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The Margarets

3.78 of 5 stars 3.78 · rating details · 824 ratings · 133 reviews

The myriad alien civilizations populating far, distant worlds have many good reasons to detest the blight called "humankind" . . .

The only human child living in a work colony on the Martian satellite Phobos, little Margaret Bain has invented six imaginary companions to keep boredom and loneliness at bay. Each an extension of her personality, they are lost to her when she i...more

Paperback, 509 pages

Published June 24th 2008 by Harper Voyager (first published May 13th 2007)

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Aug 23, 2008 Sean rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: feminist, sci-fi

Tepper, Tepper, Tepper... what can I say about her that I already haven't said? She's interesting, aggravating, inspired, pedantic, gifted in her ability to invent elaborate cultures, races and settings and given to bludgeoning the reader over the head with heavy allegories constructed of the same.

The Margarets is neither her best work nor her worst. It contains neither the ridiculous excesses of Shadow's End nor the true sense of menace and fear of Grass . True to Tepper's pattern, it is heavi...more

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Aug 02, 2008 Martha rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I now find myself wanting to reread all (or most) of Tepper's books, because I think that various incarnations of the Margaret character shows up in passing in many of them. I like how Tepper is pulling some of her worlds together into a single universe, with the unifying device of the doors (which connect disparate points in space).

In this novel, Tepper tackles the problems of overpopulation and the resulting inevitable environmental collapse. She blames this largely on humans' lack of racial...more

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Jan 09, 2009 Victoria rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: best-books

Even though I love her writing, I have to admit that every Tepper book I've read before has been ponderous and sometimes painfully slow to gather momentum (kind of like this review). So I surprised myself by liking this book almost from the beginning and only getting more caught up in it as I read. Even though it seemed clear from near the beginning exactly where the plot was going and how it would end, I was fascinated by the execution.

Tepper can - and does - create such strange scenarios with...more

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Jul 05, 2008 Nicole rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This one initially engaged me, but I found myself running out of steam about 1/2way through. Even with the index in the front keeping the Margarets seperate was difficult for me and it was a pain in the rear to need look them up every chapter. I really liked Tepper's premise, but I think this book would have been a much better read had it been quite a bit shorter. I had to push myself to finish it.

This one reminded me a lot of "Beauty" in that Tepper used it as a platform to comment on the soci...more

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Mar 21, 2013 Margaret Surina rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

The Margarets by Sheri Tepper is a Delicious read. Ms. Tepper is a mistress of intelligent, thought provoking fantasy; she can weave a tale like no other. The Margarets take you to other worlds that are so well written and fleshed out that you are totally transported..you can see it in your minds eye so clearly, smell it, taste it...It's an intricate tapestry that weaves together colorful worlds filled with strange peoples, fascinating perspectives of real and current social issues that totally...more

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Jan 09, 2013 David rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

The second ebook I checked out of the library for my Kindle. Still largely a test - before I started deliberately seeking out books. But at least this time I picked an author I had previously enjoyed.

Sheri Tepper sometimes writes wonderful stories with some very imaginative premises. The notion of Margaret (the title character) splitting into something like 9 physical versions of herself (with various names and even genders) gets handled quite well. Kind of like Sybil breaking apart into indepen...more

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Nov 02, 2011 Sjhigbee rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Let me put my cards on the table – I’m a fan of Tepper’s writing. A Plague of Angels absolutely blew me away. I still vividly recall the main details of the plot years later – something that happens with only a handful of books, given my shocking memory. So it was a red letter day, when I discovered this book on the library shelves.

Margaret Bain is the only child on Phobos, a human colony working on a doomed project to transform Mars into a garden planet. To keep away the suffocating demons of l...more Let me put my cards on the table – I’m a fan of Tepper’s writing. A Plague of Angels absolutely blew me away. I still vividly recall the main details of the plot years later – something that happens with only a handful of books, given my shocking memory. So it was a red letter day, when I discovered this book on the library shelves.

Margaret Bain is the only child on Phobos, a human colony working on a doomed project to transform Mars into a garden planet. To keep away the suffocating demons of loneliness and boredom, she invents imaginary companions, for her own alter ego – a queen, a spy, a tough boy, a healer…

When the Phobos project is shut down, Margaret is forced to return to Earth with her parents. Mankind’s birthplace is impoverished, reduced to trading the only viable product the planet has left to offer: human slaves. No longer a little girl, Margaret’s imaginary friends are lost to her, but in this harsh new world she is forced to make some hard choices and each life-changing choice results in a different Margaret spinning off: her imaginary selves are refining their own personae, acquiring their own histories, living their own lives.

And as the Margarets scatter off across the universe, unaware of their other selves, each has to struggle to survive by her (or his) wits – until the discovery of a threat to Earth and to the whole of humanity. It’s time for the Margarets to return home, for the survival of the human race depends on them… all of them.

Like all Tepper’s plots, it is a nifty twist on a familiar theme underpinning many a fantasy series – that of a special person selected by reason of his/her ability and birth to fulfil a particular prophesy. What Tepper does, is give that fantasy staple a science fiction spin, so that we have a classic space opera adventure spanning a number of worlds – think of Elizabeth Moon meeting Juliet Marillier… The various worlds and the particular plight of humankind are depicted with the clarity and precision you’d expect from a writer of Tepper’s pedigree, giving the reader a rich, three dimensional universe to enjoy. But what holds this book together is the narratives of the Margarets as they struggle to survive in a variety of difficult and largely life threatening environments.

It is here that I ran up against a problem – there are seven Margarets out there and for my money, I’d have preferred five, or even three. This is a fairly hefty book at over 500 hundred pages of reasonably small print and after an absolutely cracking start, the pace sagged slightly in the middle as I struggled to keep up with them all. Tepper makes the task as easy as possible – each Margaret’s name is altered, depending on where she ends up, with one changing gender, while the scene changes are clearly labelled as we switch viewpoints. There certainly was no bland blending of their experiences, which could have all too easily happened in the hands of a lesser writer. However, the fact remains that I did get a bit bogged down in the middle and I do believe that having so many major protagonists to follow is a very big ask for the reader.
The effort certainly paid off, though. As the book neared the end, the pace once more picked up and as we approached the climax, I was completely immersed in the plot. I love the mix of science fiction and fantasy within the story – no one does it better than Tepper and the ending produced some unexpected twists with a completely satisfactory conclusion. If you are a fantasy fan who doesn’t generally dip your toe into the techie world of science fiction, or a sci fi follower who can’t be bothered with all that wafty magic stuff – give this book a try. It is a substantial, enjoyable read by one of the best speculative fiction authors of her generation.
9/10
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Aug 07, 2011 Oanh rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: science-and-speculative-fiction, women-authors

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Jun 21, 2012 Angela rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction-scifi, fiction, fiction-fantasy

This was a strange book. I started it feeling like I was reading a sci-fi/dystopian novel, but as the story progressed, it felt more and more as if I were reading the novelization of one of RPG video games I used to play: here's the intro where you find out that Something Big Has Gone Wrong (long, long ago, of course), and our unassuming hero must fix it; here's where you travel around finding all the supporting characters, with their predictable archetypes and their tragic back-stories; here ar...more This was a strange book. I started it feeling like I was reading a sci-fi/dystopian novel, but as the story progressed, it felt more and more as if I were reading the novelization of one of RPG video games I used to play: here's the intro where you find out that Something Big Has Gone Wrong (long, long ago, of course), and our unassuming hero must fix it; here's where you travel around finding all the supporting characters, with their predictable archetypes and their tragic back-stories; here are the various little quests in which you pick up magical friends and gradually find out more about the Big Something That's Gone Wrong and the Entirely Evil Villains Who Caused It. And there, after a while -- there's that bit where all the pieces are assembled and one of your magical friends tells your ragtag band of unlikely heroes that you'd better prepare for the final dungeon, and if you have, then you get the predictable deus ex machina happy ending where the loose ends are all conveniently tied up, and everyone's smiling and waving and fading into the credits over a blaze of triumphant MIDI music.

Seriously, I felt like I there should have been a pause between every few chapters for the characters to level up.

That said, I actually really enjoyed the book. Despite the lack of originality in how it was structured, despite some of the cliches that were bad enough to make me wince (Want to guess which side the reptilian aliens are on? Go on, guess!), the premise was interesting and the characters were, for the most part, sympathetic. It wasn't a book that was full of deep meaning and important questions (and I appreciate that by the end, the author didn't try to pretend that it was); it was an entertaining read with some engaging characters that you could set aside at the end without a lot of burning, unanswered questions about unresolved plot points and what happens next. It was neither so predictable that I got bored and stopped reading nor so unpredictable that I was on the edge of my seat the whole time. (less)

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Mar 06, 2011 Robert rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

A really well-written book in which Sheri S. Tepper wrestles with the near future of Earth. In particular, she brings up environmental issues and their ties to over-population. Issues that a lot of us worry about right now.

At the same time, I should say that this really is science-fiction. There are extra-terrestrial aliens (both good and bad), space travel, and lots of science-y things.

I would guess that the book is aimed at 11- to 15-year-old girls, which is really cool, since a lot of sci-fi...more

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Oct 06, 2012 Trunatrschild rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: social-commentary, science-fiction, fiction

Typical Tepper! I like her books and often completely agree with her implied opinions on humanity. I WAS getting a little tired because she was starting to get a little preachy and I like it more subtle and this book is more subtle, though still obviously, social commentary. I was feeling that maybe the commentary was overcoming the stories but I think The Margarets did a better job with the story.
It's a story of a girl, in the future when Human beings have become so numerous that they basical...more

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May 17, 2013 Melinda rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I really like the Margarets and how each character lives in their own worlds with similar basic beliefs that are adjusted to suit their world experiences. I appreciate the ethical issues brought up around population control and living as one with the earth/planet. Oh and the walled off areas of Tercis were really interesting because it just seemed like institutionalization on a larger level. Also I liked the part where she talks about how "no child left behind" has failed. We make everyone the s...more

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Mar 15, 2011 Lorena rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: science-fiction

So, when I found _The Waters Rising_ and read it, and was a little surprised at how light it was for a Tepper book...? Having found out that I somehow missed a book by her (AAAAAHHH!) that came out a year or so previously, and snagged a copy of it... heck. My brain is tired after just reading this, of COURSE she'd want to write something lighter afterwards!

I will tell you that I was a little worried at first, because I tend to shy away from books that come with a who's-who list at the front -- I...more

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Nov 08, 2010 Mei rated it 1 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: Intense Sheri Fans

Synopsis
As the only child in the settlement on Phobos, Margaret develops several imaginary friends to entertain her. However, she notices that after several important events in her life, many of them are missing. Six Margarets intotalbreak away from the original, following paths of her life that might have been.

Review
I am a huge Sheri S. Tepper fan, but I still didn't really enjoy this book. Thebeginningof the book is pretty confusing, and as the book continues, it is still difficult to follow w...more

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May 02, 2011 Kae Cheatham rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: spec-fiction

Although a bit of hard science is thrown in, it’s really fantasy, and seems a way for Tepper to showcase her great imagination (which I thoroughly respect). Good writing, but no story I could get involved with since the text jumped from Margaret to Margaret to Margaret in different worlds and realities. The first person point of view (eight of them) made some of the stories awkward.

This book reminded me of Ursula LeGuin’s Changing Planes, where different worlds were visited and described. LeGuin...more

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Feb 24, 2013 Unwisely rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: 2013, science-fiction

I was in need of something to read, and remembered I liked Sheri S. Tepper, so I picked this up. I had kind of forgotten that her stuff is always ... kind of weird. (Not in a bad way, but it's definitely not as straightforward as some SF.)

Anyway. This was as strange and wondrous as most of her world-building. There were a lot of split characters, which I confess I had some trouble telling apart. I didn't find it a OMG, must-finish! page turner, but it was interesting and different.

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Oct 29, 2012 Jane Ann McLachlan rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This book is hard to get into, but worth the effort. The world-building that takes place is huge, intricate and fascinating - definitely this is Tepper's strength. The book follows seven points of view/story lines before Tepper finally weaves them together. It is confusing, to say the least, but once you get them straight, an interesting, involving, and very unique story emerges, from a great story-teller.
I recommend this book, but not as highly as I recommend her amazing, 5-star novel, Grass. I...more

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Feb 29, 2012 Alayne rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This was an amazing book. It was very complex and needed quite a bit of concentration (especially as I read it on my kindle, which meant I could not keep going to the page at the front which showed all the Margarets and where they all were). I didn't want to put it down and finished it at 2.40am! Without giving the plot away, the problem to be solved required one person to walk 7 roads at the one time in order to save the human race from extinction. I guessed partly how things were to be done, b...more

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Jun 13, 2012 Jess rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: 2012, fiction

This was my first Tepper novel and I see why she is esteemed by some of the big names in SF. I appreciated her willingness to craft an imaginative story that tackles the tough questions about humanity. I can imagine that her writing is not for everyone and some of the views she espouses through characters may even be pretty unpopular, but this is what I really enjoyed about her.

Like Card, there is a certain amount of underhanded moralizing and philosophizing going on, but I found Tepper's to be...more

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May 31, 2011 Webfrau rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

It took me a little while to get the "Margarets" straight in my head but once I'd got that sorted I really enjoyed it. It starts not too far in the future and tackles the "universal" consequences of earth's overpopulation and lack of resources. There are plenty of alien life forms, some of whom want to help humans, others to exploit them and of course those that just want to salvage the scraps when earth implodes. I liked the references throughout to "historical" policies (i.e relatively recent...more

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Jul 03, 2012 Tammy Eaton rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

As always, Ms. Tepper tells a wonderfully engaging story with strong characters and a really twisty plot. The themes of ecological responsibility, female worth, and the ethics of healthcare are thickly entwined throughout which is true of most of her books. This was certainly not my favorite Tepper book, but I was very impressed with the incredibly complex story arc. I would recommend it, but I would more highly recommend The Gate to Women's Country and The Family Tree for more entertainment and...more

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Dec 29, 2011 Doug Pardee rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

The Margarets is a sprawling futuristic fantasy saga, following six main characters (all of them aspects of Margaret) and probably a hundred minor ones, over a period of decades, across a dozen planets and other locations, with a couple dozen other sentient species. And right from the start, the ending has been foretold. This story's all about the journey, not the destination.

Tepper has avoided almost all of her hallmark social axe-grinding. The story does launch from a catastrophically over-po...more

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May 17, 2010 Zoe Zuniga rated it 4 of 5 stars

I love just about everything by Sheri Tepper but I found this book hard to get into. I picked up a few months ago but had trouble with the plot device of dividing a person into seven separate people. It felt askward and unnatural and did these divisions did not happen smoothly or naturally. Still I picked up again and slogged through it liking many of the ideas and loving the ultimate message of the book which was as usual about human nature, and how to solve our problem of over proliferation, a...more I love just about everything by Sheri Tepper but I found this book hard to get into. I picked up a few months ago but had trouble with the plot device of dividing a person into seven separate people. It felt askward and unnatural and did these divisions did not happen smoothly or naturally. Still I picked up again and slogged through it liking many of the ideas and loving the ultimate message of the book which was as usual about human nature, and how to solve our problem of over proliferation, and destroying our own nest.

In this book the idea was to find us a race memory so we would automatically have the wisdom that most creatures are born with. once this was accomplished through Tepper's usual grand finally of drawing all the characters toward one another and having a big upheaval near the end of the story humans woke up to find that they knew things instinctively and were able to begin to correct all the stupidity of the past naturally and without struggling with wanting to do good but being without the willpower to succeed in being good.

It was a lovely message and worth the work of getting through some awkward plot development and not the most elegant prose Tepper has written. Some of the imagery and characterization was so stunning and comforting that it made up for any bumpiness in the style and construction of the piece.

One character I really loved was from a race of intelligent beings with intact racial memory who was what cats originally where. The ones on earth are only a shadow of that original noble race. She is sent to live with humans to save her from danger. she is given a book to read as soon as she begins to learn to speak. When she reads the words in the book it triggers her race memories that have been implanted into the fetus while in utero by her mother. The book is only necessary because she is away from her kind.the description of a child coming of age and growing into her natural race memories is such a lovely process it makes me wish there were some way to implant some of that in us humans.(less)

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Aug 01, 2010 Rose rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2010, science-fiction

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here.

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Jan 12, 2010 L rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: sci-fi

Many children create imaginary friends. Little Margaret Bain really went the distance with hers, though. They are bits of her and they are much more real than one might expect.

The book is very inventive. There are many worlds, story lines, and types of beings. Earth is in danger, used up, teetering on being uninhabitable (actually from some perspectives, it's there, except that folks somehow do live on her). Eco-disaster is not unusual in sci-fi, of course. What it does to Earth's far-flung chi...more

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Dec 07, 2009 Kit rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I read everything Sheri Tepper wrote back in the 1990s, and then apparently figured she wasn't writing anything any more. I missed several between The Fresco, which I loved, and The Margarets, which I just finished and didn't quite love - although I still like me some Sheri Tepper books.

One thing I love about Tepper's sci-fi is that not only is the plot bound to be unusual, midway through the book, I'm still trying to figure out what the plot *is* - and not in a bad way, but in a "can I figure o...more

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Aug 17, 2009 N. rated it 1 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: feminism, science-fiction

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here.

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Dec 14, 2009 Ben Babcock rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: via-io9, from-library, 2009-read, science-fiction

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. In The Margarets, the eponymous character finds herself splitting into separate entities at various points in her life, each entity pursuing a different life, gaining different knowledge and experiences, and becoming a separate person. This is not an accident, of course, but all part of a carefully orchestrated plot by some gods to help restore humanity's racial memory so it will stop making war and killing planets.

Why yes, I do have the ability to take any novel's plot and summarize it in such...more

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Jun 15, 2009 Libero rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: sci-fi

Sheri Tepper used to be my favorite speculative fiction author and I still love her work. Her creativity, vision and politics all make for wonderful novels of the idea. She often takes the absurdities of modern life and extrapolates them into dark but hopeful futures. The Margarets, however, was just an okay book.

The book is about Margaret, who's childhood alter egos and playtime characters mysteriously—actually, mystically—become real people all living parallel but radically different lives aro...more

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Feb 07, 2009 Hoby rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Overall is was an enjoyable book. It's a bit inventive, I like the break the author takes from the standard militarism angle. It was refreshing to read a story featuring interplanetary clashing that side-stepped guns and conventional war.

I like the versions of a person splitting off... and the overpopulation out of control situation. It's cute who the Gentherans are.. I could tell that she had fun inventing the names of alien things. I liked that half way through, I started to feel weird and woo...more Overall is was an enjoyable book. It's a bit inventive, I like the break the author takes from the standard militarism angle. It was refreshing to read a story featuring interplanetary clashing that side-stepped guns and conventional war.

I like the versions of a person splitting off... and the overpopulation out of control situation. It's cute who the Gentherans are.. I could tell that she had fun inventing the names of alien things. I liked that half way through, I started to feel weird and woogly (that's the scientific term) from flipping between the different versions of the main character.

I did have problems with it though. The writing was a bit erratic. At times she would soar into the heights of obscure vocabulary and eloquent sentences.. and then fall back down a lot of the time.. maybe most of the time, into sort of writing 101 level storytelling. At times she reminded me of the simplistic limits of bothered me about Octavia Butler's otherwise fresh and imaginative writing. It made reading these parts kind of.. embarrassing.

This effect was made worse by the awkward injection of her social theories into the story line. I know it's difficult to do this authentically.. but still, it was awkward, and repeated unnecessarily. The theories (kind of the whole point of the book) were interesting. I'm glad she put them out there, but it did seem a little forced.

Also, things tended to balance out into normalcy for the sake of pushing the plot forward. The British authors I've read often do this, making everything either end up in England or not much straying beyond the characters always having tea and biscuits handy. The characters in this book always had ground under their feet, conventions of 20th century living in some way, and the supernatural tailored to human-centric (specifically United States centric) behavior and appearance.

Also the use of the word "race" instead of "species" might bother a lot of people. The various alien species were referred to as races and the overtones particularly at the end of the book are, well, pretty racist if you look at it that way - though technically it would be species-ist. Either way the end result is morally questionable. The aliens were not quite alien enough to distance this sci fi universe from the stereotypes between present day Earth people.(less)

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About Sheri S. Tepper

Sheri Stewart Tepper is a prolific American author of science fiction, horror and mystery novels; she is particularly known as a feminist science fiction writer, often with an ecofeminist slant.

Born near Littleton, Colorado, for most of her career (1962-1986) she worked for Rocky Mountain Planned Parenthood, where she eventually became Executive Director. She has two children and is married to Gen...more

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