She is also burdened by some very old-fashioned doubts.
She is honest, kind, determined, always trying to do her best. As to the link between the Grassian hunt and the plague: inevitably there is one, and it takes all of Marjorie’s grit and determination to uncover it. But the foxen are well worth discovering. The “mounts” are the barbed and red-eyed Hippae, who sometimes abduct their human riders, and the “foxen” – well, I don’t what to give away too much. But as the Yrariers soon discover, the kind of hunting practised on Grass is very different from traditional English fox-hunting – and far more sinister and dangerous. Sanctity arranges to send Marjorie and her family as ambassadors to Grass (including her husband’s mistress and a couple of priests) believing that as they are excellent horse-riders they will win the trust of the hunt-mad aristocrats. The unlikely hero – heroine – in all this is Marjorie Westriding Yrarier, middle-aged, unhappily married, a former Olympic show-jumper, and an old style Catholic tormented by religious doubts. They suspect the planet Grass holds the answers, but Grass itself is led by a clique of old-fashioned aristocrats who want nothing to do with Sanctity or non-Grassians, but who are instead obsessed with their own secret hunting rituals. Sanctity is desperate both to keep the plague secret (not least from the end-of-the-world religious sect, the Moldies, who would spread the plague if they could) and to find a cure. And then, just to add to the general joy, a terrible inter-planetary plague breaks out. Unsurprisngly a lot of people have already emigrated to other planets already. However as one of most powerful institutions is the fundamentalist style church, Sanctity, there are also strict prohibitions on contraception, which means large numbers of people fall foul of the law and end up being shipped to prison-planets. Our planet, Terra, has been despoiled by massive over-population, with the result that there are now strict laws about reproduction.
GRASS is set in a distant, but not unimaginable, future. I started looking for more of her books, and soon after happened upon GRASS which blew me away.
A fairly typical Tepper book in some ways, as one thing this writer does not lack is inventiveness. It was about a bunch of singers who lived on a planet of moving crystal mountains, whose job it was to sing the songs which hit the right frequencies to keep the mountain passes open…. I discovered Sheri S Tepper by accident many years ago, when I picked up one of her books from a sales rack. Guest reviewer Emma Barnes uncovers the themes at the heart of a science fiction classic.
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