Grass by Sheri Tepper
30 Dec 2017Contains spoilers of the story
Book starts off a bit slow, in particular up to page 50 or so (around the 10% mark), and I almost stopped reading it due to that. To set the stage we have a multiple planet society with its roots on Earth, called Sanctity now due to their highly religious leadership - come to think about it, this is something that feels somewhat off about this very advanced society - but everyone on all planets seems to be slowly dying by an unknown disease.
Out of all planets there seems to be one - Grass - to which we’ll come back in a second, where there seems to be little to no disease. Now what is somewhat un-natural if we can call it that - we have this highly advanced civilization that can fly trough space between planets - and we find the rulers of grass some sort of 1500 rulers (without the ruthlessness) that don’t care about the regular people - Commoners - but spend all their time holed up in their big mansions and hunting. Everyone on Grass, except of course the Commoners which are more in line with the high-tech space age their living in - is rather oblivious to the whole planet ecosystem and other inhabitants - the Hippae, the Hounds and the Foxen (foxes?).
What’s special about Grass - is that, completely unexpected, they don’t have any trees but all the plants are various types of grasses - tall grasses (trees), colorful grasses (flowers), and regular grasses in which we can assume to be included all sorts of other types.
The story, its characters and the environment fits perfectly together (with small quirks here and there) and the main character is Marjorie - finally a woman taking the reins of the story, and the actions - as everyone else seems to be in this sickly trance of cluelessness.
The book touches on lots of points related to humanity, love, human relationships and feminism.