Gibbon's Decline and Fall (Sheri S Tepper)

Sheri S Tepper is probably best labelled as a feminist science fiction author, but she's certainly not in the same league as Ursula K Le Guin, for example. Tepper's feminism - or the feminism she displays in her fiction, anyway - is excessively didactic and black and white. In all her books, there are male characters who have no redeeming features - they hate women with a deep and abiding fury, they kill women, they beat women, they try to create worlds where women are utterly confined and controlled by men. Reading back on that sentence, I'm now undecided - perhaps Tepper is writing realistic feminist prose, and I'm simply too optimistic about the world and men to see it as such. She's not a subtle author, in any case, and I prefer subtlety to Tepper's bludgeoning approach. (But is this because I'm too mired in the patriarchy and it makes me feel uncomfortable? Aaah, who knows?)

Gibbon's Decline and Fall is a story that centres around six very different women, who formed a "Decline and Fall" club while in University together. Later in life, one of them disappears, and while mourning her, the remainder of the club are called upon to, essentially, save the world and humankind from an evil force. This is more fantasy than science fiction, and becomes more so as the story continues. It's a decent story, and kept me involved, but I was disappointed by the two dimensional characters, and by what I felt was a rather vague and unsatisfactory way to end the story, not quite in keeping with the arc of the novel as a whole.

A three out of five book, and I'll keep re-reading Tepper in the future - I wouldn't quite classify her as a guilty pleasure, but in some of her novels (including this one) she's leaning perilously close to that precipice.