However, in part due to her later 1988 work The Gate to Women's Country, which raised ethical questions due to its premise of genetically altering violence out of men while also removing homosexuality from the population, Tepper has been received as a controversial figure. Tepper's work has been situated by some critics into a significant lineage of feminist science fiction by women, in particular the moderate feminism of the 1980s that included authors like Joan Slonczewski and Pamela Sargent. But the secret of the planet's immunity hides a truth so shattering it could mean the end of life itself. Given that the mainly aristocratic inhabitants of Grass have developed an obsession with a localised variant of fox hunting using the planet's native fauna in place of the horses, hounds, and foxes found on Earth, Sanctity chooses as its investigators the Westriding-Yrarier family, whose equestrian background and upper class roots may enable them to successfully infiltrate the aristocratic society and learn more about the hitherto secretive planet. The spread of a seemingly incurable plague across human settlements throughout known space prompts the authoritarian religious rulers of humanity, Sanctity, to send investigators to Grass, the only place the plague does not seem to have affected, in the hope of finding a cure. Partially as a result of this, the human race has spread out across the galaxy and populated new worlds. In the distant future Terra (Earth) has become massively over-populated and its resources overstretched. Grass is so named because almost its entire surface is covered in multi-coloured prairie. Much of the novel centers on the cosmic anomaly Grass, the only planet immune to a galaxy-wide plague. Interest in the novel continued, and it was included in the SF Masterworks classic science fiction paperback collection in 2002.

Styled as an ecological mystery, Grass presents one of Tepper's earliest and perhaps most radical statements on themes that would come to dominate her fiction, in which despoliation of the planet is explicitly linked to gender and social inequalities.Ĭonsidered to be among her best works and hailed as 'a splendid achievement, one of the most satisfying science fiction novels I have read in years' by New York Times Book critic Gerald Jones at the time of its publication, Grass was nominated for both the Hugo and Locus award in 1990.

Tepper and the first novel from the Arbai trilogy. Grass is a 1989 science fiction novel by Sheri S.

Sheri tepper raising the stones