Customer Reviews

A Plague of Angels

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(7)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

This book has many excellent qualities, including interesting characters, a well-developed universe, and a good handling of a grandiose storyline. Unfortunately, the author tends to get incredibly preachy, and has a truly vexing tendency to divide different parts of the world into "things I like" and "things I don't like". While this sort of writing may well be par for course for this author, the book would have been much better off without it.

This is an amazing book, but I wish I could have felt more for the characters. The story had all the elements of danger, intrigue and romance you could hope for, but there was something about the storytelling itself that seemed rather mechanical.

The logistical errors in the manuscript drove me crazy . . . doesn't this publishing house (Bantam) proofread anything? Still, it was worth hanging in for the climax. The book is rather long and if you don't read it consistently (ideally, every day) you might lose sight, like I did, of certain details the author brushed over -- seemingly minor points that become important at the end of the book.

I can't say I'm now a Sheri S. Tepper fan, but I'm glad I tried at least one of her books. The ending was gripping, I just found the path to get there rather tedious at times. The book didn't take me by the heart.

This book seemed fairly promising, but unfortunately, it failed to deliver on most of the promises. I loved the basic premise and the idea behind the book, but that's pretty much it.

The book started off incredibly slow. The first 80 or so pages are mainly background information, and could have easily been worked in elsewhere in the novel.

Sheri S. Tepper went into incredible detail on things that weren't very important to the story, but left it mainly to the reader's imagination on the bigger elements. Such as Orphan's guardian angel. You can surmise fairly early on what it is, but you don't actually find out what it looks like until at least midway through the book.

The whole book is done in past tense, however, for whatever reason, Sheri S. Tepper decided to switch to present tense for the last chapter. This made absolutely no sense to me. It would have worked had she started off the novel in present tense, then went through the middle of the book like a flashback, finally switching back to present tense at the end. Since this didn't happen, the present tense at the end of the novel had a really jarring effect on me.

I could go on about the other problems I had while reading this book, but suffice it to say, it's pretty bad when you keep reading a novel in the hopes that it gets better to only be disappointed at the end that it didn't. My only real regret is that I purchased this novel new at bookstore. Had I bought it used, it wouldn't seem like such a waste of money.

All in all, the book had the potential to be an awesome mix of sci-fi and fantasy. It's just sad that it didn't happen that way.

Sheri S. Tepper's "A Plague of Angels" dates from 1993 and it continues the theme that first emerged in this author's writings in 1984, with "The True Game", and developed through that book's second set of prequels, "The Jinian Chronicles", and that has continued in recent years with books such as "The Visitor (Gollancz)". All of these feature an imagined distant future in which mankind (or what is left of it) leads an unsettling, often strange existence, manipulated or controlled by some alien/planetary über-power. The interventions of these agents of some higher authority have usually been precipitated or enabled by the actions (usually misdeeds) of long-dead previous generations of Man (the race) and whilst we are usually led towards a recognition of our own times, many of the sins, particularly of men (the gender) are equally recognisable as pertaining in almost all ages. As a result, Tepper's writings are often branded (one might almost say dismissed) as falling within the genre of feminist science fiction. Which sadly is often to miss the point.

"A Plague of Angels" is set in a land which is clearly the remains of south-west/central North America many years after some global catastrophe has rearranged continental coast-lines, altered climates, and thrown the remnants of civilisation back into some Dark Age. The bulk of humanity supposedly departed for some distant and unknown future among the stars many generations previously; what remains of city life is now contained either within heavily-secured high-tech Edger enclaves, or else given over entirely to drug-fuelled power-struggles between various warring Ganger groups, whose daily street battles are broadcast routinely to public entertainment screens as some kind of obscene game-show. Outside of the cities, scattered farmers do their best to eek out an existence from the land, providing produce for the cities, whilst a network of Archetypal Villages preserve the full range of human archetypes, such as Oracle, Orphan, Bastard and Hero, the latter gainfully employed ridding the land of the myriad mythical beasts and monsters which have mysteriously returned to Earth to menace the population. Add in the extra threat to the remaining human population of widespread and rampant sexually transmitted immune deficiency diseases, plus the machinations of a handful of in-bred groups inhabiting a mysterious fortress known as the Place of Power and squabbling over plans to complete and fly a shuttle to the ruins of a former Moon-based mining colony and you will get some idea of the extraordinary range and complexity of notions that Sheri Tepper routinely throws into her books.

Given the complexity and variety of the mix along the way, coupled with her propensity for misdirecting the reader at almost every turn, it is scarcely surprising that many accuse Tepper of spoiling her books with seemingly unsatisfying endings. And certainly if you like endings where everything is neatly wrapped up and brought to a solid conclusion, then Tepper will almost invariably leave you disappointed at the end. For if her books teach anything it is that life rarely provides nice neat endings. The world turns endlessly; times change; crises come and eventually pass; some people survive them, others do not. But maybe, just maybe, if we all acted a little differently, they wouldn't arise at all.

I have to think that other readers besides me were a little disturbed by this book's seemingly easy acceptance of "final solution" thinking. A well-constructed narrative, intriguing concepts and bad, bad, bad guys are not a good enough justification for fascism, whether we're talking about actual history or speculative fiction. Strong, wise leaders who need to cleanse society (even a really rotten one) for the elites? Norman Spinrad's Iron Dream looked at this kind of seductive thinking a generation ago -- read your SF history!

Try some LeGuin in either her cultural or political mode, Emma Bull's wonderful War for the Oaks, or even the recent Lisle/ Bradley "Rift" books as antidotes to this stuff. Or go to the Salon e-zine to see David Brin's thoughtful rant about similar issues in the Phantom Menace. Good sf/fantasy is not incompatible with democracy!

I am very fond of Teppers books. So much that I blindly buys everything I can get my hands on.

This book, however, was a huge disappointment.

The style clearly shows that this is among Teppers early works. The style is far from as elaborate and enjoyably intricate as some of her later work. The story as such quickly becomes boring. After about half the book, I started to get an "are-we-there-yet" attitude and found my self checking how many pages I had left to read before I could put it down. Some wise person said that life is too short to waste on bad books. So, I took the implied advice and put it down (for now). I regret having spent money on the sequel that was just recently published ("The Water Rising").

I strongly recommend several of Teppers other books, though. Books like "Grass", "Sideshow", "Shadow's End" and "Six Moon Dance".

I wasn't quite certain what to expect in reading this work. Initially, the blend of future history, sci-fi, and fantasy seemed incongruous, but made more and more sense as the story progressed. One of the things which I've often been troubled by in other novels is the tendency to make everything out to be some huge cataclysmic battle. In this case, the real battle is something that no one ever quite expects, which is probably how such things would really go. And somehow, despite all of the disparate elements and varying foci, it works. In fact, it is one of my favorite future history novels due, in part, to the fact that Tepper doesn't shirk from making very unpleasant analyses of and decisions about issues that are facing our future. I don't agree with her about everything, but I will say that she is remarkably tough-minded and consistent, while writing a wonderful story and believable characters.

This is probably the strangest Sheri S Tepper book I have encountered so far. If you've not read one of Tepper's books before, this would not be the best one to start with. Her talents are best showcased in Beauty and The Family Tree.

If you have read and liked other Tepper novels, then you'll enjoy this. On the surface it's very much to the Tepper formula - a strange and disturbing future resulting from modern society's monumental mistakes. But it's just a bit odd. The characterisations are deliberately starker and the plot takes a while to get going. 4 stars because I like it, but wouldn't necessarily recommend it to everyone.

I very much enjoyed the first half of this book, that is, I loved learning about the world that Tepper created and was thrilled to know about the different characters and their relations. I didn't like the main character, though, the Orphan, because I never got to feel her from the "inside"; I just saw her through the other characters' motivations to relate to her,and I never really felt what drove her to act as she did.Nevertheless, the most unsatisfactory part of this novel was its ending; it is as if the author got tired of the story and decided to end it no matter how, leaving the readers with too many questions.

With every Sheri S. Tepper book I read, I wonder "why didn't I read this before?!". Her imagination, skilful writing and her social and environmental engagement in her stories makes you look around in the world we live in and raise an eyebrow... "A plague of Angels" is one more of her page-turners, which made me want to keep reading to understand the meaning of it all. Longing for that last page, where everything would become clear, yet sad when that last page, and thus the book, is finished and the dream ended. I could say that about every book of her I read so far. Besides terrific stories, her stories makes a person THINK. Well, *me* anyway ;-)