The Margarets

by Sheri S. Tepper

The myriad alien civilizations populating far, distant worlds have many good reasons to detest the blight called "humankind" . . .

The only human child living in a work colony on the Martian satellite Phobos, little Margaret Bain has invented six imaginary companions to keep boredom and loneliness at bay. Each an extension of her personality, they are lost to her when she is forced to return to Earth. But they are not gone.

The time will come when Margaret, fully grown and wed, must leave this dying world as well—this Earth so denuded by thoughtlessness and chemistry that its only viable export is slaves. For now Margarets are scattered throughout the galaxy. And their creator must bring her selves home . . . or watch the human race perish.

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

508 pages, Hardcover

First published May 22, 2007

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

[Richard Derus · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: The only human child living in a work colony on the Martian satellite Phobos, little Margaret Bain has invented six imaginary companions to keep boredom and loneliness at bay. Each an extension of her personality, they are lost to her when she is forced to return to Earth. But they are not gone.

The time will come when Margaret, fully grown and wed, must leave this dying world as well—this Earth so denuded by thoughtlessness and chemistry that its only viable export is slaves. For now Margarets are scattered throughout the galaxy. And their creator must bring her selves home . . . or watch the human race perish.

My Reviews: 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.

Her deft touch with young women's thoughts and feelings is nowhere on better display than here, and in The Fresco. Margaret Bain, our PoV character, is a worthy savior for an unworthy race that has so vandalized its homeplace as to make it all but uninhabitable. The enslavement of all humankind seems to me a just and condign punishment for our huge and horrifying maltreatment of the only home we have. A very sad read, but a good one.

[Sean · Rating 2 out of 5]

Tepper, Tepper, Tepper... what can I say about her that I already haven't said? She's interesting, aggravating, inspired, pedantic, gifted in her ability to invent elaborate cultures, races and settings and given to bludgeoning the reader over the head with heavy allegories constructed of the same.

The Margarets is neither her best work nor her worst. It contains neither the ridiculous excesses of Shadow's End nor the true sense of menace and fear of Grass . True to Tepper's pattern, it is heavily allegorical, to the point that several of the important races and persons in the story are purposefully one-dimensional so that the reader cannot mistake Tepper's purpose--but this also makes those races and persons boring, which steals a great deal of urgency from the plot.

The pacing is terrible, with most of the book being devoted to setting up the ending--arduously, predictably and laboriously. This wouldn't be such a problem if the end were worth it, but Tepper has a real problem with climaxes; in many of her books the end is where the reader discovers the massive swindle the author has pulled, when Tepper's deus ex machina arrives and teaches everyone a lesson, and when the bad guys (usually brutish, over-the-top males) get their comeuppance and the good guys (usually boring, self-righteous females) are completely justified. This is true here, with a twist: the climax is boring and stupid and is telegraphed from so far away that there are literally no surprises left.

I would recommend readers new to Tepper start with The Fresco , The Gate to Women's Country or The Visitor and save this for later. Better yet, start with a more accomplished author of feminist sci-fi, such as Margaret Atwood, Ursula K. LeGuin or Octavia E. Butler and put off being disappointed by Tepper as long as possible.

[Victoria · Rating 5 out of 5]

Even though I love her writing, I have to admit that every Tepper book I've read before has been ponderous and sometimes painfully slow to gather momentum (kind of like this review). So I surprised myself by liking this book almost from the beginning and only getting more caught up in it as I read. Even though it seemed clear from near the beginning exactly where the plot was going and how it would end, I was fascinated by the execution.

Tepper can - and does - create such strange scenarios with so much confidence and panache that there's just no room to doubt her voice as an author, her narrator's voice, or the story. Strange, compelling, sometimes beautiful, sometimes horrifying, and a total page-turner.

Other goodreads reviewers have complained about the allegorical nature of most of the characters as if it's a weakness of the book, but I disagree. In a less complicated book, the sometimes superficial way she deals with settings and characters might not work - but here, I think it is the only way to have told a story of this much complexity without getting bogged down in seven novels worth of sheer material. At times, she's a little heavy-handed, and the book doesn't exactly explain everything that happens. That didn't bother me a bit.

Tepper is one of those writers whose collected works are made up mostly of books that didn't quite make it... and a few that really, strikingly, powerfully did.

The Margarets? Success.

[Velvel · Rating 1 out of 5]

horrifying encomium to eugenics and genocide wrapped in science fiction for young adults

I spent the entire book waiting for a twist ending where the Gentherans are revealed to be the true villains, because surely no alien race can be hailed as truly civilized when it relies on mass forced sterilization (unavoidably genocide) to solve the issue of overpopulation. But I reached the end, and my twist never came. And this choice continued to be presented in a celebratory manner. And I felt sick.

Here's the thing: we're killing our planet. We know that, it's true. And science fiction authors are supposed to look forward and suggest ethical solutions to such problems, to fortify us for facing the consequences of our present actions. Eventually - maybe not in our lifetime, but eventually - we are going to face a environmental disaster, and /regardless/ of whether or not we have the resources to save everybody, there will be people who's idea of a solution will be to kill. To kill black people, Jewish people, Rroma, the poor, the disabled - and what science fiction authors SHOULD be doing is preparing us to reject that temptation when it is offered. Preparing us to being brave enough to find the lives and the bodily autonomy of other human beings worthy enough that we respond "No, I'd rather find another way."

Instead Sheri Tepper wants us to believe that eugenics/genocide is a viable option. Here, have an ACTUAL quote from this hell novel: "For those impervious to history, only sterilization and quarantine are efficacious." Ask Rroma how they feel about the necessity of forced sterilization to save "the race." Ask Jewish people how they feel about "quarantine" - "walling off" as Tepper puts it, a cutesy term for ghettoization. Even the imagery of the villains speaks volumes - unrelentingly wicked insect-like creatures who increasingly come to be referred to as "the vile races" throughout the novel; I've read less subtle metaphors in Nazi propaganda or 90s Hutu radio broadcasts.

Tepper wants us to believe that there are people (ex., the bad twins) and "races" (ex., the Quaatar) out there who are inherently evil and that they deserve to die or be sterilized and sequestered from civilized society until they disappear (genocide). Not surprisingly, the developmentally disabled, whom I assume Tepper believes have no ability to discern between right and wrong - are given similar treatment: "Trish was moved to a small Walled-Off created especially for people like her." (And again, I'm supposed to assume that the Gentherians - the alien race we are meant to believe is most concerned with ethics - would more or less abandon their developmentally disabled because seeing them is uncomfortable?)

Again, that forced sterilization/genocide can be a righteous choice is the moral of this novel, wrapped in a fun storyline and style that would be extremely appealing to young adults. It's dangerously bad.

[Leslie · Rating 5 out of 5]

2019 reread:
I love this book (as is obvious from my rating)! Tepper has very definite opinions on things and as I generally am of the same opinion, it isn't surprising that she is one of my favorite authors. One reason that I like this book so much is that in the end, the human race is saved from itself by being given the gift of information, in this case a racial memory. Some individuals refuse to accept this information but are dealt with by being contained. I have often been amazed at the way people believe what they want to believe despite facts to the contrary so this solution is very satisfying to me!

[V. Briceland · Rating 4 out of 5]

I confess: when I originally read The Margarets on its release in 2007, I found it baffling. Sheri Tepper's late-career novel, in which a woman's multiple childhood playtime personas assume independent lives of their own in the universe, seemed difficult to follow and abstruse in its philosophizing. Its many, many Margarets seemed an outright pain to keep track of. Although I've re-read all of Tepper's novels multiple times over the last three decades, The Margarets was the only one that left such an odd taste in my mouth that I never considered picking it up again.

After my re-read this summer, I have to ask myself—what in the world was I thinking back then? The Margarets is as good as anything Tepper wrote at the height of her career. It's clever in conceit and execution and deftly plotted. Every twist and turn is amply foreshadowed. I suspect that on my original reading I spent too much time attempting to decipher which of the many iterations of Margaret was the 'real' one. This time, as I absorbed the storylines for the protagonist's multiple reproductions, I was able to enjoy the remarkable world-building Tepper invested into each, from the traditional to the otherworldly, while still instilling the novel with her traditional (and expected) social concerns.

Some years ago I had a similar re-evaluation of The Waters Rising, the Tepper novel published most closely to The Margarets—I thought it pokey and pointless. Yet on a more considered re-read I appreciated its handling of tension and its fine, deliberate intrigue. Tepper's ecological and political points of view seem more timely than ever in this day and age. I'm glad I allowed myself the opportunity to emend my opinion on The Margarets, an overlooked entry in Tepper's bibliography.

[Mel · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a Sheri S Tepper book I'd not read before and I really enjoyed this. While the splitting decisions to create new universes is quite an old concept now, the idea of having those stay characters within the same universe was different, and handled so well. It was kinda like a reverse Philip K Dick story. The focus of the story was ecological disaster caused by humans, how Earth became over crowded to the point where it was totally destroyed. In the end it moved from dystopian scifi into folktale as the archetype gods got the humans together to solve their problems, which was a little disappointing. The one problem I have with Tepper's books is that there is an ultimate bad that is huge and is behind creating all the evil in the world. Whereas I think in reality all the bad things happen because ordinary people stop caring and paying attention when they should.

But I thought the idea of different yous existing from different choices was very comforting. That what seems like it was a bad decision, often works out better than what seems like the right choice. And that in the end all those different paths lead back to the same place.

I'm really glad I'm working my way through her stories again.

[Angela · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a strange book. I started it feeling like I was reading a sci-fi/dystopian novel, but as the story progressed, it felt more and more as if I were reading the novelization of one of RPG video games I used to play: here's the intro where you find out that Something Big Has Gone Wrong (long, long ago, of course), and our unassuming hero must fix it; here's where you travel around finding all the supporting characters, with their predictable archetypes and their tragic back-stories; here are the various little quests in which you pick up magical friends and gradually find out more about the Big Something That's Gone Wrong and the Entirely Evil Villains Who Caused It. And there, after a while -- there's that bit where all the pieces are assembled and one of your magical friends tells your ragtag band of unlikely heroes that you'd better prepare for the final dungeon, and if you have, then you get the predictable deus ex machina happy ending where the loose ends are all conveniently tied up, and everyone's smiling and waving and fading into the credits over a blaze of triumphant MIDI music.

Seriously, I felt like I there should have been a pause between every few chapters for the characters to level up.

That said, I actually really enjoyed the book. Despite the lack of originality in how it was structured, despite some of the cliches that were bad enough to make me wince (Want to guess which side the reptilian aliens are on? Go on, guess!), the premise was interesting and the characters were, for the most part, sympathetic. It wasn't a book that was full of deep meaning and important questions (and I appreciate that by the end, the author didn't try to pretend that it was); it was an entertaining read with some engaging characters that you could set aside at the end without a lot of burning, unanswered questions about unresolved plot points and what happens next. It was neither so predictable that I got bored and stopped reading nor so unpredictable that I was on the edge of my seat the whole time.

[Derek · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.

[Martha · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.

[Rubi · Rating 4 out of 5]

No terminaba de engancharme al inicio me pareció un poco lento, pero conforme avanzas apreciar la sutileza, claridad y sagacidad con que la autora nos reclama la destrucción de la humanidad, de nuestro hábitat y de todo cuanto tocamos; nuestra vida está en peligro, la estamos extinguiendo y no solo porque nos hemos vueltos superficiales, sino porque somos insaciables; el peor depredador... Una muestra:
“tu raza en su conjunto tiene la costumbre infalible de ensuciar el nido, de destrozar su entorno, de arrasar su planeta de origen y hacer todo lo posible para matar cualquier otro al que se la traslade”

I did not hooking at the beginning it seemed a little slow, but as you go along, appreciate the subtlety, clarity and sagacity with which the author claims the destruction of humanity, our habitat and everything we touch; our life is in danger, we are extinguishing it and not only because we have become superficial, but because we are insatiable; the worst predator ... A sample:
"Your race as a whole has the infallible habit of dirtying the nest, of destroying its environment, of destroying its home planet and doing everything possible to kill anyone else to whom it is transferred"

[Nicole · Rating 2 out of 5]

This one initially engaged me, but I found myself running out of steam about 1/2way through. Even with the index in the front keeping the Margarets seperate was difficult for me and it was a pain in the rear to need look them up every chapter. I really liked Tepper's premise, but I think this book would have been a much better read had it been quite a bit shorter. I had to push myself to finish it.

This one reminded me a lot of "Beauty" in that Tepper used it as a platform to comment on the social and environmental ills of our world. Go Sheri!

[Joy Derenthal · Rating 4 out of 5]

Although I disagreed completely with the authors spiritual, religious, and moral philosophy, this book was so well-written and interesting that I enjoyed it nonetheless. The characters were incredibly-well developed, and the concept was so original. Great book!

[Elentarri · Rating 3 out of 5]

Margaret is the only human child living in a work colony on the Martian satellite Phobos. To alleviate her boredom and loneliness, Margaret has invented six imaginary companions, each of which is an extension of her personality. When she is forced to return to an impoverished and over-populated Earth, those personalities split off to lead separate lives.

The concept of this novel is interesting concept; but long and plodding before anything even remotely exciting happens. The reader only finds out the point of the whole set up around page 250 of 500. The ending also fell flat and was terribly underwhelming for such a momentous occasion. I found the characters to be unmemorable, especially the main character (all 7 of them). The world building had unmet potential.

After reading this novel, I also suspect Tepper spent Sunday afternoon teas with Bill Gates and his cronies. Earth is overpopulated and Tepper's means of solving the problem in this book is (1) genocide of 90% of the population by vicious aliens, (2) shipping humans off world as bond-people (aka slaves) for 15 years (on paper) only to be worked to death or murdered (most of the one dimensional aliens aren't very nice), and (3) involuntary and secret sterilization of 99.something % of the population by the government. Tepper doesn't bother to explain why it is perfectly ok for some aliens to pitch up, strip mine a planet, slaughter/use/remove/enslave all the biological life and then bugger off. Presumably because a semi-functioning planet with a livable atmosphere is more important and rarer than anything actually living on the planet?

I might have enjoyed this more as a teenager. Right now, I'm tired of all the "humans are evil" books/novels. In short, this novel had an interesting concept, but the execution was bland.

[Andres Borbon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sheri Tepper me irrita y me fascina, al mismo tiempo. Las pocas novelas de ella que he leído me hacen, por momentos, querer arrancarme los ojos para después dejarme maravillado y estupefacto. Y ese es el caso de Las siete Margarets, donde una mujer se desdobla en momentos cruciales de su vida hasta ser siete que viven más o menos simultáneamente los eventos cruciales que llevan casi a la destrucción del planeta Tierra, debido principalmente a la incapacidad de los humanos para aprender de sus errores, para actuar de conformidad a su propia historia, para no tropezar dos veces con la misma piedra.

Las siete Margarets es una novela sinfónica, maravillosa, aunque dotada de pequeños detalles ridículos que me encantan: Para muestra basta un botón: Los gentheranos, una raza avanzada de pequeños seres enfundados en trajes y cascos son benévolos con la Tierra; nos ayudan contra las otras especies que buscan nuestra destrucción, pues tienen una deuda ancestral con la humanidad: Muchos milenios atrás, los seres humanos fueron los únicos capaces de acoger, amar, cuidar y querer a sus descendientes afectados de retraso mental: los gatitos.

[Kara Babcock · Rating 2 out of 5]

In The Margarets, the eponymous character finds herself splitting into separate entities at various points in her life, each entity pursuing a different life, gaining different knowledge and experiences, and becoming a separate person. This is not an accident, of course, but all part of a carefully orchestrated plot by some gods to help restore humanity's racial memory so it will stop making war and killing planets.

Why yes, I do have the ability to take any novel's plot and summarize it in such a way that it sounds clichéd and hackneyed even when it's not. It's a gift. Likewise, Sheri S. Tepper has a gift for distilling very complex morals into easily understood and entertaining stories. Nevertheless, I can't help but feel that sometimes she simplifies matters too much. She spoonfeeds the plot in such a way that an avid reader like myself is finished the book long before it's over.

I have a weakness for stories in which the gods interest themselves in the protagonist's quest. What can I say? There's something just so satisfying and kickass about a nearly-omnipotent being taking your side. The gods of this universe are far from omnipotent—in fact, their only powers seem to be immortality and the ability to teleport themselves across long distances. Nor are they omniscient, which is why they need seven Margarets; one person must walk seven roads at once in order to find "the Keeper," an omniscient being who can restore humanity's racial memory. The gods are just as fallible as the humans they seek to protect, and the antagonists have their own gods plotting on the other side.

One would think that these limitations would avert a deus ex machina. Not so! While it's true that the gods don't directly cause the resolution, they essentially provide the Margarets with a step-by-step plan of exactly what to do. This is push-button universe saving, people. It's not compelling at all, and it removes the one element Tepper needs to preserve at all costs: the human factor. Humans don't have to do anything to receive their salvation. In fact, the "problem with humans," as Tepper identifies it, is a lack of racial memory and something that the human species alone cannot solve. To me, this is a disconcerting and defeatist moral, because if humanity can't fix its own fatal flaw, our species doesn't have much of a future, does it?

I interpret Margaret's divergences as a comment on how our choices in life affect how we live and who we become. If I'm correct in this interpretation, then Tepper's use of the gods as the prime movers undermines this theme—what is the point of making choices if all along this was part of some scheme to save the universe? Is Margaret her own people, or is she just a slave to fate? And even if I'm wrong, the revelation that this is all a divine plan doesn't make for very good storytelling. Margaret literally only contributes to the climax by being there. She doesn't make any choices, doesn't actually do anything beyond showing up and following her gods-given instructions. Tepper got seven main characters but a heroine ain't one.

Combine this with repetition that leads to predictability, and you have a narrative that, while eminently logical, isn't very interesting to anyone paying the least amount of attention. Certain parts of the story are entertaining. For example, take Naumi's induction into the Thairy military. As I read, I remember thinking how much it reminded me of Ender's Game and how Tepper could easily have expanded that portion into an entire novel. The same goes for Grandma Margaret Mackey on Tercis, who literally lives an entire lifetime and sees grandchildren maturing before we come back to her. There's so much crammed into this single volume that Tepper has to simplify. In simplifying, the beauty of the narrative's complexity, as fragile as a spider's intricate web, falls apart.

I was also a little disturbed by the insistence on a dichotomy of "ethical" and "vile" races, the former possessing racial memory and the latter not. The protagonists and their gods routinely talk about how all K'Famir, all Quaatar, are evil and hate humans and want to wipe them out. When you ascribe such motivations to an entire race (or more accurately, Ms. Tepper, we could call it a "species"), you turn them into stereotypes. Even Star Trek, which has a habit of using entire species as metaphors for cultures or ideologies, doesn't go that far: there are honourable Romulans, devious Klingons, and even rebel Borg. In The Margarets, the mysterious Siblinghood of Silence ends up killing millions of K'Famir and Quaatarians, and no one bats an eye to what is tantamount to mass murder. Apparently, because they are "vile races," they deserve what they get.

If I am acerbic, it's because I'm so disappointed in how The Margarets played out. It has the potential to be a moving story of a quest for identity set against the backdrop of interspecies relations. I loved parts of it, and I was always interested in finishing the book, even by the time I had figured out how it would end. Yet I can't commend The Margarets. It's a book simultaneously too short and too long. This could easily have been a series, if Tepper had given every character and subplot the time it needed to mature and flourish. As it is, however, The Margarets ends long before the story is finished. The themes Tepper uses require a complexity that this book never achieves, which makes it less of a full-bodied vintage and more of a glimpse at what could have been.

[Jeilen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Este libro empezó complicado,no entendía nada de lo que estaba pasando y me planteé dejarlo,pero le di una oportunidad y me ha gustado mucho.Trata algunos temas polémicos (ecología, sobrepoblación) y la autora tiene opiniones duras de escuchar,pero si se le da una oportunidad,abre la mente y ayuda a pensar en asuntos tales como cuidar nuestro planeta y tratar de ser amables unos con otros.

[Marne Wilson · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a really baffling book in a lot of ways (and I'm not sure I agree with Tepper's extreme pessimism regarding Earth's future), but there is also something really enchanting about it at the same time. (For instance, talking cats and talking sheep in the same book!) Tepper's strength is in world building, and here she gets to create seven unique worlds at once, each with its own Margaret. Anyone who sometimes feels that they are a collection of disparate personalities instead of one unified individual should read this book.

[K.O. · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the best books I have ever read

[Lynn · Rating 4 out of 5]

I know all the complaints about Tepper: she can be preachy, and sometimes lets her moralizing about feminism, conservation, and pacifism (or at least her distaste for mindless violence and power mongering) get in the way of plot and character development. But hey, folks, can we acknowledge she has a great ability to create alternate worlds, she has wonderful strong, imperfect female characters (as opposed to the annoying strong perfect woman trope), and what she espouses -- treating women and children as if they were human and as if they mattered, treating the earth and its flora and fauna with respect, and behaving with civility (which is to say, acting as if others mattered just as much as oneself) -- are good things to be passionate about? Tepper, despite many misconceived complaints to the contrary, does not hate men. She writes some wonderful male characters too. In face, I would say after reading seven of her novels that she equally lambastes violent, selfish, profit-hungry, power-hungry, abusive men AND women. And aliens, for that matter. I inevitably find her work thought-provoking, interesting, and often fun to read. This was a good one. Check it out!

[Estibaliz · Rating 5 out of 5]

A los libros de Sheri S. Tepper raramente se le pueden dar menos de cinco estrellas, porque consigue hacer eso que, está visto, no es nada fácil: escribir una novela de ciencia ficción compleja, pero con el poder de atrapar al lector desde la primera página y hacer que la experiencia sea tan amena, que todo parece mucho más sencillo de lo que en realidad es.

Siempre se agradece recuperar esa sensación del lector voraz que lo es por gusto, y no sólo por hábito o por aburrimiento; y así sucede en esta ocasión, en la que la ciencia ficción adquiere en ocasiones tintes fantásticos, por más que la historia tenga, como es habitual en la que se conoce como creadora del eco-feminismo, moraleja.

Siete Margarets, siete mundos, y un camino que recorrer. Siete personalidades diferenciadas y bien definidas, en siete mundos dispares pero fácilmente aprehensibles. Diversión garantizada y, para los más sesudos, también mucho en lo que pensar.

[Melissa McCauley · Rating 4 out of 5]

I kept catching myself reading this book slowly 1) because it had a very complicated storyline which followed seven different characters and 2) to make it last longer. As usual, Tepper delivered a fascinating and thought-provoking read, but, unfortunately the ending was less than satisfying and I’m afraid the environmental message may be too heavy-handed for some readers.

Some of the setting involving more advanced races and less advanced races reminded me a teensy bit of The Uplift Trilogy by David Brin. And the revelation of who has been orchestrating things for humanity reminded me a teensy bit of The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams.

[Cara · Rating 1 out of 5]

I thought this book would be similar in quality to the only other Sheri S. Tepper book I've read, The Gate to Women's Country, which was really thought-provoking and just good. This, on the other hand, is a piece of crap, even for sci-fi, which is a genre that contains quite a bit of crap. Too many confusing alien races and alien planets, too much uninhibited use of unnecessary apostrophes in people's names. The plot itself didn't make a lot of sense, and proceeded at times way too slow and at other times way too fast to be understood. I was happy when it was over.

[Alayne · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was an amazing book. It was very complex and needed quite a bit of concentration (especially as I read it on my kindle, which meant I could not keep going to the page at the front which showed all the Margarets and where they all were). I didn't want to put it down and finished it at 2.40am! Without giving the plot away, the problem to be solved required one person to walk 7 roads at the one time in order to save the human race from extinction. I guessed partly how things were to be done, but much of it was a surprise at the end.

[Jamie Dacyczyn]

Did not finish. It's taken me days to get about 1/8th of the way through, and I'm exhausted from trying. I guess I'm not "getting" the premise...that one girl somehow got split into several versions of herself, spread throughout different planets. I hate books that jump from POV to POV with each chapter, let alone ones that jump from several point of views that are all the same person. *sigh*

Maybe I'll pick up up again another time....

[Tim · Rating 3 out of 5]

Tepper's works often demand close attention from the reader. The Margarets will lose you if you don't keep careful track. I don't mind getting lost, if there are things to admire on route. This book has many admirable things.

Tepper is often faulted for her preachiness, and there's a whole herd of political and social high horses being ridden here. But although I don't go along with all of the author's choices in these matters, I have to agree that her themes are important and in need of airing. We don't think enough about the environmental crises that we have unleashed upon ourselves. We don't take violence against women and children as seriously as we should do. Tepper keeps these things front and center - which is where they need to be. Some readers find her solutions to these problems morally disgusting, but it is likely that we have gone well beyond the point at which we can avoid some pretty nasty shocks.

I found the overall plotting of 'The Margarets' somewhat bizarre. There's some magico-mystical hand-waving about having to walk a road, and this leads to the central character splitting into seven different versions of herself. This gives the author a set of pegs upon which to hang seven different worlds. Several of these are interesting, intriguing, and colourful, although some of the details are overloaded (for example, there's a story of several pairs of conjoined twins, of which one is always good, the other bad. This seems to have no bearing on the main plot).

Tepper once said that there are two kinds of writers: one who is interested in the writing itself, and the other who is mainly interested in the story. She seemingly classified herself among the latter, but while she is sometimes hurried - and poorly edited - she had a wonderful way with words on occasion. This shines through quite often in this book: moments of invention, insight and poetry kept this reader going up to and through the end - despite the moments of confusion.

[Ellen · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this book not long after it first came out, but not since then. Lately I've been listening to "The Gate to Women's Country" and I thought revisiting some of Tepper's earlier work might be, well, a fun way to jump into the new year.

This is not one of Tepper's better books. I think the challenge is that there are just too many characters. It has seven main characters who are all versions of one person. Each of those seven characters has a network of friends, enemies, lovers, employers, owners, and family. There are multiple alien races, some of which are identical to each other. Underlying all of it is one of Tepper's themes throughout her novels: how people destroy their environment and seem to think a god will emerge to fix it, rather than changing their ways. None of this is bad; it's just hard to keep up with so many settings and characters and plots. In some ways this book seems like a revisit of earlier works such as "Raising the Stones" rather than something that would be new.

What is original about this book is that Tepper explores the concept of "what if?" What if I turned down this job, or if this small thing hadn't happened, or if I took the chance to find happiness? Margaret gets to explore many of those moments and in doing so saves humanity...for now.

I did enjoy the read. When I got about 2/3 through I ended up reading to the end. So, it was good for my reading stamina. Even knowing how it was all going to work out I wanted to see what happened when Margaret's many selves collided.

[Sasha Wolf · Rating 3 out of 5]

Science fiction with some fantasy elements. The child Margaret lives in a dystopian future where humanity has almost destroyed Earth and several colony planets and is being subjected to increasingly authoritarian attempts to reduce the population in order to stop a wider interstellar federation from exterminating all humans for the wider good - a measure which would be popular with some alien races who have a grudge against humanity that is so old they have forgotten the cause. Margaret copes with her surroundings by developing six imaginary selves, but each time she makes a significant choice, one of them splits off and becomes an independent person. She is not fully aware of this until years later, when her seven adult selves must co-operate to prevent humanity's destruction.

There are some quite engaging characters along the way, and the plot held my attention well till quite near the end, but eventually I lost track of all the different Margarets and their situations. I also got annoyed by more than a whiff of heterosexism and by the one-dimensional view of the alien races in the book. Humans are varied - some good, some evil and everything inbetween - but aliens are either all good or all evil, as far as I can make out. There's a reason for this within the plot, which becomes clear right at the end, but that wasn't enough to lessen my annoyance. I also found the eventual resolution of the threat of destruction rather too simplistic to be plausible. These last two problems are not unrelated.

[Lital · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really liked this book! I appreciate it when books and storylines can still surprise me and I appreciate it when I don't feel as though the author was trying to dumb down their material for the reader. In both of these aspects this book did very well.

I loved the characters. Although some didn't get expanded as much as others, and there were entire swaths of time I would have liked to get more attached to certain characters, overall I felt like I got very involved in their lives and was definitely rooting for them.

My complaints about the book is that the entire first half of the book is story-set-up and while that's really important, obviously, it felt like there was just too much and that it was going on forever. It was difficult to continue reading when most of it was just exposition. Likewise some of the descriptions became effusive. There was too much about certain things that, again, didn't help the pacing of the book. That having been said, the second half of the book went by super quickly. I finished it in a few hours.

Another thing I didn't like was that some important characters in the book espouse one kind of philosophy and then at the end the book seems to contradict them. It's a shame that at the end, it all comes down to the same philosophy seen everywhere.

For those two reasons the book loses a star. But overall, quite a good read.

[Anna Hepworth · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm quite conflicted on this book. On the one hand, I found it really hard to get in to, and reading it took nearly six months. On the other hand, I hit the end, and immediately turned to the beginning and started again. I have no memory of ever doing this with a book before.

The story is beautifully, intricately plotted, with at least seven separate plot threads. And then it ends with everyone turning out to be powerful, or heirs to a monarchy, and things like that. Happily ever after is okay, *in moderation*. I really liked the conceit that the whole story was based on. I just wish bits of the story hadn't made my skin crawl.

I hadn't twigged that one of the characters was male until right near the end, which means that I completely missed the homosexual subtext the first time.

Said homosexual subtext, when I spotted it the second time, is very 'well, fine, but *just don't do anything*'. Theme seemed to be 'bad of you to be in love with your same sex friend, but as long as the love is pure, and all you do is angst/pine/gaze from afar, this doesn't make you a bad person'.
This made me very cranky.