There's probably a case to be made that Tepper could get herself a nice career creating fictional worlds for other writers. I've only read three books by her and two of those showcase someone with a more than decent imagination giving her characters rich worlds to romp around in, with some thought given to intricate construction and a nod toward how the various moving parts would actually fit in together. Not all of it adheres to the strict principles of logic ("Beauty" sometimes resorted to the all-purpose get out of jail free clause of "It's magic!") but the true test if any fictional world is worth its salt is whether the reader can immerse themselves in that world and buy into it for however many pages. It may fall apart under closer inspection later, but if you can convince someone in the moment that "this not-real place is totally real!" then for most writers that's half the job right there.Which is good, because when it comes to the actual plotting sometimes, she seems to let that slide slightly.Here Tepper gives us the world of Newholme, which is having its second go-round as a settled colony after the first colony (settled by manly men, but we'll get to that later) decided to go pull a Roanoke and vanish entirely. The second attempt seems to have gone much better . . . except for the virus that keeps killing half the girl babies. But the colony winds up functioning quite well, with society stratified in a sort of odd homeostasis, with Hags and Men of Business jointly calling the shots (or the Hags letting them believe they're calling the shots) and pretty, pretty boys that they call Hunks trained as male concubines for when wives want a bit of recreation, or at least someone who knows how to talk about art. Things are going fairly well with all this and then two bad things happen at once: first the planet seems to be slowly shaking itself apart, and the Council of Worlds has decided to send the Questioner on an auditing mission to see how well the colony is following the council laws. The answer: not very well, but they're hoping that with all the cracks opening in the ground she might not notice.For the most part the story follows the training of Hunk-in-progress Mouche, from his sale to the local House for Hunkifying to his involvement with the Questioner as she arrives to start making everyone really nervous. Along the way we get hints of an indigent population that everyone has pretty much agreed doesn't exist (which is reminding me of another story I read recently that I can't for the life of me remember right at this very second) and hints that the original vanished colony hasn't quite actually vanished, but they aren't actually keen on living in harmony with the land either.It's all very fascinating and Tepper's method of taking us through this society in both a grand sweep and up-close view is riveting in its own way, especially in seeing how she's worked out all the sociological implications of it. Which is good, because it quickly becomes apparent that the main plot is going to be a slow train coming, especially when it takes almost a third of the book for the Questioner to even arrive. Meanwhile we dally in smaller stories, like a girl passing as a man, the confusions of two dancers recruited to assist the Questioner, Mouche's repeated encounters with two mean boys. It's all very nice and reads well but the narrative thrust seems to be "We'll get there when we get there."The presence of the Questioner livens things up quite a bit. Possessed of the ability to make a entire colony miserable (i.e. dead) if they tick her off enough, she has a dry sense of humor and a self-assuredness that is a fun contrast to everyone else's obvious nervousness around her, as they smile and insist that nope, nothing is wrong here. Most of the other characters don't make as strong of an impression despite a sometimes intense focus on them and most of them exist more as plot devices than anything else (the dancers are nice but strangely convenient when the time comes, and I'm not even sure what purpose Ornery even serves).The problems sort of hit when the actual mechanisms of the plot start to kick in and she has to fuse all these elements and themes into the narrative. Anyone reading Tepper for even a short time picks up that writing about gender relations is a focus for her and those issues tend to skew slightly toward "aggressive men screw everything up." And while the colony itself is an example of a mostly functioning woman dominated affair, when she starts to drag in mutated members of the first colony (known charmingly as "Thor") and basically collectively sounding like the cigar-chomping old men in the local lodge talking about how the world would be better if the womenfolk went back to what they were best at, namely making pies and babies (not necessarily in that order), you get the impression that someone has opened the window and let subtlety escape. Coupled with the plot beginning to meander when everyone goes underground (characters disappear for large chunks of the book at a shot) and you're basically reading to see what snarky thing the Questioner will say next. Which is every page she's on, and its great.Unfortunately as the book drives closer to the end it starts to become more mystical, with gods inside planets and Gaia-type organisms. I feel like Gene Wolfe could have elevated all this to exquisite if baffling metaphor but it starts to come across as near gibberish after a while as everyone starts dancing and jumping in pools . . . by the time she unleashes her climax off-screen and then has one of the characters comment that it's just like in a story and better for not knowing the whole thing in detail, you're not sure if she's being clever or just lacks confidence in her own resolution. It never quite feels as alien as it should and instead of giving the sensation that everyone involved is out of their depth and forced to make it up as they go along, there's a sense of casual inevitability as our heroes are merely guided to their ending. Even the bad men are more or less disposed of so rapidly and without fuss that you wonder why they were even introduced in the first place.Still, it goes down without too much choking and there's nothing horribly off-putting. For me what stuck the most was how she seemed incapable of society run by women as capable of doing terrible thing in an effort to keep the peace . . . her own revelation about the nature of the virus suggests for a second she's willing to go there but then she pulls back for a more feel-good stance that makes little logical sense in the universe the book inhabits except as a way of more sharply delineating the divide she sees between men and women. Even so, the world she gives us a glimpse into is worth the tour despite the plot at times having all the weight of a very puffy cloud, and I enjoyed the view of the countryside even if the people I met along the way didn't make as much of an impression as she probably would have liked. That said, however, I will give her this: I did not see that last page coming under any circumstances. I don't know if I liked it but in terms of not giving me what I expected, well played, I must say. Well played.
Tepper is an author that always engages in wondrously imaginative world-building and who weaves very complex plots with a multitude of viewpoints together seamlessly. She sometimes gets pigeonholed as an ecofeminist SF author, because ecology and gender roles are frequent topics in her novels, but she never lets her message (which is nothing more radical than that we should think of the consequences of our actions and always treat each other like human beings, rather than men and women treating each other as "other" and "alien") get in the way of telling an engaging story.Six Moon Dance is the most complete novel I've read by her yet. The world is fascinating -- on first glance it is a matriarchy, but the relationship between the sexes is nowhere near as simple as the reader at first assumes; there is an undercurrent of unease from the very first chapter at the mention of "invisibles" and the Questioner; and all this against a backdrop of seismic activity that may or may not mean something. The characters, while never entirely fleshed out (a task nearly impossible given Tepper's propensity for perspective shifts every few pages) are both likable and relateable, and there was never a perspective I did not want to return to.It is also a novel of big ideas, those things that SF is best at: as mentioned, it explores gender roles and human involvement with the environment; but it also weaves in an exploration of personal identity and cultural identity; justice and its enforcement and how that is affected by the experiences of the individuals acting as judges; what it means to be human; and it even does a good job at portraying a pretty convincingly alien alien race.But what is best about the novel, the reason I can't stop smiling about it even while writing this review, is its core sense that life is absurd, and its absurdity, joyous. The climax is absolutely perfect, one of the few I've read where the fate of the world is at stake and yet I was grinning and doubled over with laughter. What is gets absolutely right is that life simply isn't worth living if you can't embrace its compensatory joys.
What do You think about Six Moon Dance (1999)?
The book started out strong, with Tepper's consistently well-done characterization and excellent world-building. The protagonists in particular are especially vivid characters. Unfortunately, Tepper dropped the ball in the latter half of the book. The pacing fell apart as everything came to a climax, as if she had to pack everything into a set number of pages, regardless of the impact on the story. This was especially evident in the subplot involving Bane and Dyre, leaving me wondering why they had been included in the story at all.
—Rich Mulvey
“True, but Corojum had an answer that is equally true, and I like his better! We are made of the stuff of stars, given our lives by a living world, given our selves by time. We are brother to the trees and sister to the sun. We are of such glorious stuff we need not carry pain around like a label. Our duty, as living things, to be sure that pain is not our whole story, for we can choose to be otherwise. As Ellin says, we can choose to dance.”Excerpt From: Sheri S. Tepper. “Six Moon Dance.” HarperCollins Publishers, 1998. iBooks.
—Fran
This is the first Tepper book that I have finished in a while. I think that she is a talented writer of speculative fiction and does weird very well, I just generally have a hard time believing in her characters. In this case, her setting was weird enough that I did not have difficulty. An example is the view (and reality of this view) that some portion (maybe even a majority) of genetically/physically/etc humans are not human in the most intrinsic properties and are recognised or realised to be such by the characters which we see into. I think that Tepper must hold this view herself.The characters were very broad, which is also generally true of Tepper novels.
—Jonathan Miller
