The Companions

Rating:
Summary: Satire or serious?
Review: This book had a promising premise. That Earth suffers from overpopulation due to retirees returning from off-world colonies, basically the planet Earth becomes the state of Florida. That due to population pressure, religious extremists create a movement to ban all animals from Earth because only man is created in God's image. A group of animal lovers run an underground railroad for pets.

Throw into the mix a strange planet where the whole planet is intelligent. (The tired Gaia theme.) The means of communication is? Smells.

All this is great. But unfortunately, the story decends into absurdity. Throw in an ancient alien race of environmentalists and another nearly extinct race of super-shapeshifting aliens bent on destruction (and responsible for the creation of humanity), who take the form of dogs - they actually think that dogs enslaved humans rather than humans domesticating dogs - and you get a complex mess of polemics. Is it intended as satire? Or is it bad writing? It is hard to tell. Without giving the ending away, Tepper relies on a deus ex machina to extricate the heroine from the crisis at the end of the book.