Customer Reviews

Grass

5 star:		(15)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Pros: several complex plot lines that all get resolved satisfactorily, interesting characters that develop over the course of the book, detailed world building - for the planet Grass as well as Earth and the rest of the universe (even though the rest of the universe isn't mentioned much)

Cons: can't think of any

Grass is a planet with no reports of plague victims in a universe of worlds dying of the plague.

Lady Marjorie Westriding Yarier and her family are sent by Sanctity, the dominant religion in the universe (though they are old catholics), to see if it really is free of plague, and/or if there is a cure for the plague on the planet. They are chosen because the nobles on Grass ride the hunt, and the Yarier family is good with horses.

Unknown to them, the bons ride Hippae, and the Hippae are not horses. They are malevolent creatures with unknown motivations.

The green brothers live on Grass, digging up the ruins of a civilization that died out centuries before. A race that may have died of the plague.

There are a lot of politics and a lot of revelations you won't be prepared for. It's a creepy novel at some parts, a tragic one at others. It is well worth the read.

grass. miles and miles and miles of grass. haunting, beautiful and very intreging.
Sheri S. Tepper is one of my favorite science fiction writers and this is definatly my favorite book she has written. it starts out slowly, giving you information and creating charecters; by the end she has created a fast pased story with complex charecters, subtalty and romance. she depicts the human race going in a direction that they could go and each other race that is key, or even just mentioned in the story is very believable. she shows the flaws of a 'perfect' race with the Arbi. Grass is a good book that kept me involved and also made me think. she didnt go in the rather cheezy direction that many sci-fi writers these days go in with brightly colored space ships and wars with evil gooy aliens.

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"Grass! Millions of square miles of it... a hundred rippling oceans,
each ripple a gleam of scarlet or amber, emerald or turquoise... the
colors shivering over the prairies... Sapphire seas of grass with dark
islands of grass bearing great plumy trees which are grass again."

So opens Grass, Sheri Tepper's first fully-successful novel and
perhaps still her best. When I first read Grass, I realised that Tepper is
a genuine wild talent, taking SF in new and unexpected directions.

If you've read any Tepper, you'll have noticed that she takes a pretty
dim view of human nature, especially among men -- and of religion,
especially patriarchal religion. The standard Tepper themes are here --
of course, they weren't standard back then -- but handled lightly and
thoughtfully, with only a bit of the didactic ham-fistedness that mars
some of her later books. What I didn't remember about Grass is the
splendid sense of place she evokes -- Grass emerges as a fully-formed,
beautiful, and thoroughly alien world. The formative image of Grass,
to the Colorado-born & raised Tepper, is that of the American Great
Plains after a good spring, which is indeed an oceanic experience --
one that your Oklahoma-raised reviewer has shared, and misses.

Sanctity, the noxious world-religion of Tepper's Earth, is explicitly
modelled on Mormonism. Mormon readers ('saints') will not be
flattered -- though Tepper has exaggerated for effect. Sanctity is not
nice. At times it verges on cartoonish, but then I would reflect on the
banality of evil.... Tepper does a good job, handling evil. Beauty (1991)
is her masterwork of evil -- a remarkable book, but not for the
squeamish. "Down, down, to Happy Land..." Ugh.

The Hippae aren't nice, either. Neither are the Hounds, another
Grassian species she introduces in the Hunt, and splendidly develops
as the novel progresses. I've seen criticism of Grass's ecology, but to
this non-biologist it seems reasonably sound, certainly good enough
for fictional background.

The extreme isolation and strange behavior of Grass's rural
aristocracy are again drawn from Tepper's Western experience. Larry
McMurtry has written eloquently of just how strange isolated
pioneers could get [note 1], and I remember similar stories from
Oklahoma. Tepper, McMurtry and other senior Westerners (like me)
are just one lifetime distant from the frontier...

Marjorie Westriding -- besides having a wonderful name, and a
remarkably irritating husband -- remains Tepper's most memorable
character. The NY Times says she's "one of the most interesting and
likable heroines in modern science fiction." Well, "me too."
Westriding appears in two more of Tepper's books, but is far less
memorable in those (sigh). But she's *great* here.

The Great Plague, ah, that's where the dodgy biology lies, and it's a
pretty contrived Maguffin, too. And the wrap-up gets a little mooshy
and pat. But these are quibbles. I had a great time re-reading Grass,
and you will, too. Highly recommended.
______________________
Note 1.) -- in his recent essay collection, Walter Benjamin at the
Dairy Queen (highly recommended), and in almost all of his
historical novels. Of course, many of the pioneers were pretty strange
to start with....

Review copyright 2002 by Peter D. Tillman

"'Damn it,' she cried aloud. 'Can't you see that theoretical answers are no answers at all! It has to be something you can DO!'"

Sheri S. Tepper writes engrossing science-fiction. While melodrama is the driving force behind many of the characterizations, the message of this novel goes much deeper than that, addressing such themes as religion and government, guilt and charity, the place of human beings (termed: 'very small being' in a particularly well-drawn scene in the novel) in the future universe, God, class, reproductive rights and overpopulation, and metamorphosis. While it is not a 'Brave New World', it is a sound work of science-fiction, and though it may not break out of this literature ghetto, it is worth however much time you spend reading it, whatever genre you prefer.

I like science fiction. But I found this book quite hard to get started. Information is obviously withheld for later in the book that would make the beginning much easier to understand. It is one of those books with a big secret, and once the big secret is revealed, the book is pretty much over. It is a good time-waster, nothing more.

Grass is a memorable book. I've read thousands of books, and Grass is literary science fiction that speaks to women.

Grass presents a very interesting alien world, one where the entire planet is covered by grasses of various kinds except for small treed areas, with a very original set of aliens. The Hippae and their associated Hounds are the type of thing that can give you nightmares, an enlarged, horrific parody of horses, capable of mentally controlling those around them, with a totally egocentric and blood-thirsty attitude. And the human society that has formed around the Hippae is also intriguing, somewhat modeled on the South American estancias, but with a strong English manor element, as the humans use the Hippae as mounts for the Hunt, a direct parody of the sport of fox hunting, with the object of the Hunt being the Foxen, a creature never really seen in its entirety, but only glimpsed from the corners of the eyes. The ecology and relationships of the various species of the planet form the major scientific underpinnings of this novel, relationships that are somewhat surprising and very interesting.

Into this world come Marjorie Westriding, her husband Rigo, her children Stella and Tony, Rigo's mistress Eugenie, and the family Catholic priests, sent as ambassadors from Sanctity, the controlling religious body on Earth, to investigate why Grass is the only known planet that does not seem to be infected with a fatal plague that is slowly wiping out humanity. The novel's action is driven by the consequences of family learning about the strange social structures and alien life forms of the planet.

While Marjorie, the main character, if fairly well drawn with a fair amount of depth, most of the other characters are very much stick figures that are supporting spear carriers only. This is a pity, as Rigo, Stella, and the dom Sylvan show intimations of being intriguing people, but they are never portrayed in enough depth to make them come alive. The total cast of characters is fairly large, and at later stages in the book it becomes difficult to remember just who each one is due to their limited portrayal.

Grass is at least partially an investigation of religion, faith, and original sin for both humans and for two different alien races. As such, it invites some comparison with other science fiction works that have dealt with these themes - Walter M. Miller, Jr.'s A Canticle for Leibowitz, Orson Scott Card's Speaker for the Dead, and the one closest in theme to this, James Blish's A Case of Conscience. Unfortunately, Grass does not meet the high level shown by these other books, as the crisis of faith experienced by Marjorie and the Foxen is dealt with somewhat shallowly. There is little deep explication of the problems, ambiguities, and paradoxes that entail from the concept of original sin applying to an alien race that were so well investigated by Blish's work. Marjorie's own changing concept of God from the traditional Catholic picture to one where humans are mere instruments of God's will, a virus that He unleashed to perform a specific action, where individual humans are not known by name to God, is a better formed and portrayed concept, but still not at the depth and emotional level that Canticle for Leibowitz achieved.

This is an ambitious work, with many sub-themes twined around the main one, each of which is deserving of in-depth portrayal. As written, this book is just too short to do justice to either the sub-themes or the main theme, not to mention the need for greater character development. It probably should have been twice its current length to fully develop all of the richness of ideas that Tepper presents here. Still, a very original work, more focused on anthropology and with difficult thematic material than is common in science fiction, items which make this a worthwhile reading experience.

I was very impressed by the intense suspense created in me while I was reading this book. Like Marjorie and her family, I truly felt like I was on an alien planet, in an alien culture - I felt frustratingly confused by the dribbles of information (masterfully imparted by Tepper) and was made insatiably curious. However, I wasn't too impressed by the 'evolution' theory behind it all, but I'm going to give credit where it is due - the journey to that revealtion makes up for it. The characters and the interactions within this dysfunctional family are wonderfully portrayed, and gives an added dimension that most science/fiction fantasy books are lacking. Marjorie is an unlikely and unconventional heroine (not the normal romanticised figure - just a mother who cannot relate to her husband and daughter, but is innately competent) yet she is intensely appealing. Not only was I led to appreciate a new 'culture', but I also learnt to appreciate a new kind of character, one I don't often meet up with in fiction.

I consider this book to be Tepper best work. Tepper has created a book that has won me over on vision alone. She is perhaps the best sci-fi author at using imaginative metaphors to bring out the best of her novels.

Most sci-fi authors try to write action novels of some kind to bring out their ideas. Tepper manages to work on a more emotional level. It is hard to come up with very specific ideas about faith that come up in this book (And this book is very much about religon). The story works more throught the mood and imagery that the characters create. Her supporting characters in her books are very often intentally two diminsional. They exist more to protray steotypes or ideas. Tepper managanges this so succesfull that I can belive in her archtype characters more than I can many authors most important characters.

All of those statements although they may see contradictory, are true for me. I couldn't put it down - which would seem that I liked it. Although at times I skimmed over pages that were just too brutal. At the end I was left confused and somewhat frustrated. It seems if it kept me engaged and even after finishing I have not been able to shut it from mind - it must have been a good read, yes? I guess you will need to decide for yourself. I think the book had to do with risk not just change, but risking so that how you felt, thought and lived becomes different. You are not only to accomplish that which you were sent here to do but you become who you were meant to be. Through the philosophy of the main charactors - the Arbai, the Hippae, the foxen, the Sanctified, the bons, the commoners, the Old Catholics, the Green Brothers, the moldies, the climbers and the ambassador's family, I found the contrast that helped establish the theme of the book for me - Risking to Become.