Items related to The Family Tree
Sheri Tepper's gift is to address unflinchingly worst-case futures and confront head-on the reader's fears. It's a polemicist's strategy, invigorating, addictive, sharing the burden of contemplating big issues and the threat they may pose to the individual as well as the whole world. The book's title, The Family Tree, like Gibbon's Decline and Fall, has a hidden double meaning for the reader to fathom: trees have suddenly become rampant in our near future, growing at a fantastic rate to conquer land not concreted over, obscuring small roads and drives, taking over unoccupied rooms in houses - and possibly the cause of disappearing babies, always the fourth child (or more) in a family ...In this world, our hero police officer Dora Henry investigates the murders of three geneticists, meanwhile leaving her awful husband Jared and moving into her own house. Intercut is a story of princes and quests set in the far future when technology has all but vanished - two groups travel together on beasts of burden across a dangerous landscape to St Weel where they board a time machine and arrive in Dora's back garden. They are pursuing an evil person, the Wopat, who travelled back in time to change history. Jared is the Wopat: his pursuers from the future are intelligent dogs, cats, parrots, pigs and monkeys - their beasts of burden in their own time were dumb humans, whereas the Wopat was one of a handful of humans like ourselves still alive in the future. Jared has already killed the geneticists working on developing animal intelligence - producing the creatures from the future. But, also, the plague that will kill all but a few humans has already been unleashed by people intent on saving the diversity of species on Earth. Dora is taken back with the animals to the distant future, where she will deliver a message to dumb humans: that their penance is done.
"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
Review:
This technically polished novel ingeniously combines elements from traditional quests, fables and novels. A seemingly rhetorical question is posed in chapter 1: Why did sociable, smart Dora Henry marry cold, controlling Jared Gerber? But that question is the key to the book and to the parallel stories told by Sheri Tepper. The sets of characters unravel their separate puzzles until all become different aspects of the same web of events, shaking the reader's, and Dora's, perceptions to the core. Tepper's linguistic sleight of hand with metaphor and image is breathtaking, her storytelling deft and funny, and her characters memorable and sympathetic. Topical, mythical, archetypal and provocative, this is a book no fantasy or science fiction reader should miss.
Review:
From reviews of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall:
‘The Women’s Room invaded by Big Brother. A provocative, devastating, enthralling consciousness raiser’
Kirkus Reviews
‘Visceral and arresting. Curl up with it’
FT
‘Opening as near-future realism, the novel metamorphoses into a mythical telling of the struggle between those who desire domination and the forces of balance and harmony.’
New Scientist
‘As always, Tepper creates excellent female characters transported by a swiftly flowing plot’
PW
‘Tepper never forgets to give the reader a gripping story on which to hang the serious concerns that lie at the root of her books... she shows how taking responsibility for one’s own life and actions can become a kind of butterfly effect’
Fantasy and Science Fiction
"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.
- PublisherVoyager
- Publication date1997
- ISBN 10 0002256231
- ISBN 13 9780002256230
- BindingHardcover
- Number of pages500
- Rating
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