At its heart, Sheri Tepper's Hugo-nominated Grass is an ecological mystery novel, in the same tradition as Orson Scott Card's Speaker for the Dead: humans on an alien planet are baffled by some bizarre ecological quirks, but the truth about the planet slowly emerges with horrifying inevitability. Grass's first chapter sets up the mystery perfectly, dropping subtle hints about the nature of the world known as Grass while telling a eerie and disturbing story of a girl's first Hunt.

As usual in novels of this type, we readers experience the world through an outsider--in this case, Marjorie Westriding Yrarier, who is sent with her husband to the planet Grass in order to discover a possible cure to a quickly spreading plague that is infecting people across the galaxy. They come to Grass because it is the only planet where people seem not to be getting sick from this plague: perhaps there is something on the planet that will give a clue about how to attack the disease.

The first few chapters of Grass are a sheer delight to read. Tepper adeptly sketches the basic outlines of the arcane society that has grown up among the human colonists of Grass, leaving enough gaps for the curious reader to begin wondering what is going on beneath the seemingly proper veil of Grass's high society. She also clearly lays out the essential features of the world: the flora and fauna, the geographical features that describe the world, and, of course, the ever-present fields of grass that give the planet its name. The result is a virtuoso feat of world-building: without resorting to clunky expository devices, Tepper presents a complex, full-bodied, and believable world that is habitable by humans but nevertheless irrevocably alien.

At first, Tepper does just as good a job with the ecological mystery. The hints dropped in the first chapter lead Marjorie down blind alleys and into major revelations. For at least half the book there is the delightful sense of the real truth behind the planet unfolding before one's eyes. And while for the most part Tepper does an admirable job doling out the relevant details, she seems to run out of time by the end: an enormous info-dump occurs only a few chapters from the conclusion, accompanied by a ridiculous and unfortunate deus ex machina revelation that makes it seem like Tepper is simply trying to get the facts out of the way so she can finish the book.

Still, if all that Tepper had tried to do was write an ecological mystery novel in a world of her own creation, the book would have been just fine. The problem--at least in my opinion--is that she tries to do a lot more too. She doesn't want her novel to simply be about a strange world where children disappear and alien plagues can't get hold: she also wants her novel to be about religion and faith, action vs. passivity/guilt/penitence, family relations, and the role of women in society. Tepper's presentation of those Themes is not pleasant: she can most leniently be called obvious, and most damnably be called heavy-handed. And by the end, the structure of Tepper's novel is clearly insufficient to support the weight she throws onto it, as Tepper attempts to tie up her careening plot line, the necessary exposition about the planet so we can understand that plotline, and her pet bundle of Important Themes. Indeed, the entire end sort of falls apart: it's all loosely knitted together and confusing, and even the characters start falling apart. (There's a very bizarre segment where Marjorie sees a bunch of people getting killed and then thinks, "What about the horses?")

Nevertheless, even as the ending unravels, the novel as a whole is still quite entertaining; and while the maxims of Tepper's story fade from memory, the story itself lingers.

Copyright © 2003 Steven Wu