Sheri Tepper's gift is to address unflinchingly worst-case futures and confront head-on the reader's fears. It's a polemicist's strategy, invigorating, addictive, sharing the burden of contemplating big issues and the threat they may pose to the individual as well as the whole world. The book's title, The Family Tree, like Gibbon's Decline and Fall, has a hidden double meaning for the reader to fathom: trees have suddenly become rampant in our near future, growing at a fantastic rate to conquer land not concreted over, obscuring small roads and drives, taking over unoccupied rooms in houses - and possibly the cause of disappearing babies, always the fourth child (or more) in a family ...In this world, our hero police officer Dora Henry investigates the murders of three geneticists, meanwhile leaving her awful husband Jared and moving into her own house. Intercut is a story of princes and quests set in the far future when technology has all but vanished - two groups travel together on beasts of burden across a dangerous landscape to St Weel where they board a time machine and arrive in Dora's back garden.
They are pursuing an evil person, the Wopat, who travelled back in time to change history. Jared is the Wopat: his pursuers from the future are intelligent dogs, cats, parrots, pigs and monkeys - their beasts of burden in their own time were dumb humans, whereas the Wopat was one of a handful of humans like ourselves still alive in the future. Jared has already killed the geneticists working on developing animal intelligence - producing the creatures from the future. But, also, the plague that will kill all but a few humans has already been unleashed by people intent on saving the diversity of species on Earth. Dora is taken back with the animals to the distant future, where she will deliver a message to dumb humans: that their penance is done.
- ISBN10 0002256231
- ISBN13 9780002256230
- Publish Date 1 December 1997 (first published 1 May 1997)
- Publish Status Out of Print
- Out of Print 12 March 1998
- Publish Country GB
- Imprint Voyager
- Format Hardcover
- Pages 500
- Language English