Gibbon's Decline and Fall

by Sheri S. Tepper

A wave of fundamentalism is sweeping across the globe as the millennium approaches, and a power-hungry presidential candidate sees his ticket to success in making an example out of a teenage girl who abandoned her infant in a Dumpster. Taking the girl's case is Carolyn Crespin, a former attorney, who left her job for a quiet family life. Now she must call upon five friends from college, who took a vow to always stand together. But their success might depend on the assistance of Sophy, the enigmatic sixth friend, whom they all believed dead.

Genres: Science Fiction, Fantasy, Fiction, Feminism, Science Fiction Fantasy, Speculative Fiction, Dystopia

480 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published August 1, 1996

About the author

Sheri Stewart Tepper was a prolific American author of science fiction, horror and mystery novels; she was particularly known as a feminist science fiction writer, often with an ecofeminist slant.

Born near Littleton, Colorado, for most of her career (1962-1986) she worked for Rocky Mountain Planned Parenthood, where she eventually became Executive Director. She has two children and is married to Gene Tepper. She operated a guest ranch in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

She wrote under several pseudonyms, including A.J. Orde, E.E. Horlak, and B.J. Oliphant. Her early work was published under the name Sheri S. Eberhart.

Reviews

[Bradley · Rating 5 out of 5]

This one should be put on one of the absolute classics list. I'm really surprised that it isn't talked about even now, but here we are, almost to the 20 year anniversary from when this first came out and it DESERVES TO BE KNOWN.

Why?

It belongs in the same category of The Handmaid's Tale, The Power, The Book of the Unnamed Midwife, and many others that tackle the big issue of what it means to be a woman.

But how does this stack up to the others?

Fantastically.

A group of young women become life-long friends, complaining about the tendency of women everywhere to make a stand and then eventually decline... and fall... the world dragging them down. They vow to hold strong and fast and support each other, meeting every year and being REAL with each other.

Sound good? Well, the writing is better than the premise and more fascinating. The characters are an absolutely gorgeous treat to read.

And if that doesn't convince you, then just wait till things get really messed up all across the world. :)

Do we have a problem with sexism in this world? Set your teeth in this Decline and Fall. One particular note, however. This is NOT a hopeless man-hating novel. It's also not so dire that it becomes a grimdark dystopia. It IS, however, a novel with many very bright facets and a deep exploration of so many different kinds of ideas and viewpoints.

Oh, and it's very bright on some key issues, too, but let's not spoil it, shall we? I happen to wholeheartedly approve of Tepper's stand on women. No one should ever have to live through a Hail Mary, become a breeding machine for misogynists, or be forced to give up the fruits of their labors.

The more horrible stuff is absolutely atrocious and needs no reinforcing.

That being said, I'd LOVE to see a bit more repairing on that medicine bag. :) :)

I'm going to count this novel as one of my absolute favorites of all time. I've always been a fan of Tepper, and while I was kind of put off at the beginning of this particular novel because it wasn't the high-fantasy stuff I'd grown to love, it DEFINITELY made up for it in sheer quality of characters and development and ideas. :)

[Sanya Weathers · Rating 4 out of 5]

The depressing thing about this terrific story with its eerily accurate depiction of just how much fundamentalist Catholics, Protestants, and Muslims have in common when it comes to women... is not the accuracy.

No, the depressing thing is how many people won't read amazing speculative fiction because Ms. Tepper is a "woman's writer." The people who most need to read stories that perfectly capture the struggle of trying to flourish as a woman in a culture that hates women are never, ever going to read past the first two chapters.

Assuming they see the book at all. I've read a lot of spec-fic in my time, and if she had been a he, she'd be a hell of a lot better known.

Anyway. Great book. Not a five star because A) the main (human) bad guy was more cartoony than usual and B) the story kinda goes off the rails with a deus ex machina of epic proportions. But it was nice to have the story end well. Until the machine appeared, Ms. Tepper had done such a nice job extrapolating where the world is headed that I sort of wanted to crawl into a hole.

[Richard Derus · Rating 3 out of 5]

Rating: 3* of five

Saddened to learn of Ms. Tepper's death at 87. What a career! Public service as director of Planned Parenthood out West, owner and manager of a guest ranch, and a solid authorial corpus. Damned fine legacy to leave.

This was a fun read for me. Tepper's prose is facile and gracile. I won't say the book changed my life, but it made me smile and gave me some hours of pleasure.

[Kara Babcock · Rating 2 out of 5]

It’s 2000, and a strongly moralistic conservative movement is sweeping the United States of America. Blaming natural disasters and the declining economy on “unsavoury” elements of American society, the American Alliance wants to restore morality and “family values”. Does this sound familiar? In some ways, Gibbon’s Decline and Fall is ten-years-too-early yet eerily prescient. There is so much in here that rings true, which is terrible. At the same time, it is a deeply flawed book with a simplistic plot that belies its attempt to tell a haunting and worthy story. I really wish I could love and laud this book, but every time I thought I had figured it out, it just got weirder.

Though mostly set in 2000, Gibbon’s Decline and Fall begins in 1959, when Carolyn Crespin goes off to college and befriends a diverse group of young women. They decide to form the “Decline and Fall Club”, or DFC, with the stated intention that they will meet every year and pledge never to decline nor to fall—that is, to be themselves, make their own decisions, and remain strong in the face of the adversity, misogyny, and sexism that remains a part of their society. When we catch up with them again at the turn of the millennium, they are now middle-aged. Carolyn became a lawyer, as she intended, and married for love rather than the cousin her aunts and mother intended for her. She has retired now, but her daughter persuades her to take one more case: Lolly, a fifteen-year-old girl who allegedly abandoned her baby in a Dumpster after giving birth. It’s up to Carolyn to defend Lolly, for if she is guilty she could be sentenced to life in a suspension pod.

Yeah, according to this book, by the year 2000 law enforcement will be imprisoning people in a primitive form of suspended animation. Minor offences merit “STOP”, where the person remains conscious but unable to move. More long-term incarceration is a matter of SLEEP, where the person is unconscious but continues to metabolize and age at a normal rate. As Tepper points out, this system might seem strange to us, but it does come with several benefits. Still, this is a very odd extrapolation to make from a novel being written only four years prior. This, as well as some mentions of greater environmental distress than was apparent in 2000, almost push Gibbon’s Decline and Fall into the territory of alternative history. Even later, there are elements that made me seriously debate whether I should shelve it as fantasy or as science fiction.

All this is academic, though. At its heart, Gibbon’s Decline and Fall is almost a thriller. This brings a lot of benefits—despite a fair amount of courtroom drama, the story zips along at a brisk pace. Alas, it also has a few big drawbacks: namely, villains that are larger than life, and not in a good way. Ultimately, this is a huge problem for this book and its theme.

Tepper is concerned with the status of women, and understandably so! She does not pull any punches as she evaluates the difficulties, both emotional and physical, that women face all over the world. The members of the DFC each have their own personal challenges to face. I wasn’t too fond of the almost-comical stereotypical hick family of the Crespins. However, I did find Agnes most intriguing. Her life-long relationship with the Catholic Church, culminating in taking the habit, has resulted in her internalizing a lot of the sexism promulgated by that Church. In the face of her fellow DFC members she puts up constant resistance, taking a highly conservative and traditional stance. I like that Tepper did not oversimplify the matter by making it “women” versus “men”; there are women who uphold traditional gender roles, just as there are men, like Carolyn’s husband, who are allies in the struggle for gender equality.

Unfortunately, this is the exception rather than the rule when it comes to characterization. Tepper’s antagonists resonate a lot with the contemporary rise of the “grassroots” Tea Party movement in the United States. Now, there are many good conservative Americans out there, and I’m sure that there are even many honest members of this Tea Party who believe its intentions are noble and good. But when this is the same party that courts politicians who claim God causes hurricanes and earthquakes to punish us for immorality or poor economic policy, something is wrong. We’re not supposed to be living in the fifteenth century any more, people.

So the situation presented in Gibbon’s Decline and Fall does feel a little too close to reality for comfort. And I’m sure that there are a few people out there who are like Jake Jagger. Nevertheless, I worry that Tepper’s antagonists are ultimately only straw men; hence, they actually undermine her arguments rather than strengthening them. Yeah, there are plenty of men who are just flat out misogynistic and openly abusive. But it seems like all the men in this book fall into that role or into the role of ally, like Hal and Jose are. There is no grey area, no in-between men who are blinded by their privilege but not openly hostile. In Tepper’s world, you are either enlightened or you are the enemy.

Although the book opens on a strong note, its inner thriller becomes more apparent as Lolly’s trial approaches. There are bugged phones, burglaries, desert retreats, helicopter pursuits, and maniacal plans for the subjugation of all womankind. Carolyn and the DFC eventually decide to pool their efforts into locating Sophy, the most eccentric and enigmatic member of the DFC. They had thought she committed suicide, but after experiencing almost spiritual visions of her for the past few weeks, they are determined to find out if she is still alive. At this point, Tepper throws in a twist that I honestly didn’t see coming. It’s very well foreshadowed, and I guess it sort of works, but … I didn’t like it.

Then the book gets even stranger, culminating in Carolyn having to make a choice on behalf of all humanity. And that broke me. Sorry, but as much as I admire what Tepper is trying to do here, I cannot countenance giving a single person that responsibility. Carolyn has no right to make a decision that would utterly change the nature of our species; it doesn’t matter that she is a “good” or “wise” person. No one should have that power. At that point, Gibbon’s Decline and Fall had run from science fiction to fantasy and back, from thriller to something more … epic … and I just wasn’t willing to follow it there.

Gibbon’s Decline and Fall has its good moments. Its protagonist is a likable and strong character; tragically, she seems to have been transplanted to a world of caricature, cardboard villains and friends. This is an obstacle neither she nor the book can overcome, and what started as a promising journey ended as a disappointing shadow of what it could have been. There is some excellent commentary on gender roles and relationships here, but it’s lost in the noise created by an unbelievable, untenable story.

[Thoraiya · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a smart, near-future sci-fi (at least, it was near-future at the time; now it's ten years behind us) that really brought something home to me.

A smart woman can write a book for other smart women about the sacred feminine, and a small number of readers will enjoy it.

A man can write a thriller for a wider demographic about the sacred feminine, and it will become so pervasive, so widely read, that for some people it will be the only novel they have read in their adult lives.

Gibbon's Decline and Fall is full of eerily prescient, painful truths about life as a woman in the world today, and the power of female friendships. Does it have any good car chases like the Da Vinci Code, though?

No.

No, it doesn't.

There is a lesson here somewhere :p

[Giovonnae · Rating 4 out of 5]

The first Sherri Tepper book that I read... great story.. great heroines...I loved it.

[Tracey · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you only read 1 book by Sheri Tepper, read this one!

[Chris · Rating 3 out of 5]

Possibly it deserves more stars, because it stuck with me for years between reads, but the flaws (IANAL, but I don't think trials work like that; some extrapolations of the year 2000 would have been far-fetched even in 1995; the bad guys seemed a little cartoony - I think most misogynists of that kind think they're not woman-haters but decent guys who make a realistic valuation of women; more seriously, she's not very good at intersectionality) jumped out at me more this time round. On the other hand, it bears remembering that people who vocally dislike Tepper mostly seem to dislike her not because of where she goes wrong, but because of where she's right. I love all the characters, and would have loved to see more of the college section.

[Michael Battaglia · Rating 5 out of 5]

There's something to be said for reaching for a hammer when perhaps a more delicate instrument might do the job nicely.

I never read anything by Sheri Tepper before and as a woman writing SF I didn't want to automatically paint her with the "feminist" brush and assume that because she's a woman everything she writes is cloaked in metaphors about the dichotomy between men and women, just set on other planets or in the far future. Fortunately for me, she didn't bother with the metaphors and went straight into just spelling it out.

This can probably be classified as science-fiction only because its set in the future from when the book is written (the turn of the current century, which now that we're fourteen years past it really makes me wonder where all the flying cars we were promised went) or even "speculative fiction" if you want to be like Margaret Atwood and not go near any of that yucky SF stuff, as if people aren't able to tell the difference between stuff like this and "War of the Worlds".

The Atwood comparison doesn't entirely come out of left field. Much like her, Tepper has gone and written a novel that serves as sort of a thematic prequel to "The Handmaid's Tale" as both have to do with the idea of a fundamentalist conservative hierarchy of men taking over the country and turning women into walking Pez dispensers of infants. In Atwood's tale, we got a life during wartime type of view where the nightmare came true and we got to see just how unpleasant it would be. Here, we get to be on the cusp of it, where men collectively start to think that all the world's problems would be solved if women just spent more time in the kitchen making pies and sandwiches.

If that sounds like I'm trying to be funny, it unfortunately is about the level of subtlety we get here. Our tale follows the world through the eyes of six women who meet in college and decide to band together as friends despite the fact that most of them seem to exist more as checkboxes on the scale of archetypes (the radical lesbian, the religious one, the one with the eating disorder, etc). One of them, nicknamed Sophy, appears to be more special than most , something that becomes more pronounced when the narrative jumps ahead about forty years to the end of the twentieth century and we catch up with the ladies in their various states of success and failure. They've all kept in touch except for Sophy, who seems to have disappeared at some point even though some of the women still hear her voice or see her occasionally. In the interim the world has become more man-oriented, with a wave of conservatism growing that threatens to relegate women to third class citizen status after cats and dogs, promising a new world order that won't be pleasant depending on which restroom door you go through.

Part of the enjoyment of this book is going to depend on how on-board you are for Tepper's gender politics here, as a good chunk of the plot exists to deliver them and conveniently show how a women-oriented world would be better. While I'm not completely behind her on the notion that everything is men's fault, I'm not unsympathetic either (certainly aspects of the last few years of political debate has proven, whatever your personal politics, it's still a valid issue for discussion), but the book seems blatantly designed to prove that she's right in a fashion that borders on the ham-fisted. The gap between the beginning and where the plot picks up doesn't help, as we don't get to see the insidious chipping away of women's rights, the slippery slope of compromise over the decades that puts people in a position that they didn't quite intend. Instead, we're given multiple scenarios with the various women that basically boil down to "men stink, and they're ruining everything."

Which isn't surprising given that the book features more or less two kinds of men, ones that are sensitive and compassionate and caring (and thus are helping our heroines, if they aren't already married to them), or complete jerks who feel that women are worthless and should only exist to bear children. One of the lead men of this ilk, a lawyer named Jagger, is almost a teeth-gnashing parody of manliness, flailing about with a hatred of women that would only border on the irrational if it hadn't already annexed everything around it. He's part of a group called the Alliance, a shadowy organization that in the spirit of every shadowy organization ever, is working with the government and religious leaders (look, fundamentalist Christians and Muslims actually agreeing on something!) to undo every right women ever had and make it a man's man's man's man's world, baby.

The problem that all of this is over the top that its hard to buy into the scenario. When every man they come into contact with is spouting the same "get thee to a kitchen, babydoll" nonsense and the Alliance is bwah-ha-haing about the World To Come in the background, it starts to become so much static as the plot appears to go in circles. Look, Helen is afraid of her husband. Look, Agnes is questioning her faith. Look, Carolyn is defending a Symbolic Person. And golly, everyone keeps hearing Sophy. There's very little nuance to be found anywhere, and if you're at all religious you are going to find this book making you very unhappy at some points. I'm far from the most religious person in the world but even I had to wince when Agnes the nun of the group isn't able to coherently articulate a counter-argument to anything anyone else says, and then gets slapped down by the head male priest anyway because he hates women too like everyone else. Having everyone wearing a priest's habit either be bigoted or deluded (in Agnes' case, clearly its because she's denying part of herself) sort of stacks the deck for the book, especially when Sophy's stories of a women-centered goddess are meant to be taken as entirely reasonable. The book would have been far more electric as a debate if Tepper had been able to a conceive of a rational argument for religion that the characters could argue against, instead of making everyone religious seem like idiots and making it clear where the book's sympathies lie.

Even if any of that was manageable, she sort of shoots herself in the foot by allowing the book to descend into vague magical realism and mysticism, undercutting the ultimate point of the book that the sickness comes from man himself. Instead, the book comes across as unfocused, with the Alliance conspiring hitting against Carolyn's defense of a young girl hitting against religious arguments hitting against a plague that seems to suddenly make men less macho out of nowhere hitting against the dueling faceless armies of old women and men with torches. She's trying for a global cross-section but it never gathers the momentum would give it the horrifying drumbeat of inevitability. By the time we reach Sophy's secret and the origin of the sinister old man Webster who heads the Alliance, it's lost almost all sense of the real, giving mankind a way out by suggesting all these bad, bad men have just come under the sway of a force beyond space and time, making it into another facet of the timeless battle between Good and Evil, where the messier truth would have hit harder, that we are responsible for our own actions ultimately, both as individuals and as a society, and that we must constantly be on guard to ensure that the rights of others are not trampled upon or diminished, as they so easily can be. In that light, the SF element comes across as more awkward than anything else, spacesuit people blundering into your finely wrought drama and wrecking the whole tone. With well-drawn characters and a focused scenario it would have been off-putting. In this case it's more white noise stacked on incoherence.

It's telling that the sharpest and most coherent section of the novel is the trial segment, where Tepper through Carolyn argues that society has to take some responsibility for the way a person is, not by abandoning them and then passing judgement when they don't know how to act. The debates here, while still somewhat one-sided, gain a passion and drama that the rest of the novel is lacking and while the later inclusion of the SF element spices things up slightly, it's still too little too late. We needed to see the world as it could be, not as it almost was, and its a shame that she wasn't able to make a world that I recognize, especially when I can open the newspaper and see these same arguments played out across the world, in shouts and knives, in bombs and laws. While most fiction can function as escapism, I don't think this one was intended as such, and yet with this world and that one facing each other, I'd almost want to escape to hers. At least there, despite the window-dressing touches of grey, I can have some assurance that things will ultimately turn out to be okay, while here we remain a work in progress.

[Muriel (The Purple Bookwyrm) · Rating 3 out of 5]

More accurate rating: 6.5/10.

Full video review: https://youtu.be/6QU-j-MdAdw.

Okay, so, this one was wild... mostly in a bad way. Let's get the boring stuff out of the way first: I enjoyed Tepper's prose, as I enjoyed it in the other novels I read written by her. It was fluid, decently evocative, just-about-the-right-amount of descriptive, etc...

I'll give points for the fact the story centred on a group of lifelong female friends who all met in college, though by the time of the main storyline, all are middle-aged/post-menopausal. That was neat! What was also neat, was the fact they didn't always necessarily agree on everything, or have the exact same beliefs when it came to politics or relationships. Each character felt decently distinct; the nun had her own beliefs, so did the lawyer, the artist, the geneticist, etc... It all felt credible, and somewhat refreshing as well. The side or secondary characters, for their part, were mostly fine as well. I guess the story's main antagonist was a little strong on the 'blind misogynistic hatred', but it was still believable from a character psychology point of view. Especially given the ginormous problem that was eventually posed, in terms of world-building and theming, by the actual Big Bad™ of the story...

So, deep breaths, here we go.

World-building and theming, the good:
• The story starts our relatively light on the SFF, but you do get a "loss of libido" pandemic, which I thought was quite the original concept! The very slight "sex itself is the problem/root cause of Patriarchy" stance this leaned into wasn't to my personal taste (much less belief), but it wasn't egregiously eye-roll inducing either, and it was intellectually stimulating to a certain extent – so that's all good.

• As expected, there was legitimately good (and properly feminist) commentary on the sex-based oppression of women, beauty standards in relation to heterosexuality, motherhood, gender, etc... On overpopulation and environmental destruction, and on the Nature v. Nurture dynamic. Some things were said about testosterone and sexual violence that didn't entirely pass my sniff test, but this book was written in the 1990s, and it really wasn't the worst I've seen either, by a long shot – so fine.

But then, yeah, it got weird.

World-building and theming, the bad (and wtf, honestly):
• Lizard people. No, seriously, LIZARD PEOPLE. Okay, technically, dinosaur people I guess, since them bitches stated they'd evolved from the saurian-avian line. So hey, cool, at least they weren't alien lizard people! But what. The. Actual. Fuck. Ms Tepper. 😂 I'll say this: you legitimately surprised me there; I wouldn't have seen that coming in a million freaking years! But so yeah, this novel went from low-level SF with a 'libido loss plague' and suspended animation prison tanks to "let's crank this bitch up to 11, GO BIG OR GO HOME WOOOOO!" levels of (quite frankly immersion-breaking in this case) SF... and then fucking fantasy! Cuz okay, we got parthenogenetic/all-female, if you please, "lizard people" (who were supposedly the fairy folk/nature spirits of old legend, yeesh 🤦‍♀️), but then we got a fucking Patriarchy alien! The über Big Bad of the story was, in fact, an alien entity – Cthulhu's third cousin no doubt – that fed on pain and violence, and was the principal cause of the emergence of Patriarchy in our species. It then got defeated by the Goddess (yes), in a literal deus ex machina. Fuck me.

• My brain noped out, because that shit cheapened everything! You can't just say Patriarchy was created by an evil alien in a story purportedly taking place in our real world, with its real world history. Not with me! The origins of Patriarchy is one of my pet niche topics of interest, I live and breathe this stuff, and I can't, not in a book that started out with decent feminist theming! Cuz then the freaking dinolizard folk just kept on tacking contradictory and inaccurate shit onto their tale of the elder days of humankind: saying we started out "animalistic", but then started to get wiser, only to be led in a more "chimp-like" direction again by the evil Patriarchy alien. Then you get a spiel about the Abrahamic religions and their fostering of male bodily urges, reproduction at all costs, etc... And I'm like: a) fuck the (always tragically oversimplified) chimp stuff, especially when you also mention bonobos earlier in the book, only for them to become magically irrelevant when it's convenient, b) if anything, the Abrahamic religions tend to over-value male-coded "reason" over Nature, the body, and the female. Plus, there's also condemning of humans destroying the environment earlier in the story, so why double-back like this and shit on the animal, the fleshy, etc... Where's the balance that was initially valued?! So many contradictions, painful misrepresentations, and shit that just didn't make a lick of sense!

And I mean, outside of the stuff I personally found unsavoury or irritating, the simple fact is Gibbon's Decline and Fall juggled with too many concepts that didn't mesh together at all, or taken from symbols and archetypes that really shouldn't have been made as literal as they were. There was more than enough worthwhile material in the story's base premise and its 'libido loss plague'; the Dawn of Humanity and wtf 'out there science-fantasy' stuff should've been left out.

I can't fathom why Tepper went the way she did with this story, but I'm not mad I took the time to read it. The turn it took around the 85% mark was insanely disappointing, and it was nowhere near as good as The Gate to Women's Country or even the two Arbai books I read, but it wasn't a complete waste of time either.

[Mel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sheri S. Tepper was one of my favourite authors as a teenager. She wrote about gender issues in a way other authors didn't. She made me aware of so many things and reinforced so many ideas for me about feminism and gender equality and challenging gender assumptions. As an adult I read much less fantasy and science fiction but when I heard she died I went back and decided to read some of her works again.

This one is particularly appropriate for today. While written in the mid 90s and set a few years later, the distopia she describes could be Trump's America. We have sexism at extremes. A society falling apart and one where only wealth matters. It's a book that focuses on the lives of a small group of women in their 50s. A friendship that's continued for decades. Something that makes this book quite unique for scifi.

There were however a few problems I had with it. There seemed to be an uncomfortable attitude towards the "victims" in the book. *minor spoilers* The friend who had an abusive marriage escaped but wasn't included in the group again. Likewise there was a Big Bad "Devil" who was the cause of all the sexism in the world and the driving force behind the desire to control women. I found that to be the biggest let down. Because we live in a society where women are controlled the same way they are in this book. Where women's worth comes from their ability to breed, to look pretty and many people thing we shouldn't be out there in the world. This is reality and it is NOT caused because there's a secret devil at work behind the scenes. Rather it is simply brought about by the attitudes of people, what they accept and what they don't fight. So I found her cause and answer to the problem of sexism in the book to be a little disappointing.

Above all though the book challenged what it called the Hail Mary Assumption. The idea that women were genetically (or divinely) called to be mothers. That was their nature and something they should all do. That women had extra responsibility compared to men to mother children, and any that didn't, or didn't do it properly, were evil.

It has interesting and important things to say and is more relevant now than ever. Normally I don't bother making notes of interesting passages in books but this one I found myself marking several passages.

"For millenia religous power and prestige had been built on the foundation of sexual proscription. Now the sudden abscence of sex came like the surgeon's knie, abreivating both doctrine and doctinarie. What were sin fighters to do without their favourite sin? Without traditonal lusts what good were traditional values?

"All the Aryans and polygamists and militiamen need to do is be patient. Once we're in power, they can lynch all the blacks, and rape all the lesbians and kill all the government men they like."

"Some went among women who were alone, teaching them to join together, for there is hope in two women, help in three women, strength in four, joy in five, power in six, and against seven no gate may stand. Some even went among men to tell them of the battle that was coming, to explain that it is not male god against male devil, not is it female against male, it has nothing to do with gender but with dominion "

"First was disrespect of female persons, the violation fo the female temples, and the denying of female gods. Then was the disrespect also of other's male gods and the teaching that only one god was true, and he male. Then the teaching about the devil, also male, and to his jurisdiction were assigned all enemies, all strangers. One's own people were of God, other persons were of the devil. Both were male. Then we saw the making of rules by old powerful men, to assure they would have many females to serve them or to bear their sons, from these occsaions the habit famified, and it was said to be the will of the male god. Women were enslaved, shup up in harems or cloisters, prostituted, raped and this was said to be the will of the male god. Women's names were taken from them and they were named for their male owners. Women were considered possessions to be thrown away, burned, killed, battered, mutilated, and this too was said to be the will of the male god, and those who obejected were said to belong to the devil. In every nation man might cry, "Behold we are goldy and our women are kept pure, but those others are the great Satan and their women are whores".

"When racism is promulgated, someone is usually responsible. A death camp, an ethnic cleansing, a marching of skinheads does not happen by itself; there is always a leader, maybe several layers of them. when religious hatred takes place, someone causes it. An inquisition, a crusade, a reformation does not simply occur out of nothing; someone always kicks the first pebble down the cliff."

"If you wish to lead men, you tell them that your power or religion or whatever will allow men to do just what they want to do. You want to rape women? Our god allows that. You want to kill homosexuals? Our god approves of that. You want to force women to bear your children? Our god insists upon it, and upon your shooting anyone who would help her to do otherwise. You want to have eight children or a dozen? Fine! our god say's that's just wonderful. And when the children die of hunger or neglect, when the very earth fails under the weight of humanity, why that's God's will."

[Wealhtheow · Rating 2 out of 5]

A mysterious young woman draws together disparate fellow students to form a band of women that remains close for decades. But insidious forces of misogyny threaten each of them. Now older, less reckless, and without the guidance of their oddly wise friend, can they nevertheless draw together and create a more egalitarian future?

The villains and their plot are cartoonishly evil, but the heroes of the story are well-drawn and interesting. Whole plot threads are abruptly dropped. The dialog is naturalistic, but everything else is a little melodramatic. One's ability to enjoy this novel is probably predicated on one's ability to enjoy 2nd wave feminism crossed with magical lizard creatures.

[Karen Klink · Rating 2 out of 5]

The first book I read by Sheri Tepper was "Grass," and I loved it. I liked several after that, too.

Her latest books, in particular this one, have been too preachy for me. I am into women's rights, but I don't want them shoved down my throat in a story. I don't care for characters that are all black or all white. I don't like predictable plotting. "Gibbon's Decline" is all that. Her soapbox has become more than the story, rather than part of it.

[Trish · Rating 1 out of 5]

Sorry, I just really hated this book. Like I'm all about feminism and women in power but was adding a lizard-people species into the equation really necessary??? I don't think so. The point could have been made without the lizard-people, therefore if I could give this book zero stars I would. I swear, sometimes I despise being an English major and being told what to read.

[Dana Ragnarok · Rating 3 out of 5]

First note: WHOA ABLISM. Second note: this made me hella uncomfortable in a race perspective - not sure if it's actually racist, but be aware. Third note: if you have difficulty reading about children and babies dying in awful ways, this is not a good book for you.

What I liked about this that I didn't about, say, Native Tongue (to use another example of feminist literature I read and enjoyed) was that they manage to show evil misogynists, actual decent men, AND general assholes who abused the privilege they were given. I also liked that of the 6 main viewpoint characters, two explicitly supported the patriarchy, though I felt their arguments lacked the conviction they should have had. On the other hand, I doubt I could have written them better.

[spoilers follow]

I think what this book missed most was actual evil women, which with the exception of Carolyn's aunts in the very beginning and maaaaybe Jagger's mother, it had none. The book keeps repeating "this isn't man vs. woman, it's dominion vs. wisdom!" but it seemed an awful lot like it was women (and allies) vs. men.

I wonder if it was the author's intention to portray the society Sovawanea came from as female-supremacist or as an ideal of equality. The story of Elder Sister's medicin bag really weirds me out. If it's supposed to be a tale from an idyllic equal society, it fails, because in it women explicitly take ownership of men's sexuality against their wills. This is justified by equating male sexuality - or sexuality at all - with violence. Which makes sense if you're a society of parthenogenetic lizard women, I guess, but isn't the kind of morality I'd like to see accepted in our own world.

Also, in the end, Carolyn is chosen to decide the fate of all mankind, which I felt really undermined the premise: you had this somewhat diverse cast of women, and then they all knowingly give the decision to the straight white happily-married woman to decide on her own. That rubs me hella wrong. Also I'm not certain whether the solution she chose was explicitly stated and I missed it, or if it was intentionally left vague. Which I can understand the writer doing, but I do wish she'd have stated a choice, and some of its reprecussions.

Ah well. Guess that's fanfic is for. :)

[Katherine · Rating 2 out of 5]

I tried. I did. This book has been on my to-read shelf since I was in high school (I went through a major Sheri Tepper phase for a while), and I was really looking forward to revisiting an author I'd really enjoyed in the past.

Unfortunately, I cannot get into this book to save my life. Several months' hard slogging brought me about halfway through, and I still can't bring myself to care much about the characters one way or another. It's militantly, didactically "feminist" in the way that kind of makes my teeth hurt: men bad, women good, heterosexual relationships are inherently damaging and oppressive, etc.

The cast-- the "Decline and Fall Club," a group of old college friends reacting variously to what appear to be the End Times-- remind me of the kids from Captain Planet-- carefully chosen from various races and cultures, representing various properly-empowering vocations. (Faye, the militant black lesbian artist, seems to have "TOKEN" stamped across her forehead in large block letters.) The villains are men in general (and conservative, politically powerful men in particular). The time frame is, apparently, the turn of the millenium.

Granted, this book was written and published just before the Internet came into general use. At the same time, it's bizarre how completely off Tepper's predictions are. For someone apparently writing in 1993 or 1994, she came up with a truly... unexpected... vision of 2000. Criminals being put into suspended animation as a punishment was particularly surprising. Furthermore, she seems to have had some trouble with basic math skills: characters who were supposed to be 17 and 18 in 1959 are described as "in their forties" in 2000. On the whole, the book is strange, and not really in a good way. I might keep it around, and try to finish it, but I can't quite keep it at the top of my reading list. (On the other hand, just talking about how strange it is has made me kind of curious to see what will happen, so I might pick it up again after all.)

[Roddy Williams · Rating 3 out of 5]

More of a gender morality tale than an SF novel, arguably Tepper’s most feminist novel starts realistically enough in 1959 where a group of girls swear an oath to always be friends and to reunite regularly.
Years later, odd waves of behaviour are sweeping the world. Sexist and patriarchal views are in the ascendancy. One of the friends, a beautiful enigmatic mystery, is now dead but seems to be mysteriously appearing to them.
In America, a male-dominated organisation called The Alliance seeks to reduce women to the position of child-bearing slaves. The Alliance in turn has links to the Vatican which is itself in a secret union with Islam in order to deny women rights.
Things get stranger still in a plot development involving an ancient intelligent race which has been hiding itself from humans since they emerged into sapience, as well as their implacable foe, a male intelligence from out of space which is causing Humanity’s problems.
Tepper takes an awful lot of artistic licence with some degree of success. As a wish fulfilment fantasy it works, and at the end of the day it is a novel which I presume is written for women whom no doubt appreciate it on a far different level.
In my view there is much to commend this book. It is written from the soul and much righteous anger bleeds through in sections which – quite divorced from the fantastical elements – ring true in relation to modern USA.
Many would argue that it boils down to a ‘battle of the sexes’, and a grim and bloody one at that. There is some truth in this. It’s not a joyful read, but it’s one that stays in the mind.
The denouement though is a positive one, in which one of the female protagonists is given the power to make a choice regarding the future direction of the human race. The power of this novel is that even now, some weeks since I finished it, I am still wondering what choice I would have made. That’s a great thing for any book to be able to do.

[Passive Apathetic]

"For instance, in your religion your priests say woman brought sin into the world when she bit into the apple, but my people would say man brought sin into the world when God ask who did it and Adam blamed Eve. Which is the greater sin? Intellectual curiosity? Or betrayal? Scientific experimentation? Or disloyalty?" (loc. 2453)

"No God can be bigger than the gate that lets people into the presence. If the only way to that God is through a narrow little gate with picky little gatekeepers, then that God is no bigger than that gate nor wiser than the keepers. If a woman wants to approach divinity, she should not go through a narrow gate built by men. Women should find their own way." (loc. 6732)

[Megan · Rating 5 out of 5]

An important book; not perfect, but an answer to today’s common question of “Why aren’t we talking about (sexuality, reproductive rights, the various perspectives of women) in genre?”: Tepper is talking about them, right here. It’s preachy and there are dinosaurs and aliens but, what science fiction isn’t sometimes? The lessons here are just more specific than usual. There’s a temptation here to say “I don’t agree with all of her portrayals, but,” but I don’t think that’s the point either: it’s important that this book exists. She started the conversation. It’s up to the rest of the genre to be willing to continue it.

[Jennifer Macaire · Rating 5 out of 5]

I think this is one of the most interesting books since 'The Handmaid's Tale' that looks at the place women occupy in modern society.
Following the story of a lawyer who agrees to represent and defend a girl who left her newborn baby in a dumpster - it takes you on a journey into the lives of six very different women, their families, their loves - while also touching on the supernatural.
Perhaps the supernatural was what was weakest in this novel - it hardly needed it, because the premise - women vs men, was so interesting. But Ms Tepper pulled it off, with glorious writing and a glimpse of true friendship.
I highly reccomend this book.

[Rachel · Rating 5 out of 5]

A brilliant and frightening piece of story telling about a group of long-term friends who discover they may be the only line of defence against a sinister and powerful man who wants to ensure women are kept in their place in the worst possible way. Intricately plotted with beautiful characterisation, this is must-read fantasty for anyone concerned with the rising backlash against the role of women in Western society.

[Kathleen · Rating 5 out of 5]

My husband calls this my 'feminist rage' book. And it is, at least a little. But it's also about what it means to be a woman in this modern world, and all the myriad ways women (and people) are.

[Earl Biringer · Rating 3 out of 5]

WARNING: SPOILERS INCLUDED
(and oh, is this thing spoiled!)

First, a quick note about spoilers: I don’t see how someone can write a review of a book without including some spoilers. No one wants to read an entirely subjective, emotive response to a work without some indication of what brought on that particular response. “I was carried on wave after wave of unmitigated joy, interspersed by troughs of terror and impending doom, before being washed ashore on a beach of confusion, to be left sweating and crying upon sands of turpitude and gastro-intestinal distress” just doesn’t cut it. Nor does “I liked it a lot until the ending, which sucked.” What sucked? What turpituded? Didja just vomit a little there in the back of your throat or was a full-blown, freight-train-commin’-through-and-not stoppin’-till-there’s-nothing-at-all-left case of the sh…

Never mind, you know what I mean. So there are spoilers in this review, some mild and some major. The ending is kind of given away, which I had to do in order to explain why I didn’t like it. Read on to understand what I consider to particularly turpituding about this one (and really, it was just mild cramps resolved by a swig of Pepto).

This is the first Tepper book I have read, and in many ways it was a really interesting page-turner. At least for the first 18 of the 20 chapters. Then it collapsed – maybe down into quicksand, maybe into itself like a singularity, maybe like a building suddenly succumbing to some inherent, heretofore unseen design flaw. I’m not really sure what metaphor works best, but the point is it goes from pretty damn good to pretty damn bad pretty damn quickly.
Oh, there are some minor issues throughout the first 18 chapters: a couple too-Dickensian coincidences, uneven character development, things like that which don’t really need mentioned as they play no role in my overall assessment. These would prevent me from ever considering this a great novel, but through 18 chapters I did consider this to be a really good novel. Then – well, we’ll get to that.

The gist of it is that there is a group of seven women who meet in college in the late 1950s, form a bond, then a group called the Decline and Fall Club, pledging to each other that they will not allow themselves to decline and fall but will rather pursue their diverse goals come what may. The bulk of the story (everything except the prologue) takes place in 1999. One of them has apparently died (or at least has disappeared) and the other six are preparing for their annual get-together. A radically misogynistic wave is sweeping through the world and is seemingly about to come to a head when a strange plague starts to rapidly spread, the main affect of which is to cause people to lose their sex drive. The six remaining women (and a new seventh, kind of) confront this misogynism, the plague, their ideas of womanhood, and their feelings for/about each other as the story moves along. The story is compelling and well-written and moves along at a brisk pace.

Some reviewers here have commented on Tepper’s time frame for the events. The book was written in 1996 and takes place in 1999, so it definitely falls in the “near future” category of SF. In these types of stories, the setting is usually very similar to the world at the time the book is written, with maybe one foreseeable, believable change that separates the book world from the real world. Tepper’s 1999 book world is very similar to her 1996 real world, with two notable exceptions, neither of which prima-facie seem to be realistic extrapolations from her real world. The first item is sociological - the wave of misogynism sweeping the world and the impending fascist take-over of the US. Smack-dab in the middle of the Clinton years this likely seemed ridiculous, but from the perspective of 2023 it’s probably more accurate to say that the rumblings were there, she was just a decade or two too early. I’ll give her this one, no problemo. The second item is technological - instead of being jailed, criminals spend their sentences in a state of suspended animation. This is treated without wonder, as just a natural normal part of everyday life and how the world is. This one is not really justifiable. There is nothing in the technology of 1996 (or today) that would have indicated that something like this would be possible (and commonplace) by 1999 or at time in the foreseeable future. Furthermore, if some sort of paradigm-shifting technological breakthrough were made, why is there no other indications of this? Things like this aren’t invented in a vacuum and most technologies have multiple uses, but no other technological aspect of the world appears to be have changed and no other aspect of life seems affected. Any breakthrough of this nature, in addition to having been researched, experimented with, and tested for much longer than three years, would have effects on other things and other aspects of life, but there are none. Other than this one single item, the book world of 1999 is technologically the same as the real world of 1996. That just doesn’t make sense.

But this has nothing to do with my misgivings concerning chapter 19.

Other reviewers have commented on the feminist slant of the book. I take this to be a good thing – in fact, one of the best things about the book. As a middle-aged, middle-class white American heterosexual male I understand that there are some things I can never truly know – I can’t know what it’s like to be black, or gay, or Muslim, or Russian, or female. I can read all the books ever written, I can talk to as many different people as I can find, I can listen and ponder and introspect, but I can never possess that first-hand, immediate knowledge of what it’s like to be someone other than who I am, to have gone through anything other than what I have gone through. However, what good literature can do, and what this book does through 18 chapters, is to give some perspective on the world as seen through the eyes of others, to achieve some level of understanding of what it is like for them to live in this world, to exist in this reality, to be. No, it will never be a full and complete understanding, it will never be KNOWLEDGE in the true sense, but it can be the basis of mutual understanding. Tepper gives me this by convincingly presenting the world through the eyes of these very different women. This apparently makes some folks uncomfortable. Sometimes good literature does make us uncomfortable and takes us out of our too-easily-fallen-into, egocentric, static ways of understanding. This is a good thing. Thank you for this, Ms. Tepper.
So what is my real problem with this book? My real problem is chapter 19. This chapter contains two of the things I most despise in fiction – two of the biggest, laziest cop-outs an author can use: A giant info-dump disguised as revelations from a mystical source, and an excruciatingly tedious infiltration/chase sequence that tries for suspense but delivers only drudgery and more dumping of info.

Also, snake-people and a space-vampire.

Yes, that’s right – completely out of nowhere, totally non-foreshadowed, inexplicably placed into this feminist near-future critique of modern society, we get snake-people. And a space-vampire. Not only that, but these function both as deus ex machina (the snake-people) and diablo ex machina (the space-vampire). All the evils are explained by the existence and actions of the space-vampire, and salvation comes only through the existence and actions of the snake-people. The humans – male and female alike – are only pawns in their great battle. Oh, the ending leaves open the possibility that the entire future of the human race will be decided by these six women, once the snake-people and the space-vampire have finished their shenanigans and gone away, but even then the options are limited to what the snake-people will allow.

Really. Snake-people. And a space-vampire. Please stop here for a moment and let that sink in.

As an avid reader of science fiction, I LIKE the idea of the snake-people, a separate intelligent species that evolved from reptilian ancestors and co-exists with us here on earth. The idea has been used before in SF, but it is far from exhausted. There are many different things that can be done with this, many different stories that can be told, themes that can be explored, etcetera. Even the idea of the snake-people being mystical shamans in the American southwest may be salvageable, though it is a bit cliched. The problem is they just don’t belong in this story. This is a story about a group of very human women struggling to achieve their dreams and goals in a very human world, and then all of sudden we find out that they are incapable of salvation without the intercession of the snake-people. With only one exception, we don’t even see the effect that the revelation of the existence of the snake-people has on these women. “We have problems, here’s snake-people to explain the cause of those problems and show how to solve those problems (and actually do the solving), that’s nice isn’t life good?”

Blah.

As far as the space-vampire goes, the less said the better. To attribute the ills of the human race to some sort of energy/life-force-sucking creature from the beyond is trite, cliched, unbelievable, and downright stupid.

These may have worked better if the novel were written as Sophy’s story – yes, I know Sophy dies off-screen and doesn’t appear after the prologue, but that doesn’t prevent the book from being her story. Hell, a character doesn’t have to appear in a story at all for that that story to be about that character, explored through the effects they have had on the actual characters. But Tepper doesn’t give us that. If any of the characters can be considered the main protagonist, it is Carolyn. Sophy’s “presence” is alluded to, mentioned, felt here and there, but she doesn’t drive any of the action or motivate any of the other characters (until the Great Revelations of chapter 19, of course). She almost incidental.

And what do we finally discover to be the root of the problem? What is it that the Soul-Sucker from the Great Beyond has inflected on us and from which the Mystical Snake-People of the American Southwest must save us? What could possibly be the horrible, terrible, all-encompassing malignancy that befalls and almost destroys the human race?

Lust. Sexual lust.

Yep, that’s it. Everything would be fine and grand and hunky-dory and A-OK if men and women (but particularly men) did not feel sexual lust.

Lust. You know, that completely normal, natural, basic drive that exists up there (or down there, rather) with things like, oh, I don’t know, hunger and warmth and such as some of the most basic, most fundamental drives of human nature? For the sake of anyone still reading, I’m not going to go too deeply into my issues with this. It will suffice to say the vast majority of human beings who have ever lived have experienced sexual lust at some point or the other in their lives (or at many different points). The problems come with the actions some people take in order to satisfy that lust, not with the feeling of it in and of itself. Must of us are able to control it, or even guide it toward productive and moral ends, but some folks can’t or won’t. It’s not the feeling of lust which is problematic, it is the actions some people (yes, mainly men) take in order to try to satisfy that lust. But that’s not what Tepper says – the benevolent Southwestern American Mystical Snake-People don’t feel lust and the Alien Soul-Sucker uses human lust to achieve his ends. Lust is bad, folks. I wonder if hunger and warmth are too?

One final note on morality that just struck me as I was finishing this up (yes, it ends soon!): At the end of the book, after the representative of the snake-people has defeated the space-vampire, the space-vampire and three of his cronies are punished by being placed into suspended animation for what we are led to believe will be at least a very, very, very long time, if not forever. This is probably justifiable for the space-vampire, but for the three humans who were ultimately under his control (not that this absolves them – they didn’t really put up any kind of fight against his control)? Really? A small group of people takes it upon themselves to sentence three humans to an eternity in suspended animation with no trial, no attempt to come up with a better solution, and apparently no remorse or regrets or empathy whatsoever? And this is a good thing?

There is no way to read just the first 18 chapters and come away feeling satisfied, so if you are interested in some of the feminist themes or are looking for this perspective, go ahead and read this one – just don’t be surprised when the snake-people show up. Or the space-vampire. They’re the real spoilers here.

[Suzie Quint · Rating 4 out of 5]

Several books came to mind as I read this. If I were pitching this as high concept it would be The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants meets American Gods meets Ayn Rand.

The story starts when 7 young women meet in college and become lifelong friends. This is a tough opening for me. I don't do well when an author throws too many new characters at me too quickly. It always takes me forever to get them sorted out in my head. Given the way the story is structured, I'm not sure how else it could have been done because, a few chapters later, the story makes a large jump in time. On the plus side, the characters lives are distinctive enough to help with sorting them out.

The author has a definite pro-feminist agenda for this story. While there is definitely black and white, there are also shades of gray. I agreed with much of what she had to say, but I also disagreed with some of the things she chose to throw into the black and white camps. These may reflect the author's views or they may have simply been "easy" choices to serve the story. I'm not sure which, but I see them as a pitfall, because too many people read without engaging their critical thinking.

Some of the reviews have expressed disappointment by the "ambiguity" of the ending, but I think it was perfect. For me, it's clear that the author intended to provoke thought, and this book definitely contains much that is thought-provoking.

[Kat Heatherington · Rating 3 out of 5]

This didn't age well. I remember reading it in grad school, not too long after it came out, and really appreciating it then. Now - it's got racist subtexts, and the tenor of its focus on gender is very last century, to put it mildly. The Alliance could easily be the Heritage Foundation, though, and the ways in which the text is prescient are uncomfortable and make for difficult reading. We could all wish our society was about to be rescued from itself by magical matriarchal lizard people. Adter all that build up, the ending is practically a deus ex machina and feels like a total cop out. On top of which, the entire argument boils down to the idea that sex creates violence, and that eradicating nonmonogamy - with emphasis on non-consensual nonmonogamy, but still - would eradicate violence and the drive to control. Thanks, I hate it. I think it's incorrect and hugely incomplete - hierarchical thinking and the perception of otherness creates violence, not just testosterone. It lacks nuance in a scenario that requires nuance to be successful, and thus fails both as an argument and as a book.

The best thing about this story remains that it is set in northern New Mexico. and that's just not enough.

[Brittany · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a phenomenal book. And it is absolutely astonishing that it was published in 1996. It looks almost eerily prescient from this viewpoint. The only way you can tell it was written that long ago is the absence of smartphones and social media. But even with that, the story is fresh, sweeping, original, and deeply thought-provoking.

Every publisher's summary I read of it was misleading. It's not a "women's book" or a book about "women's" issues. It's a humanity book, and men certainly aren't the bad guys. It's a huge, societal, thought-experiment of a book with rigorously well-rounded characters that live and breath. It's fun to read, engrossing to think about, and almost impossible to put down.

[Jason Fischer · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 out of 5.

An interesting idea, but the wheels fall off close to the end. Caricature EEEVIL misogynist club just came off as ridiculous rather than a plausible antagonist. I loved how Tepper explored similar themes in the Gate to Women's Country but Gibbon's Decline and Fall works more as an allegory than a novel. Lastly, the SFnal elements of this book Just Don't Work. Hand wavium doth not a SF book make.

[Thalia]

I only read about 2/5ths of the way through. Tepper deals with some complicated and serious issues about relationships, including abusive ones, here. Important to do, but I grew exhausted and felt beaten down, and put it aside.

[Andrew Leon · Rating 3 out of 5]

All right, this will probably be the last Tepper novel I do for a while. Not because I've grown tired of her books or anything but because I'm out of all the ones I have and I don't plan to go book buying any time soon. Not until I finish some of the other books I have sitting around. Or unless I decide I just need the sequel to Grass.

That said, overall, I didn't enjoy this one as much as her others, and I'm going to tell you why, which means, yes, there will be spoilers, so, if you plan on picking this one up, you may want to bypass this. Not that I think any of you are making that plan because, if you were, you would have picked up The Gate To Women's Country, which is something you should certainly do.

Let me give you some context:
The book was published in '96 and is set in '99. The coming millennium looms over the events of the novel though it actually has little to do with the action. When it came out, it was a contemporary novel, though the present that Tepper shows is a bit removed from ours. Chimpanzees, elephants, and many other species are extinct in the wild. Prisons are full of pods that they sentence people to sleep in. Far Right groups roam the streets... Wait, that doesn't sound too far off.

Basically, Right-wing groups of fanatics of every flavor around the world are making their presence known in violent ways, mostly against women but, really, against anyone who doesn't agree with them. They've taken over the politics in the United States and, really, everywhere else, too. People who do not belong to these groups have fewer and fewer places to turn for help.

The beginning third of the book actually felt very prescient.

The action of the book revolves around the disappearance of one of the women the book is about. At least, that's the only theme that carries all the way through the book as the conflict is rather fluid other than that. That's all stuff I'm not going to get into. Why spoil everything, right? The supernatural element that Tepper so likes plays into this, and it's ultimately what ruined the book for me. Or what it leads to, which is an actual deus ex machina ending.

Let's just say I'm not a fan of having a god step in at the end to save everything, especially when that god was a character in the novel beyond a mere spoken about concept.

However, the real problem area for me was the antagonist. In a general sense, the antagonist is "men" and their antipathy toward women, or, at least, their antipathy towards women's rights. The unifying factor among all of the far Right groups in the book is their belief that women should get back in the kitchen, so to speak. They should be no more than baby makers and food preparers and house cleaners. The book deals a lot with how shitty men can be and how they systemically undermine women and their potential roles in the world.

And we're all good as far as that goes, because all of that is true. However, Tepper then sabotages her point by having the main villain, Webster, be an interstellar entity that is causing men to be the way that they are. Well, maybe he doesn't cause it, but he exacerbates and intensifies it, so, really, except in a few cases, it's not really their fault.

This is a problem because the men she portrays in the book are not caricatures or exaggerations. They are exactly the way men are. But Tepper gives them, gives us, an out: Oh, really, men, they're not that bad; it's just all of these really bad outside influences that make them that way. I really don't understand why she chose to go that route. It pulls the teeth out of any social commentary she was trying to make.

Not to mention the unresolved nature of the denouement. Or, rather, the fact that the resolution is unrevealed to the reader. This is a tactic that would work if Tepper had left the reader with a question which the reader needed to answer for himself, but that's not the nature of it as none of the choices the protagonist is given are choices any of us can actually choose, so we're just left to wonder what choice she made and that's the end of it. It was... unsatisfying. And it left with the feeling that Tepper herself didn't know how she would choose so just left it hanging. Rather like the end of Inception where Nolan left the ending hanging because he didn't know which way to go with it.

So... yeah... brilliant beginning, but she failed to nail the landing. It's not a book I would recommend. Which isn't to say I didn't enjoy it -- it was certainly much better than many other books I've read -- but, again, I'd say go out and get a copy of The Gate To Women's Country.

[Katherine · Rating 2 out of 5]

Guh. Okay. First, if I was rating this book based on the first three or four hundred pages I probably would have rated it at least four stars. The writing is really good, the characters are believable (if not always likeable), and Tepper spends the first part of the book building a real sense of dread and tension. It's a real page-turner for the majority of the book, and you really want to know how the characters are going to extricate themselves, and the women of the world, from the situation that is brewing. Tepper builds a real sense of menace there, and the situation is all too plausible, which makes it even more frightening.

Then . . . the end happens. I'm not going to spoil it here, but if a literature teacher wanted to teach about the weaknesses of deus ex machina, the end of the this book would be an outstanding example. It just . . . ugh. Without spoiling the plot, I will point out that all of the tension and menace introduced in the first nearly four hundred pages is resolved in about fifty pages. If that many. The real "resolution", if you want to call it that, happens in one short, disappointing scene. I was just terribly, terribly disappointed in how the story was resolved and how flat all of the emotion fell at the end. I think my main complaint is that all of the horrible things that are happening to women around the world, all of the oppression and mistreatment that men are inflicting on women, is because of . . . evil, basically. Bad guy makes men do bad things. That's all. Unfortunately, I don't think the great writing in the beginning of the book makes up for the dreadfully trite ending. I might try another Tepper book from the library, but I doubt I'll purchase another one. Your mileage may vary.

Because I read this as a paper edition, I'll include my highlights here (SOME HIGHLIGHTS MIGHT INCLUDE SPOILERS):

She laughed her bubble laugh, as if she were all full of something sticky, with slow bubbles rising up. p. 43

Her voice rose to a mechanical whine, a vocal nail drawn down the chalkboard of her life. p. 66

...Society for the Perpetually Unaware and Only Dimly Cognizant. p. 66

"...Mankind is a good word." She set down her glass with a thump. "Or humankind. I'm afraid we've spent a lot of feminist energy on meaningless symbols rather than essential functions..." p. 170

"...She quoted what she called the first law of the supernatural: No God can be bigger than the gate that lets people into the presence. If the only way to that God is through a narrow little gate with picky little gatekeepers, then that God is no bigger than that gate nor wiser that the keepers..." p. 221

"...Doin' sex is all some men have to brag about, you know. Got no brains, got no ambition, got no skills, but they can fuck like a bunny. ..." p. 238

For millennia religious power and prestige had been built on a foundation of sexual proscription. Now the sudden absence of sex came like the surgeon's knife, abbreviating both doctrine and doctrinaire. What were sin fighters to do without the favorite sin? p. 259

Seemingly, even if the world died tomorrow, Jagger intended to stand with one foot atop the corpse declaring himself victorious. p. 261

It was no more that she'd expected, but it still hurt, in the way a sudden blow hurts, as much from surprise as from trauma. p. 263

"What's coming is reality. Politics has nothing to do with reality!" p. 269

"Happy? Sometimes. But, then, happy is a sometime thing. When Younger Sister broke the happiness jug, bits of it scattered everywhere, so Sophy always told us. She said not to worry about happy, just get on the way because we'll find bits of happy everywhere we go." p. 323

"...'Track by your star, but keep an eye on your feet, for some stones are set in the road to make you stumble.'..." p. 323

"...'...a mouth that gives kisses like wounds. ...'..." p.327

"...What profiteth a race to be numerous and stupid, la?..." p. 392