Days of Grass

Tanith Lee 1985 Buy from Amazon.com

Days of Grass is a novel set several generations after the invasion of earth. Esther is a girl living in an underground shelter, with the descendants of people who fled there during the take over.

Tanith Lee manages to create a twilight world underground, redolent with dark tunnels and the inevitability of known paths. The people are increasingly ignorant and petty, squabbling amongst themselves, vying for scraps of power in a world where there are only limited places and no real benefits. Soldiers endlessly drilling for no real purpose, no goal.

Eventually, inevitably, Esther is caught, given away by her tanned skin in the dim tunnels underground, she is taken to the leader, Standish. Standish is an old man, living in his own suite of rooms with treasures from above, including books. Esther is given the freedom to roam the apartments and read, and use the trap door leading from them to the surface.

Esther despises the other members of the community, seeing it as stagnant and useless, no one goes to the surface, no one learns new things. As she matures, her contact with Standish and his knowledge changes her view of the world and their place in it.

As she grows older, Esther learns about the invading aliens and about the problems the community is facing, but it is not until the death of Standish that things change forever. That day while wandering through the city, she finds a human, a man, called Cury.

Cury was a spy, raised by the aliens as a pet, one of their dogs, hunting out the hiding humans. The group are exposed to the waiting aliens and captured, placed in a compound, except for Esther. She belongs to Cury.

Her hate and misery are pointless, useless, she cannot kill herself yet she can see there is no point fighting. The Cury takes her to meet one of the aliens, his Gods. He calls the alien Jupiter, having made up names from the pantheon of gods for all the aliens he knows.

In many ways this can be read as an indictment of colonialism, and Tanith Lee certainly would have been aware of that aspect, the comparison is a strong one. The humans are bought off with a placid life and security, no longer trying to rebel, and they become largely irrelevant to the main action, between Esther and her enemies.

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