Jinian Star-Eye by Sheri S. Tepper
Trigger warnings for lethal ableism, discussion of eugenics and genocide, killing babies, and a high-level comment about pedophilia. Also, HUGE spoilers for the series. And fair warning, I think this is my longest review to date, clocking in at over 3,000 words because look at all of those topics I’m gonna discuss.
~Hot Take~
I really liked this book until it wrapped up in a baffling if likely accidental endorsement of eugenics and genocide. But, like, the connection there isn't a stretch, and it's hard to come back from something like that. Even if I still think Jinian Footseer is one of the premier books of vintage fantasy.
~Real Review~
So Jinian enters this third book of her series, Jinian Star-Eye, in trouble. Well, everyone's in trouble because the world—known as Lom—is dying. Still, Jinian is explicitly in trouble because the Oracle wants her dead. Jinian and Peter have also decided to plumb the depths of Lom's memories—housed in a dangerous maze—to figure out why Lom wants to die in the first place and fix the problem. Jinian now has a double chance of dying before dying alongside everyone else when the world ends.
It's a pretty uplifting story.
All that bleakness aside, I enjoyed the beginning of Jinian Star-Eye. The maze introduced some of the magical randomness that so captivated me in Jinian Footseer, and alternative POVs helped make me sympathetic towards Peter. This connection with Peter was long overdue, but at least it finally happened.
Jinian's coven—for lack of a better word—re-enter the story, and even though each one individually maybe doesn't stand out as much as they could, I adore them as a group.
I finally got to meet Mavin, who is clearly a Big Deal in this series/world but has been absent. I like Mavin.
The Eesties and the shadowpeople feature heavily, which made me happy. They must have been covered in other series in this world, but they were mysterious to me, and I've wanted to learn more since I first heard about them.
Everything was looking like the series was cruising towards a satisfying conclusion.
And then Ganver—an Eestie of lore—decides to take Jinian on a quest. The purpose? To impart some wisdom on Jinian about why Lom is so intent on dying.
First up is a religious order of someone called Saint Phallus. Patriarchal in nature and led by abusive men, the "sisters" of the order are kidnapped and forced into this life. They're beaten if they try to escape, and most of them behave as if they're deep in the grips of denial and/or Stockholm Syndrome.
What's curious here is that these Sisters care for many people with severe intellectual disabilities. These people are incontinent, largely immobile, and incapable of feeding themselves. The Sisters refer to all of them, including the adults, as "babies."
These "babies" rely on the sisters for all of their care. This is a problem: there aren't enough sisters to keep up. When Jinian notices sores on one of the people under the Sisters' care, she asks for a healer. The sister hisses,
"Do not say 'Healer.' Father would not have a Healer here. As bad as Midwives."
Jinian is confused by everything that's going on. She asks what the Sisters' goals are concerning the people under their care. They say that, over decades, they try to train them towards continence, and then perhaps even the ability to feed themselves. Jinian points to a young man near her.
"Do you really feel there is sufficient intelligence, there? To … ah, get the hang of it?" I had seen only a shell, a body without a mind. I wondered if my eyes had tricked me.
"He makes progress," [the sister] said stiffly. "Every day. It doesn't matter that he's a little slow. He's a unique, valuable fruit of St. Phallus. Father says it doesn't matter whether it takes one year or a hundred. Every fruit of St. Phallus is sacred."
Jinian is unconvinced but says something complimentary about the Father because the Sisters are creeping her out. Then we learn how these people came to be in the Sisters' care:
The rest [of the Fathers] were out in the world, seeking out special fruits of St. Phallus to bring them to the sanctuary.
Jinian nods, then unfairly and unfavorably compares the abilities of these disabled folks to her pets. She sticks around long enough to finally meet these Fathers and witness them being coercive, abusive, and evil.
When Jinian leaves the grounds, she looks back on what she witnessed.
"Then, because I felt great sorrow for the Sister Servants and pity for the flesh they tended, which mercy would not have kept alive, I did Inward Is Quiet upon all those mindless creatures that lay in the beds in those buildings below. Inward Is Quiet in the imperative mode. Forever. They would not need to be cleaned or fed again."
My jaw was on the floor.
With no forethought and absolutely no deliberation or internal struggle, Jinian murders them.
Let's look again at how she describes the disabled people trapped at The Order Of Saint Phallus:
"flesh"
"mindless creatures"
Jinian doesn't even see them as living, breathing humans!
This infuriated me—it still infuriates me. It is undeniably horrible. And yet I don’t think that Tepper's point here is that disabled people deserve to die—even though that's what the writing inexcusably portrays. I'm pretty sure she thought she was coming at this from a different angle.
This scene has all the symbolism to be an allegory for reproductive rights: a group of men who rule based on the sanctity of their cocks, forcing women to care for those who cannot care for themselves. Even if the women could escape, what would happen to the "babies?" The men clearly aren't going to take care of them. So the women are psychologically as well as physically trapped. Meanwhile, the men are off making sure the Sisters never run out of “babies” to care for and probably spreading the gospel of Saint Phallus in extremely horrible ways.
Given that Tepper was actively dedicated to the pro-choice movement, this interpretation doesn't seem like a stretch. It's easy to make the connections. And seeing those connections makes me want to cut Tepper some slack.
But I can't. Tepper used disabled people as a prop to signify unwanted pregnancies. And since the point was that fetuses aren't people, she tried to make these disabled people "not people" by stripping them down to what Jinian perceived them to be: mindless creatures. But not only is that impossible (surprise, they're still people!), it's cruel. People at this level of disability exist. By attempting to display the people in this book as "not people," she effectively states that similarly disabled people in real life are "not people."
Worse, Jinian kills them in large part so that the Sisters can have their lives back. Death by caregiver is a prevalent end for those with disabilities, for the exact reason that Jinian casts Inward Is Quiet: they "want their lives back." So this allegory, instead of giving us an alternate insight into reproductive rights, simply unearths an existing and deadly problem. In the bad way.
Even outside of the eugenicist tone of killing the disabled, this veneer of disability over forced pregnancy only undermines the pro-choice movement.
These disabled people are living, breathing, conscious, standalone people. Yes, they need care so that their disabilities don't make their living conditions dangerous or unhealthy. Still, their disabilities are not inherently and immediately lethal or "incompatible with life."
This is incomparable to < 1.5 ounces of cells* existing within another living, breathing, conscious, standalone person's uterus.
(*92% of pregnancies that are terminated in the US are terminated before 14 weeks. At 14 weeks, that's the mass of a fetus.)
I think reproductive rights—including access to abortion—are a cornerstone of a just and healthy society. If Tepper is trying to highlight why abortion is a human right, she's preaching to the choir. Despite this, when it came to the Sisters' wards, I was #TeamSaintPhallus, because #TeamSaintPhallus was saying that living, breathing, standalone people with disabilities were special and worthy of time and attention. Yes, yes, a million times yes, that is true.
Sure, the Fathers of Saint Phallus were hypocrites. They weren't the ones dedicating that time and attention to care for the disabled; they were forcing women into that role. And that is unfair to women, no question. But even if they're only using disabled folks as a weapon to imprison and punish the Sisters, I cannot and will not take fault with their decree that disabled folk are worthy of care. This is a Stopped Clock sort of moment. Sometimes horrible people say—or even do—the right thing, but that doesn't change the fact that it's the right thing.
So by conflating fetuses with the disabled, and making the sentiment "living breathing humans deserve care" a rallying cry of the bad guys, this does the pro-choice movement no favors. It makes it seem like we deign to be the arbiters of who deserves to live or die when in reality, we simply want control over our uteruses.
I've heard it said that feminist books written during this second wave of feminism sometimes leaned into the label of "baby killer" in a tongue-in-cheek way. I get that. I took no umbrage with BoJack Horseman's take on this with pop superstar Sextina Aquafina's song "Get dat fetus (kill dat fetus)" because there were some key differences:
they used fetuses to represent fetuses
it was clearly satirical of the way anti-choicers characterize pro-choicers
it was clearly used as a way to shockingly reframe the discussion about abortion
Just in case anyone missed that, those points are explicitly made later in the episode
Where were we? Oh, yes, this isn't supposed to be a treatise on reproductive and disability rights and why they should never be conflated. It's a book review.
So Ganver reappears. Eventually, Jinian decides to punish Saint Phallus's men and casts a spell that will significantly affect the sanctity of their cocks. Ganver seems upset about this and implies Jinian failed a test. The moment passes, and they continue on the quest. Jinian never, ever second-guesses her decision to murder the disabled residents of The Order Of Saint Phallus, and Ganver never mentions it. Case closed.
There's no coming back from a unilateral and hasty decision to murder at least a dozen people because you don't deem their lives to have value, but damn. It was a brutal way to end the topic.
Next, Ganver and Jinian meet brothers; one charismatic and likable but abjectly evil, the other cold and distant but dedicated to protecting others ... mostly from his brother. It becomes known that the evil one was born without the aid of a Midwife.
At this point, hazy memories about the power of Midwives returned to both me and Jinian. They could detect if babies had souls, supposedly, and were tasked with killing those without souls. But the employment of Midwives waned, for one reason or another, and few assist with births anymore.
I began to fear the "point" of this book, but I kept going, hoping beyond hope that I was wrong.
Nope.
We soon learn, through heavy implication, that the Oracle is both Ganver's child and soulless. Eesties don't have Midwives; it's upon them to take care of their own. Ganver failed his own test many years prior because he knew his child was soulless but couldn't bring himself to take his child's life.
With this understanding, the source of Lom's troubles becomes clear: the world is dying because Eesties and Humans both let their soulless offspring live. Those soulless children grew into evil adults that behaved unconscionably and desecrated the very things that, in the parlance of my age group, "gave Lom life."
There's a lot to unpack here, but let's start with something seemingly unrelated: the extent of Lom's power and knowledge/consciousness.
Lom's power—its ability to affect itself (the world) and the inhabitants of the world—is seemingly limitless. When it wants to die, everything falls apart. When it wants to live, whole ecosystems (plants, animals, clean water, you name it) spring back within seconds. This is but one example, but it's big: Lom can change both itself—the world—the creatures within it. It's powerful.
But what about Lom's consciousness? It's more than an id randomly giving in to every whim: it makes calculated decisions. It thinks abstractly and plans ahead. It tries new things. It's, technically, intelligent.
We know this because we learn how humans got their Talents.
Humans arrived on Lom in a spaceship; they're aliens to this world. When they got there, they behaved like humans. Some were good, but some were very bad. There were wars, ecological devastation, you name it—the best of humanity on full display.
Lom spent some time watching humans be assholes for no good reason and thought, "You know the problem? They're insecure. And I know what will make them behave better! Give (some of) them powers! If they're able to Beguile each other, open the ground to swallow others whole, or read each other's thoughts, then they'll finally be good to each other / the creatures / the world. And the fact that some of them will be Talented and others not could in no way lead to inequity which would only further the devastation humans wreak."
Lom is very powerful and very stupid.
So one of these Talents is Midwifery with a capital M. Midwives, as we established, can supposedly detect if babies have souls. Their Lom-given duty is to kill babies that do not have souls.
...And we're just taking Midwives' words for it that a specific baby is not deserving of life? Lom couldn't even figure out that there was no good reason for the Talent of magical coercion. The chances that it only hit incorruptibly good folks with the Midwife Talent is laughable.
Secondly, we're just taking Midwives' words for it that they're Midwives? As far as I can tell, there's no way to know for sure if a Midwife is Lom-sponsored or not. Unless, at birth, you get a quorum of Midwives and hold a blind vote on the state of the baby's soul, and only kill it on a unanimous vote, the chances that there's an imposter in the mix who just wants to play god is pretty much a given.
There's absolutely no way that babies with souls aren't murdered in this scenario.
And that's not even beginning to consider that humans are incredibly susceptible to bias and interpreting things in ways that confirm these biases. Or the fact that, psychologically, being tasked with a life of murdering babies is gonna fuck these Midwives up. You know how people who work in slaughterhouses are more likely to become domestic abusers? Yeah, like that. These Midwives aren't walking away unscarred.
Even if we accept that we're in a hypothetical world where babies can be born without souls and Midwives will, without exception, only put to death the soulless ones who will grow up to be evil; and even if we believe this constant murdering won't mess the Midwives up, we're still in a moral quandary.
First up, there's the question of whether it's reasonable to kill a creature for its innate nature. Let's take a real-world example. A leech can't be anything but a parasite. If it lives, it will be off the lifeblood of others. Is it right for me to kill it for no other reason than it exists and its nature is to be parasitic? If it causes me harm, that changes the conversation. As does a scenario where it might be invasive or have grown to unsustainable levels. But I'm talking about: there's a leech. It's just sitting there in the water, being a leech. Does it deserve to die?
These babies don't murder their parent on the way out, and they aren't described as mean-eyed and joyless monsters. Presumably, it's the fact that they're normal, happy babies that made parents want to ban Midwives from delivery. And a baby has done no wrong. It exists through no fault of its own due to the actions of others. Even if you can see evil in its heart, how on earth could it be morally acceptable to kill a sentient and (as of yet) entirely innocent creature?
Fuuuthermore (apparently, I can talk about this all day), people in our real-world are inclined toward evil behavior yet successfully fight against it.
A sad, horrible example I read about was a support/accountability group for people afflicted with pedophilia. They recognize that pedophilia is evil and unacceptable. They vehemently do not want to act on their inclinations and carefully set up their lives so that they can't. And they do this at significant personal risk to themselves.
Should they be killed for a part of themselves they actively eschew?
From here, I could start discussing the morality of thoughts versus actions, but this is getting long enough. My point is this: even if I take all of this at face value—babies can be born evil—this is still horrible on so many levels.
Unfortunately, trying to take everything at face value made me realize a potentially worse aspect of Jinian Star-Eye.
A critical component of being "soulless" is the inability to learn or change or improve.
Take Jinian punishing the Fathers of The Order Of Saint Phallus. Ganver implied that she failed a test, and the test was thus: the Fathers were evil. No amount of punishment would make them change or see the error of their ways. And since punishing them would not make the world a better place, that meant Jinian's retaliation was not justice. It was Jinian indulging in cruelty herself; she wanted to see them pay. To pass the test, she should have killed them—quickly and without pain, as they should have been killed as babies. This is why killing the soulless at birth is considered the only fair thing for both the soulless and society: they cannot develop or grow.
Are you reading between those lines? Because if being incapable of emotional/intellectual growth is wrapped up with being soulless ... what does that say for disabled folks who are perceived by non-disabled folks as lacking those qualities? And given Jinian murdered the disabled people outright and she/Ganver/Lom didn't seem to think that was a problem...
This is what makes the use of disabled people as a prop for fetuses extra troublesome. I sincerely doubt Tepper intended to make such a forceful implication. In her mind, I'm sure the disabled people at The Order Of Saint Phallus weren't people, they were fetuses. The Order Of Saint Phallus was a statement about reproductive rights, which is completely different from this (still very questionable) statement about how some people are born evil and the only way to fix that is with death. But it seemed so clearly coupled to me that it couldn't have looked worse were there highlighting and string connecting the two passages.
And, real talk, if we make that connection, we slide straight into eugenics and genocide. And what baffles me about this is that none of the reviews mention it. It's not a leap. Disabled people are killed for being disabled, and the plot's crux is "people incapable of growth aka evil people should die at birth." Uhhh, not a great look, even if those two things weren't intended to be connected.
I am just beyond lost. I adored Jinian Footseer and here we are, two books later, ending the series with Mass-Murderer Of The Disabled Jinian saying, "golly gee, I hope all of the children I bare with Peter deserve to live. Otherwise, I'll let the Midwife do what she must."
There is a lot more I could talk about in terms of plot/characterization and where Tepper fumbles and shines. And she does shine! But that doesn’t matters. What matters is this book, purposefully or not, espouses ableism to a deadly degree.
This is depressing for many reasons I've already covered and because this ending wasn't inevitable. It would have been so easy to pivot towards "hold people accountable for their bad behavior and work to undo their damage," which, you know, is a genuinely good message. I could edit this book in a weekend to make that the guiding moral philosophy. I could even tweak The Order of Saint Phallus to work in commentary on the importance of reproductive choice. It's so close!
Why Sheri, why?
Cover art by James Christensen:
