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Does "bonkers even for Sheri Tepper" have any meaning? If so, let me just attempt to describe the plot of this book.
Thrasne is a young boatman in a terraformed world split by a great river which no one is allowed to cross. You can travel up and down, but not across. Also, no one is allowed to travel east. West only. If you leave your village and go east to another village, you can never go back. You can make a full-circle pilgrimage but it takes fifteen years. These are all religious prohibitions.
The river is contaminated with a blight which turns all organic matter to wood, so you need to fish very carefully because if you touch a wood fish, you become wood too unless you decontaminate it first. It's inhabited by many bizarre creatures, including strangeys which I thought were giant floating jellyfish but disappointingly turned out to be more like whales, which spit out bones which are ground up and made into a spice. I was so sure that bone-spice would turn out to have some sinister and/or revelatory meaning since practically everything else does, but no.
People are "selected" after they die, supposedly by God, and the unlucky ones are made into zombies that work till they fall apart; due to this, there is a secret society of people who will throw your body in the river so you can become a wood statue rather than a zombie.
And all that's not even the plot! That's just the world. The plot is that Thrasne has been obsessed since childhood with the image of a perfect woman, and carves hundreds of images of her in wood. He is shocked when he finds the body of a drowned woman who became a wood statue who looks just like his statues, and fishes her out and decontaminates her and keeps her in his cabin. He eventually discovers by drawing thousands of images of her and making a flip-book that she's alive, just very slowed-down, and is asking him to check on her daughter.
MEANWHILE the daughter has joined the world's main religion which is of course a sinister front for a terrible secret (religions in Tepper are always sinister fronts for terrible secrets) that the avian natives of the planet can only eat people once they're zombified with a fungus and that's why the zombies. This part is neatly set up by it being generally known that humans are not native to this world, and can only eat stuff native to the world if they also eat earth-grain along with it. This turns out to go both ways.
Before I continue with the plot, I have to say that Tepper's worldbuilding, minus the evil religions with their Nuggan-esque rules, is really neat. She's very good at creating fascinatingly bizarre worlds and the intricate and weird ways their ecologies work. Unfortunately it all tends to end in pro-environmentalist, pro-genocide, pro-eugenics, anti-religious tracts. One of these things is not like the others.
( But you probably want to hear about the extremely tragic results of cross-species premature ejaculation. )
I forgot to mention the half-alien-whale, half-human flying baby born from a wooden statue. Probably because she doesn't really have an effect on the plot.
There's WAY more worldbuilding than I mentioned. The first third of the book is basically a fever dream of an incredibly strange world, and I enjoyed that part a lot. The rest of it, while still containing enough world details to keep me interested, throws in a huge number of new characters and an allegory in a completely different tone from the rest of the book.
I love this cover. It 100% conveys the atmosphere of the book at its best.
Thrasne is a young boatman in a terraformed world split by a great river which no one is allowed to cross. You can travel up and down, but not across. Also, no one is allowed to travel east. West only. If you leave your village and go east to another village, you can never go back. You can make a full-circle pilgrimage but it takes fifteen years. These are all religious prohibitions.
The river is contaminated with a blight which turns all organic matter to wood, so you need to fish very carefully because if you touch a wood fish, you become wood too unless you decontaminate it first. It's inhabited by many bizarre creatures, including strangeys which I thought were giant floating jellyfish but disappointingly turned out to be more like whales, which spit out bones which are ground up and made into a spice. I was so sure that bone-spice would turn out to have some sinister and/or revelatory meaning since practically everything else does, but no.
People are "selected" after they die, supposedly by God, and the unlucky ones are made into zombies that work till they fall apart; due to this, there is a secret society of people who will throw your body in the river so you can become a wood statue rather than a zombie.
And all that's not even the plot! That's just the world. The plot is that Thrasne has been obsessed since childhood with the image of a perfect woman, and carves hundreds of images of her in wood. He is shocked when he finds the body of a drowned woman who became a wood statue who looks just like his statues, and fishes her out and decontaminates her and keeps her in his cabin. He eventually discovers by drawing thousands of images of her and making a flip-book that she's alive, just very slowed-down, and is asking him to check on her daughter.
MEANWHILE the daughter has joined the world's main religion which is of course a sinister front for a terrible secret (religions in Tepper are always sinister fronts for terrible secrets) that the avian natives of the planet can only eat people once they're zombified with a fungus and that's why the zombies. This part is neatly set up by it being generally known that humans are not native to this world, and can only eat stuff native to the world if they also eat earth-grain along with it. This turns out to go both ways.
Before I continue with the plot, I have to say that Tepper's worldbuilding, minus the evil religions with their Nuggan-esque rules, is really neat. She's very good at creating fascinatingly bizarre worlds and the intricate and weird ways their ecologies work. Unfortunately it all tends to end in pro-environmentalist, pro-genocide, pro-eugenics, anti-religious tracts. One of these things is not like the others.
( But you probably want to hear about the extremely tragic results of cross-species premature ejaculation. )
I forgot to mention the half-alien-whale, half-human flying baby born from a wooden statue. Probably because she doesn't really have an effect on the plot.
There's WAY more worldbuilding than I mentioned. The first third of the book is basically a fever dream of an incredibly strange world, and I enjoyed that part a lot. The rest of it, while still containing enough world details to keep me interested, throws in a huge number of new characters and an allegory in a completely different tone from the rest of the book.
I love this cover. It 100% conveys the atmosphere of the book at its best.
