Gibbon's Decline and Fall
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- $10.99
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
The year is 2000. America is swept up in the tide of fundamentalism that is overwhelming the world. Suicide cults and paranoid militias are on the rise and mobs of hooded men drive young women from the streets, as the right-wing American Alliance marshals it forces to close an iron grip on the United States.
Yet even as a power-hungry Alliance candidate makes his first move in a game that will land him the presidency, one woman prepares to stand against him. At Carolyn Crespin's side are five women friends, the oddly present spirit of another friend who had been reported dead, and an even more surprising ally, mysterious and powerful - one who hands Carolyn the key to the future of humanity, for good or ill.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Tepper (Shadow's End) ) can be characterized as a quirkily feminist writer whose novels often question whether humanity might be better off with a smaller, more docile male population. This theme, combined with the author's ambivalence about Catholicism, informs this fable of ethics, feminism and transcendence, which employs an intriguing concept involving an alternate branching of the evolutionary tree. Carolyn Crespin comes from a stultifying family that believes women should be seen and not heard. When she escapes to college in the early 1960s, she helps form the Decline and Fall Club, comprised of herself and six other women (including a devout nun, a radical lesbian artist and a brilliant scientist). They band together to protect one of their members, an exotic beauty named Sova, from unwanted male attention. During a 40-year gap in the narrative, conservatism and misogyny increase, a focused evil grows and Sova mysteriously disappears. The tale resumes at the dawning of the Millennium, when terrorist bag ladies are on the rise and sexual desire is on the wane. Now, Carolyn and her friends must defeat an embodiment of violence and ultra-patriarchal masculinity or see women reduced to the level of walking wombs. As always, Tepper creates excellent female characters transported by a swiftly flowing plot. Her proposed solutions for the world's problems, however, may leave male readers wondering why they should settle for being little more than ambulatory sperm banks.
