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Dec. 4th, 2008 03:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sophiaserpentiaI just finished reading Beauty by Sheri S. Tepper. Actually i just read a trifecta of her books: The Awakeners, The Visitor, and Beauty.
Beauty has not become my favorite of her books, but it is the most "solid," in the sense that the writing, plotting, and characterization is really tight. It's... well, it's literally a fairy tale: a radical feminist fairy tale with a touch of dystopian science fiction and a clear anti-porn & anti-religion strand running through it. Tepper asks us to consider that we need beauty in our lives and environment not just to thrive but to survive, describing a dead-end future where all of the joy and beauty in the world has been paved over, and contrasting this with scenes from the medieval period (where the fey, and magic, still exist), and the present day (where the magic is almost all gone).
When i consider what i've written about meaning in the last year or so, i think i'm forced to agree with Tepper: as we gain more ability to shape the spaces in which we live, we cannot consider beauty to be optional.
Beauty has not become my favorite of her books, but it is the most "solid," in the sense that the writing, plotting, and characterization is really tight. It's... well, it's literally a fairy tale: a radical feminist fairy tale with a touch of dystopian science fiction and a clear anti-porn & anti-religion strand running through it. Tepper asks us to consider that we need beauty in our lives and environment not just to thrive but to survive, describing a dead-end future where all of the joy and beauty in the world has been paved over, and contrasting this with scenes from the medieval period (where the fey, and magic, still exist), and the present day (where the magic is almost all gone).
When i consider what i've written about meaning in the last year or so, i think i'm forced to agree with Tepper: as we gain more ability to shape the spaces in which we live, we cannot consider beauty to be optional.
