Book review: The Fresco

The Fresco by Sheri S. Tepper is bad pap on several levels. I'll put in a token piece of niceness - I finished it - and then move on to slagging it off. Grass was good, but this is more Raising the Stones: pantomime villains, fairy godmothers, and the wrong answer to the question "is it worth losing freedom for happiness?"². This one star review says much that I would say, if I could be bothered.

There's a slightly awkward feature of this book, which is that I recognise some of her ideas in my own. Suppose you were given <special powers> - and really, the aliens that turn up are just arbitrary powers - what would you do, if you wanted to make the world a better place? How would you oblige all these unruly humans to behave? All my day dreams of what I might do inevitably fall apart quite quickly, as I realise that instead of doing the sensible thing, people would get their backs up and react against. Well, perhaps fortunately I don't have <special powers>, and definitely fortunately SST doesn't (as well as being dead, obvs).

What, I hear you cry, are the levels on which it is bad? The text is easy-reading pap and the characters all tedious stereotypes, which is why I finished it; you will find no demands on your reading ability. The alien socities are badly crudely sketched; despite being starfaring civilisations their planets appear to be little more than villages. And as in RtS, the philosophy is bad: lying to people is good if done in a noble cause, as judged by those doing the lying; a certain amount of judicious culling of the population is fine, if done in a Darwinian manner¹; an inescapable caste-based system is good³; and more importantly, freedom - judicial, civil, mental - is to be traded for a quiet life.

As a token piece of analysis: SST is very very keen on people getting their comeuppance, to the extent that this occurs even when irrelevant to the plot. The obvious example is the aliens who insert their developing young into humans so that they can grow and feed, eventually clawing their way out (although most of the humans survive this process, the insertion, and clawing-out, are carefully described as very painful, even though the humans had to be sedated for the insertion and so could have been anaethetised, so this is deliberate cruelty, but that does not worry SST who salivates over the pain). But - aha, this is the bit that makes it all right - they only do this to right-to-life right wing males, who have publically stated support for no-abortion-even-for-rape. This doesn't work, of course: even the right-to-life people don't support rape, indeed they oppose it; but SST is so keen to see them suffer she doesn't stop to think.

Notes

1. Actually I have to admit a certain sympathy for that; but I think that's a reflection of why the book is bad, encouraging our worst instincts.

2. Or you may prefer "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety".

3. Obvs, in her version, those choosing your caste for you are "nice", and only "rarely" make mistakes, and even then they err in favour of what you want. In a cleverer author I would suspect it was all ironic but SST is not such.