Sheri Tepper is a prolific and energetic writer who has established a capacious niche for herself over the last decade in the area between science fiction and fantasy. The first of her three recent novels, Sideshow, is set in a distant future, after the Dispersion of the human race (or perhaps I should say Man, since this—for her own thematic reasons—is the term Tepper prefers) over a large and scattered array of habitable planets. The Dispersion (as has been established in previous Tepper novels) is technologically advanced and ftl capable, though cultures within it maybe more or less wilfully ‘primitive’. But it was at least partly effected by means of the Arbai Doors, whereby individuals, groups and whole populations have travelled from planet to planet, through time and space. The Arbai,(like the Heechee in Frederick Pohl's Gateway sequence; and one could give other examples) are beings who have retired—apparently—from the cosmic scene, leaving behind artefacts of fabulous power. Humans encounter these artefacts and are profoundly changed by them. But Arbai technology doesn't just seem to be supernatural. It genuinely is the Supernatural, as far as humanity is concerned. The other significant Arbai relic, besides the Doors, is a phenomenon (featured in the previous Raising the Stones and also in Sideshow) as ‘the Arbai device’ and also as ‘the Hobbs Land Gods’—a kind of paranormal fungus that can infest whole planets and has the effect of bringing the inhabitants’ mythologies to life: gods or demons, with all their imagined powers made concrete and effectual.

Sideshow, opens with the birth of miraculous Siamese twins, on earth in the USA in the 1990s. Gender, in the sense of social differences between the sexes, is immediately a major issue. The twins, who rationally must be identical and therefore of the same sex, have their indeterminate sexual organs rebuilt as boy and girl. Society, represented by their parents and the Catholic Church, insists that this be so. Contention is established— between the mother and the father; between a patriarchal establishment and the women who endure its stupidities with helpless, resigned contempt.

Meanwhile, in the city of Tolerance on the post-Dispersion planet Elsewhere, some members of the governing council are becoming alarmed at a planet-wide trend towards extreme nastiness.