Overall is was an enjoyable book. It's a bit inventive, I like the break the author takes from the standard militarism angle. It was refreshing to read a story featuring interplanetary clashing that side-stepped guns and conventional war.I like the versions of a person splitting off... and the overpopulation out of control situation. It's cute who the Gentherans are.. I could tell that she had fun inventing the names of alien things. I liked that half way through, I started to feel weird and woogly (that's the scientific term) from flipping between the different versions of the main character.I did have problems with it though. The writing was a bit erratic. At times she would soar into the heights of obscure vocabulary and eloquent sentences.. and then fall back down a lot of the time.. maybe most of the time, into sort of writing 101 level storytelling. At times she reminded me of the simplistic limits of bothered me about Octavia Butler's otherwise fresh and imaginative writing. It made reading these parts kind of.. embarrassing.This effect was made worse by the awkward injection of her social theories into the story line. I know it's difficult to do this authentically.. but still, it was awkward, and repeated unnecessarily. The theories (kind of the whole point of the book) were interesting. I'm glad she put them out there, but it did seem a little forced.Also, things tended to balance out into normalcy for the sake of pushing the plot forward. The British authors I've read often do this, making everything either end up in England or not much straying beyond the characters always having tea and biscuits handy. The characters in this book always had ground under their feet, conventions of 20th century living in some way, and the supernatural tailored to human-centric (specifically United States centric) behavior and appearance.Also the use of the word "race" instead of "species" might bother a lot of people. The various alien species were referred to as races and the overtones particularly at the end of the book are, well, pretty racist if you look at it that way - though technically it would be species-ist. Either way the end result is morally questionable. The aliens were not quite alien enough to distance this sci fi universe from the stereotypes between present day Earth people.
Many children create imaginary friends. Little Margaret Bain really went the distance with hers, though. They are bits of her and they are much more real than one might expect. The book is very inventive. There are many worlds, story lines, and types of beings. Earth is in danger, used up, teetering on being uninhabitable (actually from some perspectives, it's there, except that folks somehow do live on her). Eco-disaster is not unusual in sci-fi, of course. What it does to Earth's far-flung children is a twist in Tepper's hands, as is the major export from the denuded Earth.The characters are solid, even those who are, of necessity, thinly sketched. The story lines and their interwovenness (not really a word, it seems) are fine. What is bothering me is the underlying premise that the basic ecological problem is just too many people having too many babies. I'm half-way through the book & have yet to see any reference to the economic geopolitics that underlie so much of environmental destruction. For instance, the sort of corporate greed demonstrated in the film "Crude" and that has us all worried about global warming would be a more realistic background than what we see here. In fact, given what we know about which nations use how much in the way of resources and which have large populations, Tepper's underlying premise smacks of an alternative explanation for our looming problems that would please Bush & his ilk, almost jingoistic. There is also derogatory use of the stereotype of the southern/country/hill folks who are poorly educated, live in poverty, and use two-first names, the "Bobby Joe" sort of thing. Similarly, the "really bad guys" are simplistically and horrifically evil.So why keep reading? Tepper's inventiveness re worlds & peoples and her sensitivity to character, emotion, and the like hooked me. I had to see what they would do and how well it might work. My "score" is a sort of average of what I liked and what I very intensely disliked.
What do You think about The Margarets (2007)?
I now find myself wanting to reread all (or most) of Tepper's books, because I think that various incarnations of the Margaret character shows up in passing in many of them. I like how Tepper is pulling some of her worlds together into a single universe, with the unifying device of the doors (which connect disparate points in space). In this novel, Tepper tackles the problems of overpopulation and the resulting inevitable environmental collapse. She blames this largely on humans' lack of racial memory and their lack of concern for future generations. Tepper's solutions are admittedly draconian, but I think many of the points she makes are valid. Our protagonist - Margaret - mysteriously splits into several different people, each with their own identity and each of whom have a crucial role to play in saving the human race from extinction. I was entirely entertained by this novel for a Friday evening and Saturday and recommend it to Tepper fans.I do have a beef with Tepper's editor, though, for not slicing out some jarring and ridiculously didactic passages; for example, where Tepper goes on a little rant about No Child Left Behind. I'm sorry, but in a distant, dystopian future in which the Earth is dying and humans have ceded almost all authority to alien races, who is going to remember or care about No Child Left Behind? This is stupidness that the editor should have caught.
—Martha
This cover creeps me the hell out. And it should because Margaret breaks herself into multiple physical incarnations of herself (eep! Sybil!), which matches the cover. This was my first Sheri S. Tepper novel and...I'm just not sure I'm going to read another of hers. She's got a way with words, can describe worlds, people and alien races like nobody's business but this particular story beats you over the head with allegories, which didn't impress me. Is this true in other books of hers? I know that she has some die-hard fans out there -- maybe a recommendation for a favorite Tepper novel so I can try again?
—Mary
I wish Tepper was a bit better at (or more concerned with) science. She says of the future Earth's "space elevators": "There's been some talk of building more of them as ocean-based platforms, but the last time that was tried, a tsunami took it out." Please! Tsunamis don't work that way. At sea, you're unlikely to even notice the wave. It certainly will be smaller than many "rogue" waves. But I have to keep forcing myself to remember Tepper really doesn't write SF, she writes a kind of pseudo-scientific Fantasy. Which I generally enjoy, but every now and then she has characters do things (or makes explanations like the above) that just don't make any sense. Having said that, I really enjoyed this story. The characters—even as seven fragments of one original—were believable and engrossing. The plot was a little predictable, but not so much as to be boring, and the conclusion satisfying (though I could have done without the pseudo-scientific explanation). It is, perhaps, a little too easy to suggest that humanity is as bad as it is because early in our species' development we pissed off an alien race, and they excised an important part of our brains. But there must be some reason why so many of us are such unmitigated bastards, and most of the rest can't stand up for their own principles.
—Derek (Guilty of thoughtcrime)
