"I prefer science fiction or speculative fiction because it throws new light on the human condition," novelist Sheri S. Tepper noted in a Locus interview. "One simply cannot discuss [human issues] simply as something one's mother or sister experienced. If you put it 100 or 500 years in the future and throw some strange and exotic elements in, it's like throwing a searchlight on the whole thing so that you can perhaps, one hopes, see it more clearly than you can today." In the more than two dozen fantasy and science fiction novels she has published since her first in 1983, Tepper has thrown her searchlight on a variety of human issues, from sex roles to religion to the environment. With her inventive, detailed depictions of strange worlds and alien beings, "Tepper has developed into one of the best novelists in the field," Faren Miller asserted in Locus, "with the human...