Sideshow by Sheri S. Tepper
467 pages
Published 1992
Read from December 5 to December 7
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5
I am very glad I persevered through the Arbai Trilogy.
The preceding volumes, Grass and Raising the Stones,
were audacious but ultimately flawed novels, both sunk by a tendency to
swarm with nonessential, scarcely defined characters and to get bogged
down in the middle with dull material. Sideshow avoids those
problems, maintaining a relatively streamlined cast of characters and a
conventional (but effective) sci-fi quest structure. A definite note of
satire is present, or at least more pronounced than in the first two
books, but the occasional touch of flippancy doesn't undercut the
dramatic potential or my emotional investment in the characters. In
fact, Sideshow was at times quite affecting.
Some spoilers ahead.
Where Grass brought us techno-jousters battling sadistic alien stegosaur-horses, and Stones brought us a world overgrown with a fungal god, Sideshow
delivers a quadripartite computer-consciousness that is also a
psychotic god, manifesting through nanomachinery, that slices a pair of
conjoined twins into their component parts and places them in boxes
where their consciousnesses can only scream, said boxes then getting
broken down and reconstituted by the Stones fungus into a
humanoid bird and otter-man, respectively. Awesome as that is, of
course, any time you say "psychotic computer consciousness," you start
running into trouble -- cliche trouble. The four "villains" were my
least favorite part of Sideshow, an indulgence of genre convention that I think weakened the whole book.
Nonetheless,
this was solid overall, and the ending did not disappoint. I am left to
mourn the fact, however, that I will never be able to read a series on
the adventures of Marjorie Westriding and her pal Great Dragon as they
warp through time and space via Arbai doors with their occasional
companion Sam Girat. I picture such a series as a more inventive
alternative to new Doctor Who, full of whimsy and new worlds and
daring escapes as well as allegory and basic humanist philosophy. Oh
well. Probably it's for the best. Regardless, I'm a little sad now to
reach the end of this series, something I never expected to say as I was
wading through the arid wastes in the middle of Grass all those months ago.
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