon's Decline and Fall

By Sheri S. Tepper

A group of girls become friends in college and form a club called the Decline and Fall Club in which they promise never to allow themselves to decline and fall. One of the girls, Sophy, seems mysterious and different but the other girls never figure out her secret.
Forty years passes. The women still get together for an annual Decline and Fall gathering. They have been successful, for the most part, in their lives. They have various professions: a doctor, a lawyer, a scientist, a society wife, and a nun. And Sophy, who fights for women's rights and to protect abused women.
Then the group gets word that Sophy has committed suicide. Of all of them, she was the least likely to do such a thing. But in the years after her death, she seems to be haunting the women. They hear her voice, they get glimpses of her. Maybe there is something she wants them to do for her.
Meanwhile, an ominous new political force is becoming a major player in the US political scene. Posing as a fundamentalist, moral majority, ultra-conservative group, they appeal to those who long for the good old days when men were men and women knew their place: barefoot and pregnant. Leading the group is a handsome, charismatic man who has come up with a solution for what he calls "the woman problem."

This was an OK story. I couldn't buy its main premise though. I just don't believe that men hate women enough to do to them what was posed as the solution to the "woman problem" in the story. Also, it just seemed to go on and on with too much of it about the young teen in prison for killing her baby. It is basically a feminist story with science fiction elements.

Six Moon Dance

By Sheri S. Tepper

At a time in the future and after humanity has spread to the galaxy, on a certain planet a new social order has been created. Females are more rare on this planet and thus are more valuable. A man wishing to marry must pay a dowry for his bride. Further, men are required to wear veils that hide their faces when in public lest their naked faces tempt women into uncontrollable lust.
When people first settled on to this planet, Newholme, extensive surveys has shown no intelligent life on the planet. But later, suddenly, intelligent natives appeared. Legally, people were forbidden to settle on planets that already had native populations. Frightened of losing their planet, the people hid the fact there was an indigenous population from the central authority, the Council of Worlds (COW for short).
But word leaked back to COW and an investigator was sent to Newholme. This investigator, part machine and part human and known as the Questioner, has the power of life or death over the people of Newholme. So the people are frantic to hide what they have done and they order all the native peoples into hiding.
What the locals don't know is that there are no native peoples. There is just one native person and all the little natives running around are just extensions of itself. Living everywhere, nothing occurs on Newholme that this entity doesn't know about. And it is pleased to learn of the arrival of the Questioner. Not because it wants the humans punished for invading its planet. It is pleased because it needs the Questioner's help and human help to solve a very big problem, a problem so serious that if not dealt with very soon will cause the annihilation of the planet Newholme.

This is a fascinating story. Tepper has some imagination. Her strange human society seems like it would work, in some weird, creepy way. Reading about the people of Newholme was very interesting. Also her aliens are very alien and yet not so alien that they are unsympathetic or incomprehensible. She tells an engrossing story with lots of detail and lots of mysteries to wonder about and discover the truth about later in the story. Especially intriguing was the fauxi-dizalonz, a part of the native being of Newholme, a pool where its old parts are melted down and reassembled good as new; and it so happens this pool works on humans too!
One thing I didn't like about the story was not the conclusion, but the ending. At the end of the story, the Questioner is given the opportunity to enter the fauxi-dizalonz and be reborn. It's pretty clear the Questioner will end up entering the pool but the story ends before that happens and we never get to know how it would affect the part-human, part-machine being. I would really liked to have known that!

New Words

Hispidity: Hispid means covered in short, stiff hairs; bristly. 'Haraldson further provided that persons must not only advocate but assure personal rights for all races, and that they must not discriminate against born, hatched, aggregated, or budded creatures on the basis of species, morphology, color, hispidity, gender, age, or opinion, except as species, morphology, gender, et al. provably altered the consequence of any given situation.'

Corpora callosa: The corpora callosum is the band of nerve fibers that connects the right and left cerebral hemispheres of the brain. 'Because it [the Questioner] held three human brains and unlimited memory, complicated corpora callosa and storage units of enormous capacity were required, but the solutions to these and other problems of structure and design were uniformly inspired.'

Brachiate: Swing from one hold to the next (like a monkey). 'She [the Questioner] was enormously strong; she could swim, dive, fly, brachiate, crawl, or climb mountains.'

Miscible: Capable of mixing or blending. 'Clothing, ideas, fads, convictions, all had been transitory and miscible.'

Analects: Collection of moral and social teachings of Confucius, including the concept of the Five Relationships. '"I am memorizing whole book of Confucian analects."'

Marmoreal: Resembling marble or a marble statue. 'The seating area sloped down to an oval dais with a curved back wall against which stood the three effigies of the Hagions, marmoreal images four times the height of a woman, each the likeness of robes draped around a female figure, but with only an emptiness inside.'

Adits: Entrances or passageways. 'Instead he was in a maze of passageways that branched opening onto narrow catwalks that crossed open space to small, dark balconies from which, ascending or descending by ladders, one came upon narrow adits leading to crawlways the went hither and thither in all directions through the ancient fabric of House Genevois.'

Ramified: Divided or branched out. 'No effort had been made to map the ramified and interpenetrating layers.

Neap: The lowest high tide of the month. 'A two big-moon neap, full or dark, was low, but a three big-moon neap was lower, and an all-moon low sucked the water out of the bays to leave mud flats extending to the horizon.'

Squamous: Scaly. '"It's a scale," she said. "From some sort of squamous creature."'

Eidolon: 'She was a perilous eidolon, a symbol of marvel and romance.

The Family Tree

By Sheri S. Tepper

The first sign that Dora has that life is headed in a new direction is that bold and fast growing weed that has popped up in a crack next to the stoop of her house. This is a yard where not even flowers are allowed to grow: too messy. Jared, Dora's husband, likes everything precise and neat and no weeds allowed.
But this new weed is just the beginning because before much longer, it seems like all the plant world has gone loop-da-loop. Not only are new, tough weeds sprouting everywhere, but the trees are growing and taking over, even: blocking traffic, devouring abandoned properties, even making off with babies in families that have more than three kids. Seems like nature has decided that mankind has had its own way for too long and that now the trees are in control.
On top of that, Dora, who is a police officer, is investigating the similar deaths of three local geneticists. Are these deaths related to the new, aggressive and self-aware forests?
Three thousand years into the future, the survivors of an disaster that wiped out most of Earth's people have not regained the technology of those who came before them. A few pockets of knowledge have survived, hidden libraries, but the knowledge contained in these libraries is flawed and incomplete. It is revealed to a few of these people that some new catastrophe is headed their way that could, again, destroy Earth's peoples. This small group heads out to gain the knowledge they need to ward off disaster. Little do they know how far they will have to travel ... 3000 years into the past, back to Dora's time and location. For their very survival is key to the events happening outside Dora's door.

The premise of this book is a little weird and a lot of fun. The suddenly sentient trees taking over the land and pushing people around was scary and fascinating. Isn't it something we would all like to see? Something greater than ourselves who has the wisdom to force us to behave and be decent to our fellows and treat the Earth with respect? Plus the people of the future are a hoot. Tepper gives little clues about these people as you read the book, still, it was so cool when their true natures are revealed. This is a really good and charming story, and even though it is a pretty long book, almost 500 pages, it is never boring and always interesting. I very much enjoyed it.

For another review, see Curled Up with a Good Book.