Raising the Stones

Sure to enhance Tepper's growing reputation, this imaginative novel is set in man's distant future among a number of human cultures inhabiting a distant solar system. On the recently colonized agricultural world of Hobbs Land, the aborigines and their god have died, leaving a few temples and villages. The children of the matriarchal Settlement One, including teenagers Jeopardy Wilm and his cousin and sweetheart, Saturday, begin to act strangely; they restore an old temple and place a new god inside. As quarrelsomeness and strife disappear, clear thinking prevails and worship of the new god spreads to other settlements, the fanatic, patriarchal prophets of Voorstod on the planet Ahabar seek to impose their brutal, slave-owning society on the whole system. For propaganda, they try to lure back from Hobbs Land famous singer Maire Girat, Jeopardy's grandmother, who had fled Voorstod years before. Tepper ( Grass ) builds strange rich worlds with distinct cultures breathing their own realities; among her many interwoven themes is the relationship between men and women and the societies each dominates. (Sept.)