“I hear,” whispered Marianne, speaking to the night, the rain, the corner of the living room she could see from her bed. Winesap’s window, babbling its music in vain to ears which did not hear.
The opening paragraph of Marianne, The Magus, and the Manticore remains one of my favorites:ĭuring the night, Marianne was awakened by a steady drumming of rain, a muffled tattoo as from a thousand drumsticks on the flat porch roof, a splash and gurgle from the rainspout at the corner of the house outside Mrs. I tend to be completist when I love an author’s works even if I do not love all of them. Reading the first in this series put Tepper’s name immediately on my “buy as soon as they appear” list of authors, and that response never changed although some of her later works appeal to me much less than the earlier ones. But even before I read the later trilogies in the True Game series, I found the Marianne Trilogy. Suddenly, as with Anne McCaffrey’s Pern series, I found myself in a science fiction narrative of sorts, a lost colony settled by humans. The later trilogies in the True Game series, Mavin’s and Jinian’s, turn away from the male bildungsroman to twist fantasy conventions on multiple levels. I was lucky since she published so many novels so quickly: her entry in Wikipedia lists ten novels published in 1983-1985. Those differences were different enough to keep me reading the trilogy and keeping an eye out for her other work. But the initiating event is an attack on King Mertyn in which Peter is used and injured by his male lover, and the outcome of Peter’s journey is learning about the Immutables (those outside the Game who lack any of the powers valued in the Game) and meeting his mother (not his father!). The setting is the world of the True Game where characters have fantastic powers echoing medievalist fantasy conventions. He is a young man, a foundling, raised in an all-male environment, who almost immediately embarks on a quest. Peter starts out as a typical fantasy orphan hero.
However, even this early novel had threads of the feminist themes Tepper would develop in more detail in her later work. Had Tepper’s work continued in that vein, interesting world-building with a male protagonist, I am not sure I would have become such a fervent fan. I remember standing in the University of Washington bookstore reading the opening pages of King’s Blood Four, the first of what would become the nine-novel triple trilogy The True Game. I found my first Tepper novel in the early 1980s. WARNING: For references to rape and abuse of young women as an element of Tepper’s novels. NOTE: Spoilers for a number of Tepper’s novels occur throughout the essay.
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