I was introduced to Tepper’s novels in the early 1990s, when she was at the absolute peak of her powers. Her most recent novel, Fish Tales, was published in 2014, when she was 85. She started writing at the age of 54, near the end of her tenure at Planned Parenthood, and never stopped. We know that we’re safe only if we take care of ourselves in ways men can’t take away no matter how hard they try. Lobbying is for other people who put too much trust in government. Within the organization she was famous for her force of will and her insistence on institutional self-reliance: women’s health and access to abortion needed to be protected from the ground up. For two and a half decades she worked at Rocky Mountain Planned Parenthood. Tepper came to science fiction late in life. No, Tepper’s heroines (not all of them women) hit back, hard, and often in ways their male adversaries never even suspect. Tepper’s ecofeminism had no truck with sentimental earth-mother tropes of gentle peaceful softness.
But her grim view of the masculine power is matched by the remarkable reslience of its feminine counterpart: courageous, clever, compassionate, wily, and – when needed – hard-headed. In her books, women’s lives, women’s bodies, and the fertile planets they call home are almost always in danger of assault by these stereotypically male villains (not all of them men). The limitless evils of man – grasping, needy, controlling, thrusting, swaggering man – were an endless theme for Tepper. Trump – a misogynistic con man with an impossibly large ego, a need for outside vengeance over every slight, and a sadistic brand of dominance politics – is a Tepper villain from her literary version of Central Casting, and if life were one of her novels, he would have been grabbed and strangled by a cyborg pussy willow or crushed to death when the earth itself shook Trump Tower to pieces. Tepper’s novels are sometimes described as “ecofeminist sci-fi,” but that barely begins to describe the spirit that pulses and crackles in her work: as wide and nourishing as the sea, and as capable of drowning you in an instant. Tepper was no longer alive to hold him at bay. I know now why Donald Trump won the election: because Sheri S.
0 kommentar(er)
