My first book of the year is The Gate to Women’s Country by Sheri S. Tepper. This is sort of cheating, because I’ve read the book before, about 6 years ago. But as I re-read it, I realized that I had forgotten almost the entire plot and cast of characters, though I remembered the gist of the story. I would say there is a lot to discuss here (and argue over!) about traditional male and female roles, eugenics, building an ideal society, transparency in government…. all wrapped in an interesting and engaging story. It took me a while to get into her style of writing, it’s a little overwrought at times. The descriptions of the setting are a little too wordy and lavish, without giving us a really good mental picture of the scene. You know it’s a sci-fi/fantasy novel if the word “darkling” appears more than once, yo. Let’s try to break out of the mold when we write our speculative fiction, OK? One thing I really did appreciate about the book is Tepper’s use of a re-imagined Greek tragedy about Iphigenia at Troy as the society’s central myth. (the ghost of Iphigenia, obviously.) The gist of the play is that in the Greek tragedies and epics, the focus is on the heroism of the men, and no thought is given to the women and children who are sacrificed and swept away in their male path of destruction. Of course, anyone who’s read Aeschylus’s “Agamemnon” knows that this is not the case – Clytemnestra certainly doesn’t get lost in the shuffle! Neither does Medea, who kills her children rather than give them over to Jason, which would be a fate worse than death. The thing that is most interesting to me is not how women are represented in Greek tragedies versus the society in Women’s Country, but the fact that the characters in Greek plays are pawns in the larger game of the gods. They do horrible things because it is their fate to do so. So a Greek play is an interesting choice for the central theme of this book, which is about a society that is not heavily religious, in which women shape their own fates and the fates of men. Hmmmmm…..