The threat comes, rather, from their guardians and protectors in the warrior garrisons. These inbred hillbillies don’t offer much threat to the Women’s Cities. There are some mavericks outside this system, bandits and nomads, and late in the story, we meet the hill-folk of Holyland, a religious patriarchy founded on full-blown misogyny. At age 5, a boy goes to live in the garrison, and at 15, he must choose either to go for glory as a Warrior or return in shame through the Gate to Women’s Country into the city, to lead the inglorious and enigmatic life of a Servitor. The women keep everything else going they do the herding, farming, manufacture, trading, education, governance. They are called Warriors, and do nothing but train for war and occasionally fight one with the Warriors of other cities. Outside the walls, in garrisons, live most of the men. Inside the city walls live children, women, and some men called Servitors. Nearly three centuries after nuclear war, a number of small cities, surrounded by radioactive desolations, are thriving on the Northwest Coast. Tepper’s lively, thought-provoking novel, “The Gate to Women’s Country,” the subject of the experiment is human gender.

Sometimes what comes out is a monster, of course, but sometimes the rearrangement of facts produces beauty. Like all great literature, it repays re-reading and close attention.Science fiction novels are like Frankenstein’s laboratory, a great place for experiments. Those who have not read this powerful masterpiece should be herded with cattle-prods out to the bookshops until that situation is remedied those who have read it should take this opportunity to re-read the work. Gollancz's reissue of the work, in a characteristically handsome 'SF Masterworks' paperback is long overdue.

'Tepper's Grass is, with hindsight, one of the most significant works of 1980s SF: a spacious, well-plotted, wise and thought-provoking book with an exceptionally cover scanwell-drawn central character and a beautiful twist on the 'beauty and the beast' mythos at its heart.

Grass (Doubleday, 1989) - Hugo and Locus Awards nominee, 1990.

The Water Rising (Eos, released August 31, 2010).

She operated a guest ranch in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She had two children and was married to Gene Tepper. Sheri Stewart Tepper ( JOctober 22, 2016) was an American author of science fiction, horror and mystery novels particularly known as a feminist science fiction writer, often with an ecofeminist slant.īorn near Littleton, Colorado, for most of her career (1962–1986) she worked for Rocky Mountain Planned Parenthood, where she eventually became Executive Director.

Beauty sheri tepper