Sideshow

I read this after reading Grass, and was pleased to note a couple of familiar names and faces. Personally, this is one of my favorite of Ms. Tepper's works, and the commentary on religion and tolerance amidst various barbaric practices in this book make it a worthwhile read.

This book would have achieved 5 stars if it wasn't for the Tepper-style deuz ex machina that I have come to expect from her books. This one wasn't as obvious or contrived as some of her other books (Family Tree, The Visitor, Gibbon's Decline and Fall) and it was a bit of a letdown, but the ending was better than some of her other books, so a solid 4/5 stars.

I actually came to understand this book better after reading 'Raising the Stones', which was the last book in show more the Arbai Trilogy I read, and then I could see the connection between all 3 books. show less

This is the third novel in a loose trilogy, and I have to wonder if it was originally intended to be a trilogy, even though the three books were published one after the other. The first book, Grass, is considered a genre classic, and was No 48 in the original SF Masterworks series. Tepper, who came to her career late, appeared frequently on the Clarke, Tiptree and Campbell Awards during the late 1990s and early 2000s, and with good reason - she wrote a number of excellent sf novels. Her feminism grated with some genre commentators of the time (men, of course), although these days it mostly seems notable for being not very intersectional.

Grass was followed by Raising the Stones, and then Sideshow, and all three are linked by the Arbai, show more an ancient race of dragon-like aliens who created a galaxy-wide network of Doors, which provided instantaneous travel between worlds. In Sideshow, an alien visits Earth in the late twentieth century and persuades a pair of joined twins to destroy an Arbai Door moments after it arrives on Earth. While doing so, they accidentally fall into the Door.

The story then jumps ahead several thousand years to the world of Elsewhere, which is the only planet left in the galaxy inhabited by humans not “enslaved” by the Hobbs Land Gods (an alien fungus which has created a hive mind out of all the infected humans, as described in Raising the Stones). But the founding philosophy of Elsewhere is a perversion of the term “diversity”, where a thousand or so cultures are protected despite their depredations on their members, such as sacrificing babies, treating women as property, abusing children, and generally allowing the privileged to treat the poor as less than human…

Elsewhere is administered from Tolerance, which uses Enforcers to, well, enforce Elsewhere’s distortion of diversity, by ensuring people do not move between cultures, the cultures do not change, or do not use technology of a higher level than is mandated for their culture. The Provost in Tolerance once a year consults a hidden computer holding the minds of the thousand academics from the galaxy’s greatest university (before the Hobbs Land Gods), but those uploaded minds, especially the four most powerful, are now quite insane and have been masquerading as “gods” and interfering in many cultures.

A team of three Enforcers, the joined twins from the twentieth century (they ended up in Elsewhere when they fell through the Door), and a mysterious old woman and her equally aged male companion (and an even more mysterious not wholly physical companion called Great Dragon), travel to the uninhabited centre of one of the continents, on the run from the mad uploaded “gods”, and eventually discover the secret of Elsewhere and the Arbai.

It makes for an odd novel. The cultures are perversions, but then Tepper has been deliberately perverse before - in Raising the Stones, for one - and it’s clear she’s arguing against the philosophy which governs Elsewhere. Even so, “diversity” was a bad choice of word to use. It makes something reprehensible of something that should be admirable. And it sometimes seems Tepper delighted in doing just that. There are also weird tonal shifts between the various sections - the opening chapters with the conjoined twins reads like some sort of US carnival novel (sadly all too common in twentieth-century US science fiction) flavoured with a little Ray Bradbury. But then Sideshow turns into a Jack Vance novel, although the wit is considerably more heavy-handed than Vance’s. The final section is pretty much explanations, but relies a little too much on close knowledge of the preceding novels, which, to be fair, I read in 2020 and 2018.

And yet, this is Tepper. You expect certain things, a certain angle of attack, so to speak, and in Sideshow she delivers it. A bit too much in places, I think. The main characters are mostly sympathetic, but the rest are grotesque, often more like caricatures than characters, especially the villains. It’s a book that’s slow to start, picks up pace in the middle, before slowing down once again for the grand finale. Which is, to be honest, a little disappointing.

Tepper is always worth reading, and in Sideshow she’s as inventive as ever, as extreme as ever, and as readable as ever. I’m not convinced you need to read Grass or Raising the Stones first, but it would probably help. show less

Honestly...I hate this one. Sometimes Tepper has a golden pen, inking out precious jewelry of social commentary, and sometimes all of her hate and anger come spewing out in revolting torrents. This is one of the latter books. I just barely managed to make it through the violence, mysogeny (inadvertent, but vile), and general hate to get to a somewhat satisfying but not truly worthwhile end. It's too bad that a loose trilogy with so much potential missed so many possibilities.

[Sideshow] is the last of the Arbai trilogy. It opens with one of those leading statements that reveals the destination, and then the story leads the reader to that point before moving beyond: "Humanity was saved from certain destruction when, on their wedding night, Lek Korsyzczy informed his wife that their first child was to be a son." This starting point and the book's title derive from the conjoined (Siamese) fraternal twins Nela and Bertran and their career on Old Earth before being catapulted through time and space via a newly materialized Arbai gate.

From their origin story, the narrative moves to the origin of Elsewhere, a remote planet colonized by humans fleeing the perceived enslavement of the Hobbs Land Gods introduced in show more [Raising the Stones]. This colony is a living manifestation of the amoral paradox of tolerance (indeed, the capitol is called Tolerance), the population divided into 1003 individual provinces governed by a noninterference pact--each province could do whatever the hell it wants with its people who cannot leave, and thus the planet becomes a millenium-long museum exhibit of human cultural/religious/governance diversity: authoritarian society based on extensive child sacrifice (Molock) or racial enslavement (Derbeck), extreme misogynist patriarchy dedicated to female enslavement and suffering (Thrasis), across the river from extreme misandrist matriarchy in which dependent men can only travel with their "mothers" (Beanfields), extreme caste differences (Enarae), military autocracy (Frick), extreme bureaucracy (New Athens), legal system based on mutilation and death penalties (Sandylwaith), society based on musical contributions (Choire), cyborg "dinks" created from deconstructed human parts to pursue either a life of the mind or of simplified bodily sensations (City Fifteen), and on and on. You see how many of these reflect extremism?

Elsewhere's founders were university professors from Brannigan Galaxity, and the premise for the colony's arrangement is a literal living lab to manifest the answer to the existential question "What is the ultimate destiny of man?" Tolerance is built atop the mysterious Core, where puzzling and scary manifestations are happening. Dragons have been reported in the mysterious and unexplored center of the continent. The Provost of Tolerance keeps receiving the message "The people of Elsewhere are respectfully requested to rethink their position with respect to the rest of the universe" in various increasingly improbably ways. So many interlinked mysteries! And thus a quest gets underway, traveling through the provinces and seeking the source. What is the nature of God? What is freedom/free will? What is the ultimate destiny of humanity? What is good/moral/just? Will our heroes survive? And how do the Arbai fit into all this?

I haven't even mentioned the other main characters: Council Enforcers Zasper Ertigon, Danivon Luze, Fringe Owldark, and Curvis; Provost Boarmus of the Council Advisory; Jory, Asner, and Great Dragon, plus an assortment of minor characters who help carry the plot forward. It's an interesting story generally well told. I just didn't love it. And once again, I am sympathetic with many of Tepper's points and appreciated her storytelling, but I don't agree with her final conclusions. I also noticed a bit of a gendered double standard. Whereas Sam in [Raising the Stones] is recklessly and foolishly yearning for heroic greatness and something beyond the quotidian, Fringe Owldark's similar seeking for something more is shows her exceptionalism and leads to transcendence. Hmmm. In the end, I am ambivalent about these stories and unsure whether I want to keep the trilogy. show less

This book is an excellent example of how science fiction can examine diversity, (non)intervention, and transcendence. Asking questions about when to intervene and when to respect cultural differences on imaginary worlds offers the reader more perspectives than asking these questions in a realistic setting--the mind is not limited to known worlds, but is free to explore new paths. Also, having a female main character (one of a strong ensemble) who is not interested in marriage and love is important for female readers; women are far more than their romantic relationships, and literature should reflect this. That being said, Tepper does have a couple passages that beautifully describe an experience of love. And there were wonderful show more connections to her previous novel, Grass. show less

Elsewhere, lit by one middle-sized yellow sun and accompanied by a scattered handful of heavy little planets and moons. Elsewhere, which had been set up--so said Council Supervisory--as the last refuge of humanity from enslavement by the Hobbs Land Gods, that botanical plague that had swept across the galaxy over a millennia before, bringing, so it was said, slavish conformity in its wake.
Some of the urgency had seeped out of that claim over the centuries, during which time Elsewhere had remained so inviolate that one might question whether the Hobbs Land Gods knew or cared it was there. Considering that Elsewhere had been set up and populated in secret, this was not astonishing. Still, Elsewhere had indisputably been designed as a show more refuge, and from the moment the first fleeing groups arrived to settle provinces of their own, each one was guaranteed the uninterrupted continuance of its own language and religion and customs and dress and anything else it considered important. Elsewhere, managed by Council Supervisory, was designed to insure the immemorial diversity of man.
Council Supervisory had made the rules to start with, and they had not changed since.
No province would be allowed to cross its own borders to infringe upon another or to make common cause with another to infringe upon a third; evangelism across borders was forbidden along with treaties and alliances; travel and trade were allowed, within limits; and any and all groups would be welcome so long as they let one another alone!

I suspected that I had read "Sideshow" before and I was right, as I recognised Elsewhere straightaway although I had forgotten the plot entirely. The first time I read the books of the Arbai Trilogy, I read them out of order and far enough apart that I didn't realise they were part of the same loosely linked series, and "Grass" was the only one I remembered well.

Elsewhere is an interesting world, with the enforcers maintaining the status quo, and only outsiders like the twins seeming to recognise the contradiction of championing diversity while forbidding change. Unfortunately I never really like the protagonists of Sheri Tepper's books, who are always flawed in ways that irritate me, especially in their approach to relationships. I liked the story but the ending was too much of a deus ex machina so be satisfying. show less

I jumped directly from "Grass" to this novel for some odd reason, but I was able to pick up the characters from the previous book.

The world-building and anthropological details in Tepper's novels continue to astound me. They are not easy reads, but are works of speculative genius.