FISH TAILS

Tepper continues a slow procession toward aquatic apocalypse in this follow-up to The Waters Rising (2010).

In 200 years, the waters of Earth will drown all the land, and only those capable of living in the sea will survive. Abasio and Xulai and their twin sea-adapted babies, Bailai and Gailai, are traveling across the world, attempting to convince those they meet about the rising waters and the necessity of sea-adapting their future children. Along the way, the family encounters various people and beings either hostile or sympathetic to their mission, and they eventually discover the cause of the planetary flooding. There’s actually not much of a coherent or well-paced story here until about the last quarter of the book; it’s simply a chain of connected traveling episodes. Worse, many motifs have already been exhaustively explored in several other Tepper novels—in particular, that environmental wastefulness and damage have offended the world spirit and brutal misogyny, xenophobia and stupidly obstinate closed-mindedness persist yet can be deliberately bred out of humanity. Talking animals, whimsical galactic investigators and often groaningly awful wordplay have also featured in her other works. Characters from a decades-old (and mainly out of print) series make a cameo, but anyone who appreciates their reappearance is also more likely to recognize just how much Tepper is repeating herself here.

A sad patchwork of plot scraps from Tepper’s previous, and superior, works.