Book - BookDetective

Name: The Gate to Women's Country

Author: Sheri S. Tepper
Year: 1987
Rank:

Rating:

Original Rating:

Pop Rating:

Genres/categories:
Science fiction, Award winners, Fantasy

Purchase/reserch links:

ISBNs:
9780006482703
9780553280647
0006482708
0553280643

Tepper's finest novel to date is set in a post-holocaust feminist dystopia that offers only two political alternatives: a repressive polygamist sect that is slowly self-destructing through inbreeding and the matriarchal dictatorship called Women's Country. Here, in a desperate effort to prevent another world war, the women have segregated most men into closed military garrisons and have taken on themselves every other function of government, industry, agriculture, science and learning.

The resulting manifold responsibilities are seen through the life of Stavia, from a dreaming 10-year-old to maturity as doctor, mother and member of the Marthatown Women's Council. As in Tepper's Awakeners series books, the rigid social systems are tempered by the voices of individual experience and, here, by an imaginative reworking of The Trojan Woman that runs through the text. A rewarding and challenging novel that is to be valued for its provocative ideas.