Singer from the Sea (Mass Market Paperback)

by Sheri S. Tepper (Author) "GENEVIEVE'S TOWER WAS SLENDER AND TALL, AN ARCHItectural conceit added at the last moment to the otherwise undistinguished structure of Blessingham School..." (more)
Key Phrases: Lord Paramount, Aufors Leys, Yugh Delganor (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review
Sheri S. Tepper has crafted a far-future fantasy that reads like the best of whodunits: murder, religion, treason, a mysterious ailment called batfly fever, interplanetary spies, true love, and planetary consciousness are the strands that make up this colorful tale. She limns the culture of this new world so skillfully that the reader never has cause to doubt its 1000-year history.

A nontechnology planet, Haven was seeded by one of the Ark ships that carried humanity away from a dying Earth. Purchased by a consortium of wealthy men who chose peace over progress, the planet and its people appear to be thriving--all except young noblewomen. In the millennium since Haven was settled, it has become a sad truth that these women often die in childbirth or shortly thereafter, while commoners flourish and produce bountiful offspring. Noblewomen are raised to live, marry, and give birth as custom demands, adhering to strict religious and cultural tenets, for they "have been taught that women are happiest in gracious submission to the covenants."

Lady Genevieve, motherless from a young age, experiences visions and knows that somehow she is fundamentally different from those around her--but how different she is may surprise even the most experienced Tepper reader. An ancient voice is calling Genevieve to her destiny, although her path continues to be unclear. Together with the gentle Colonel Aufors Leys, she pieces together a horrifying revelation that will change their lives forever--but don't fear: there is good and wonder mixed in here as well.

Singer from the Sea begins with a deceptively simple storyline and evolves into an ecofeminist tale of the struggle to save the women of Haven, and indeed the planet itself, from a uniquely hideous end. --Jhana Bach --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly
On a planet covered almost entirely by oceans, two small countries lie side by side. The societies of both are carefully constructed around a single, deadly secret that only old men share. Those who don't know the secret can't imagine how deeply it affects their entire world, and those who do will sacrifice anything, and anyone, to keep things exactly as they are. Noble women, like Genevieve, do not live long. Most die in childbirth or soon thereafter of the mysterious batfly fever, for which there is an equally sinister medicine, P'naki. Genevieve's life, like all lives on Haven, is carefully scripted by the ancient Covenants, but her fate was arranged long before her people even landed on the planet, for she has been chosen to restore the natural balance of life and death. Don't mess with the "world spirit" or the great "Whatever," warn the followers of the planet's two mystical religions, but some men haven't listened, and now divine retribution is coming: Genevieve is to be the harbinger of the planet's transformation. This is a mystical, well-imagined feminist tale with enough hidden powers and intrigue to make it feel like a mystery. The societies that Tepper (Six Moon Dance) creates are frighteningly believable; her characters are multi-textured and full of life. Narrative flow slows because of repetitious dialogue in the novel's middle, but otherwise the storytelling is fluid and captivating.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Mass Market Paperback: 544 pages
• Publisher: Eos (March 7, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0380791994
• ISBN-13: 978-0380791996
• Product Dimensions: 6.7 x 4.2 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars See all reviews (32 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #264,694 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

19 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Classic Tepper, March 25, 2000

By	A. D. Ladner (Gulf Stream, Florida USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

With sincere apologies to the great Isaac Asimov, there has never been
a better world builder than Sheri Tepper. And with further apologies
to Ursula LeGuin, no one handles gender issues and emotional
ambiguities better than Ms. Tepper. Her prose remains brilliant, the
plot is complex, and the character development extensive.

Summary:
On a world divided into nobility and commoners, where women are slaves
and pawns, we find that the royalty has discovered a drug which will
give them extremely long lives. The story progresses as an
intelligent, but compliant young woman becomes trapped in the politics
of the creation and distribution of this drug, and ultimately, the
planet's future becomes balanced upon her acceptance of her own
destiny.

Only Sheri Tepper, with her confident story telling, could
explore the nuances of such strong gender roles without lapsing into
modern American feminist diatribe. Her characters do not expostulate,
they talk to each other and we are led through their lives and through
their thoughts. It takes me forever to read through a Tepper book.
Her vocabulary is large, and her sentences are complicated. Ideas are
not thrust onto the page fully developed, rather they evolve with
precision through careful reading and attention to details. However,
like viewing a painting, the greatest pleasure is gained through slow
and careful attention to the work at hand. As you can tell, I highly
recommend this book. And if you can find "Grass" or
"Raising the Stones", you won't be disappointed.

27 of 29 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars handless handmaids & heroic hunks, June 23, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: SINGER from the SEA (Hardcover)

O.K., so it's all been said before. I agree: Tepper's ideas get old. But (at the risk of being tendentious) whoever finds fault with male SF authors for repeatedly creating heroes who don't even measure up as bad adolescent fantasies, who tromp around their respective realms (physical and metaphysical) demanding homage on the basis of their strenghth and not on the basis of their use of it, who pass the time in proving their prowess and that IS the plot, who (like hobbyists) go about collecting lands and honors in order to collect more lands and and honors, and who pal around with advisory-figures who during said heroes' (rare) moments of reflection and doubt, assure them that everything they do is okay since "people are stupid" and have a lesson or two coming to them anyway? Huh? Nobody, that's who, and quite rightly, since many books of this description are roaring good reads, move along like houses afire, and manage the titanic feat of keeping track of two or more different chains of events which take place at different locations at approximately the same time. As nobody I know of reads science fiction for enlightenment (God help them if they do) that's about all one can ask of a science fiction novel; and at all the abovementioned tasks (namely: plot, pacing, world-construction) Tepper excels. Why, heck, she even WRITES well. Enough said.

Now, having come to Tepper's defense, I'm going to speak of what bothers me most about her. And what bothers me most about Tepper is her anti-technological stance; her notion that Homo Faber, the direct descendent of Homo Habilis the Tinkerer, is somehow always intrinsically, genetically criminal, just bound to be up to no good. In book after book of Tepper's we are invited to behold the disastrous consequences of human meddling; in no book of hers do we ever receive much of a suggestion that such meddling may sometimes turn out WELL--that it may result in a cathedral, a symphony, a cure for polio or an unusually nifty flower display. No, Tepper implies, human ingenuity is not wanted in this universe: down with it.

Worse yet, this proscription against too much ingenuity, too much human cleverness, seems to come down hardest upon her sex and mine. Tepper's books treat eloquently of the power imbalance btween the sexes and the disastrous consequences which often proceed from THAT, but it's been years since she's painted the picture of a woman accepting power instead of renouncing it. In _Singer from the Sea_ Tepper has a great deal of fun at the expense of cultural conventions which prescribe resignation and acquiescence (not initiative and problem-solving) on the part of women. But, in the end, in effect, she herself preaches the same thing. Nineteenth-century conduct books used chillingly to recommend that women be "wise for self-renunciation and not for self-development": in other words they advised women only to USE power in the service of LOSING power. The female lead of _Singer from the Sea_, Genevieve Marchioness of Wantresse, does just that: she evinces ability, but only in the cause of service to a higher power; isn't that precisely what women have all to often been required to do vis-a-vis men? Why should it be any different when the recipient of female sacrifice is a World Spirit instead of a husband? And the World Spirit of Genevieve's planet requires of her the greatest abjection; at the end of the book she renounces meddling, technology--the use of her hands. In doing so, she becomes akin to all the mutilated maidens in the gorier fairytales--the ones who walk out into the world, meet with events which diminish them terribly, and who must thereafter either outclever or cope with their diminishment--except that Genevieve wishes her disempowerment upon HERSELF (to say nothing of her descendants.)

THAT is appalling. And it's a sacrifice required only of the female--one of Genevieve's (male) sidekicks, Jeorfy Bottoms, escapes his own entrapment by learning about machines and about the technology which will allow him to assume some degree of control over his circumstances, while Genevieve is made to sink back into the realm of the undifferentiated. Mercedes Lackey's retelling of a fairly grim fairytale, _The Black Swan_, a book with an argumentative thrust similar to that of _Singer from the Sea_, DEMANDS of its female protagonist that she learn how to interfere, to accomplish, to achieve, to DO. Lackey's heroine accedes to power, she does not deny it: she strengthens her hands instead of (metaphorically) cutting them off. The whole point of _The Black Swan_ is that Odile von Rothbart can do things with hands that she can't do with wings; the whole point of _Singer form the Sea_ is that Genevieve would be better off with flippers. The husband, he's the best thing in the book. By far. To the cynical he might appear to be a bit infatuated and biddable but verily, I say unto you, appearances are frequently deceitful. Aufors Leys, male lead of _Singer from the Sea_, has gonads of steel. His powers of endurance are superlative, his resourcefulness is amazing, and his intentness on getting what he wants gives rise to awe. (Of course, that last characteristic is okay since he's a guy.) Aufors Leys displays syptoms only too infrequently to be met with among the general run of science fiction males--he shows signs of being a REAL HERO. Admittedly, he's a romantic hero: his quest is to find out what's up with his woman. THIS, as my mother used to say, is the kind of man you marry. The sad thing is, though, that his character is ineluctably weakened toward the novel's end, just as his wife Genevieve is "winning toward the goal" of her apothesis. Exactly why should that be? Nothing in the plot necessitates it. For my part I can't escape the feeling that, just as it's somehow ACTUALLY not all right for women in the world described by _Singer from the Sea_ to learn to cope with machinery, it's also somehow not all right for Genevieve to end up being able to do something that her husband can't.

All the same (as I said before) Tepper writes well, constructs worlds like an expert, handles a plot line (or several) like a pro. Hence this diatribe. _Singer from the Sea_ is, like all her books, an eloquent testimonial to her authorial powers. It's because Tepper's books are so consistently so GOOD that it troubles me when they appear to be implying Very Bad Things--that's all. I don't think we NEED another renunciation story, either as women or as men. The kind of transformation story in which the protagonist learns to endure pain and to accept fate has been WRITTEN already--by the Brothers Grimm and by everybody else. As I see it, we need more transformation stories in which the transformed characters end up with REALLY COOL POWERS which enable them to do INCREDIBLY INTERESTING THINGS. Anything less, as Queen Mu tells us, is BORING. Why is it that books like _Singer from the Sea_, with such promising sources of interest at their command, preach acquiescence in dullness, in non-differentiation, at the last? Why should we be advised, either as women or as men, to live our lives out underwater?

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Who or what's killing the planet? (and all the women?), February 27, 2001

By	Joanna Daneman (Middletown, DE USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 10 REVIEWER)    (COMMUNITY FORUM 04)

In Singer from the Sea, author Sherri Tepper creates a memorable heroine, Genevieve the Marchioness of Langmarsh. Who and what Genevieve is happens to be part of the mystery in this novel. Genevieve behaves admirably as the well-brought-up, educated noblewoman she is. But part of her operates at a level that even Genevieve has trouble connecting with. Sometimes she feels, and acts, like two different persons.

People live a long, long time on Haven, that is, if they are of the ruling class and if they are men. Women don't seem to fare as well; a large number of the noblewomen simple fade like flowers after bearing a child or two-mostly succumbing to batfly fever. Only the drug P'Naki, whose production is strictly controlled on the island of Mahahm can save people from batfly fever. Unfortunately, pregnant or nursing women can't take it.

There is another horrific problem looming; planet after planet suffers a mysterious ailment where all native life simply stops. Animals die, plants yellow and wilt. And people begin to suffer a strange affliction; they simply stop as if they were frozen in their tracks. Living, yet not alive. The very time the planet dies can be pinpointed to a night of fires in the sky. What is going on? And why? No one seems to know.

Genevieve is called to serve at the court of the Lord Paramount, ruler of Haven. As she takes up her duties at court, she begins to uncover secrets hidden there, and also begins to uncover what and who she is. And she also begins to discover the true secret of P'Naki. And when she learns more about her heritage, she begins to awaken to the planetary dangers ahead.

Genevieve's discoveries lead her to a deadly dangerous situation, and some very exciting reading. One of Tepper's best books, along with Six Moon Dance, Grass and Gate to Women's Country.