the alien princess book reviews

In one of my favourite local bookstores for some retail therapy after a hard week, I was attracted to Sheri S. Tepper’s 1989 novel Grass by an icon of a fearsome, spiny beast embossed onto its moss-green cover. Within the novel’s 450 pages, I found the alien creature at the centre of a complex meditation on ecology, religion, and duty, supported by compelling characters and a tightly-crafted plot. I give it an 8.5/10.

A deadly plague is sweeping through the universe under an intergalactic techno-Catholic regime known as Sanctity, who forbids acknowledgment of its existence. Former Olympic equestrian Marjorie and her husband Rigo, on a secret mission to find a cure, are sent to the supposedly plague-free prairie planet Grass as ambassadors. Upon arrival, they witness a traditional Grassian Hunt and are introduced to the alien featured on the cover: a Hippae, a horselike animal with deadly spikes which force its riders into a frozen posture. Soon Rigo and their daughter Stella are fascinated with the Hunt, while Marjorie and her son Tony investigate the ruins of an alien city in pursuit of a clue to the cure. When Stella disappears during a Hunt, Marjorie plunges into the dangerous wild grasses to save her and uncovers a shocking truth that touches everything: the Hippae, the plague, and even God.

This novel was an excellent read. There were so many elements at play, but nothing felt out of place or random. It has the kind of worldbuilding that I find really satisfying, where every element is in service of the plot. The Catholic focus was a bit of a surprise, as it was not mentioned in the back cover summary, but definitely a welcome one. I love sci-fi that explores religion and spirituality, and Grass absolutely hit that spot for me.

The writing style was natural and evocative, with well-paced and vivid action scenes. I especially enjoyed the way the novel opened with a scene of a Hunt from the Grassian elites’ perspective. It was incredibly intriguing because the Hippae (or mounts, as they call them) and their hounds weren’t described, so the reader has to wait to experience the alienness of the Hippae with Marjorie and her family. The characters, too, were interesting and believable. The characterization has a timelessness about it; I kept mistakenly thinking while reading the novel that it was published later, perhaps in the early 2000s. The plague plotline reads as especially modern in our post-covid present.

The second half of the book is where most of my issues with the text lie. True to Catholic form, the narrative insists upon the inherent danger in sexual desire, punishing female characters with a brain-wipe or death for acting on their desires. Stella, who snuck into a Hunt to get close to the son of an aristocratic family she was attracted to, is paired off by the end in a lovingly modest relationship with a monk and is expecting a baby by him. This relationship came out of absolutely nowhere, except for a couple mentions of the monk, Rilibee, being attracted to Stella on the rescue mission. I find it hard to picture the stubborn, passionate Stella of the first half of the novel settling down to raise a family when she’s just out of her teens. Part of the novel’s sexual politics is the idea that sexual assault is a death sentence: the girls who disappear during the Hunt resurface feral and unsocialized, their brains wiped clean. It is heavily implied they are raped by the Hippae. The survivors’ established identities and personhood are eliminated, leaving just a shell. Stella is able to be re-taught her lost knowledge and regain a sense of identity, but the other two girls are beyond saving. Stella’s character arc is the fantasy of the slut who learns her lesson, who dies from her own sin and is reborn as a sexually moral woman by the grace of a benevolent religious figure.

I also felt that the novel’s end tied up the plague plotline a little too easily – the finding of the cure kind of came out of nowhere in the final chapters, with no real foreshadowing or clues that the reader could put together as the solution was revealed.

The spiritual elements of the novel really came into play in the second half as well, which I quite enjoyed. Its exploration of alien biology thru the lens of Catholic doctrine is a combination I would never have thought feasible, yet it was a fascinating contribution to the story’s themes. I particularly liked a passage wherein the characters discuss the possibility of alien original sin (249-252) and Marjorie’s contact with the divine (353-355) while knocked out in the swamp forest. These spiritual elements rounded out the novel’s dissection of duty and goodness, leaving me with satisfying concepts to mull over after I’d turned the last page.

Overall, I found Sheri S. Tepper’s Grass (1989) to be an incredibly enjoyable read. Its absorbing worldbuilding, well-paced plot, realistic characters, and fascinating themes garner it an 8.5, well worth staying on my bookshelf.

Work Cited
Tepper, Shari S. Grass. Bantam Books, 1989.