(Untitled)

[bookelfe]

A few months ago I went to stay chez varadia, and we got into a long discussion about Sheri S. Tepper, as you do. When I left, she pressed a Tepper book into my hands and announced, "It's the one with CEPHALOPOD MERBABIES."

So I read The Waters Rising!

The weird thing about The Waters Rising is not actually the cephalopod merbabies. . . . All right,

Comments

[bookelfe]

ORANGE MERBABIES!

I am not even going to try to make you read the thing. I AM NOT AS CRUEL AS LYNNE. (Hahahaha but I do have the option to take up $50 tickets to Spiderman next week if I wanted to see it again! THANKS NYU I think I will decline.)

[jinian]

I don't know, I have to do something just as strange and annoying as laying an egg every goddamn month.

(The first one with Abasio does not reach the heights of strangeness that this one does, if that helps.)

[bookelfe]

True, but so does she! She lays the eggs as well, which may be a literalized metaphor but to me just sort of seems like overkill.

(I have vague memories of the first one with Abasio. I liked it at the time, because I like dramatic plagues and playing around with archetypes, but I don't know what I would think of it now . . .)

[maladaptive]

Wait. If she's menstruating, where does the egg come from? Inquiring minds.

[bookelfe]

The egg comes from a biological process unrelated to normal egg production! I think. It's very unclear. But the protagonists do spend a LOT of time wondering if they are ever going to get to have the sexy kind of sex after they are all weresquids, or if they're going to have to have depersonalized cephalopod-sex involving external egg fertilization and stuff . . .

[parcae]

9. At the end, everyone reaches Post-Apocalyptic China, The Most Enlightened Civilization On Earth, and reveals that the entire plot and quest and political maneuvering has been about making everybody swallow the eggs Xulai has been laying so that they can join the civilization of sentient cephalopods under the ocean when the melting polar ice caps drown the earth, as they are shortly about to do.

WHAT.

[bookelfe]

HUMANITY IS SAVED!

. . . . \o/ . . . . .?

[bookelfe]

Some of it is like that! SOME OF IT IS WEIRDER. In all its crack, this is actually pretty tame for Tepper . . .

[bookelfe]

I was so boggled when I reread one as an adult a few months ago that I did a lengthy play-by-play! This is the one with incestuous conjoined twins, evil undead university professors, invisible dragons, and a tour through Lands Where Everybody Is Intolerant Ways So That Sheri Tepper Can Preach Militant Ecofeminism At You.

(At least three of these four things are consistent Tepper themes.)

[teaheehee]

For my own sanity I am choosing not to believe in Sheri S. Tepper. Sheri S. Tepper is a dream you are having.

[bookelfe]

MY BRAIN IS NOT WEIRD ENOUGH TO GENERATE HER. And I freely admit that my brain is pretty weird!