waiting for the scythe

Recent cultural consumption: Sheri S. Tepper's latest, The Margarets, which I acquired in hardback in a fit of undelayed gratification. It's an interesting novel, positing the weird, apparently multi-dimensional splitting of one future-Earth girl at various significant points in her life, so that in the end seven different versions of her are taking wildly different paths. The setting is the standard Tepper one of a drastically overpopulated Earth and a supporting cast of umpteen alien races ranging in character from the dopily benevolent to the basically monstrous. As usual, Tepper's ongoing polemical interests thread through the narrative, occasionally stepping forward to dominate when her characters have themselves a little rant about human stupidity.

I enjoyed it, although I found it less accomplished than a lot of her other writing - possibly inevitably given the basic plot, it was scattered and a bit wandery, and a lot of the themes felt recycled from earlier novels. What really hit me, though, was her despair - always present in her novels, but particularly strong here. I love Tepper's writing because she articulates some of the same things that I worry about - overpopulation, violence, misogyny, bigotry, human selfishness and shortsightedness, the horrible sense of the sheer momentum of a technological culture that is rushing towards self-destruction because it hasn't bothered to build in restraints - because restraint is, in our world, a sign of weakness and denies the entitlement and self-indulgence that capitalism preaches.

In Tepper's novels, Earth is almost always trampled under the massed hordes of humanity, its biosphere despoiled and destroyed. If the human race survives, it's as often as not because something from the outside intervenes, usually an alien race or a mythic force of some sort. Anyone, Tepper seems to think, is more likely to save humanity than humanity itself. Some earlier novels allow enlightened pockets of humanity to impose rescue on the whole, for example the tough, pragmatic women of Gate to Women's Country, but generally human action is subservient or incidental to the intervention of larger, wiser, more powerful beings. Even in Gate, human self-limitation is only possible because of radical population reduction after apocalypse. In a lot of her worldspaces, humanity is somehow crippled, missing a vital moral or historical sense which would allow it to function more rationally than it does.

This fascinates me. In a sense what she's writing isn't science fiction so much as science fiction fable, a sort of cautionary bedtime story for naughty children: if you can't play nicely, the grown-ups will take your toys away, and spank you for your own good. This is patronising, demeaning, and incredibly bleak, but the horrible thing is that I can't disagree with her. The likelihood of humanity pulling itself up by the bootstraps out of its morass of indiscriminate expansion and destruction without some kind of enormous catastrophe first is, in my opinion, vanishingly small. I deplore the need for the wise intervening alien even as I admit its necessity. This may, possibly, make me a fascist, but mostly I think it puts me in the same boat as Tepper - sadly and despairingly watching it founder, waiting for the water to close over everyone's head.

Last Night I Dreamed: a sort of hidden fantasy realm, either underground or a dream-world (yes, I've been watching way too many Henson movies). This entailed a group of us (we were children for this part of it) trekking through a scenic swamp calf-deep in water, feeling for snakes through the sludge; and getting lost in a strange area composed of giant broken pillars and cracked, moss-covered paving. There was also an elevated railway on brick arches with a completely peculiar train that travelled in jumps to an exact timetable. Later, someone gave me an absolutely beautiful full-length black coat in a particularly fine and silky fur.