The Fifth Sacred Thing
The Fifth Sacred Thing is a 1993 novel by Starhawk.
Winner, 1993 SF/F Lambda Award.
The Fifth Sacred Thing, Starhawk's first novel, takes place around 2050 in California. Like Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time or Ursula K. Le Guin's Always Coming Home, it portrays two distinctly different societies. In San Francisco, activists created an ecologically friendly, communitarian, consensual and free society, based primarily on reverance for the earth and for spirituality. This society was created in reaction to a fundamentalist sect of Christianity that preached that Jesus returned in 1999 and abandoned Earth and humanity in disgust. The fundamentalist society, which has taken root in LA (stripped of its Latino name "Los Angeles" and given an Anglicized name), employs patriarchy, extreme capitalism, class oppression, anti-environmentalism, militarism, and racism, and exploits children to boot. The societies come into conflict, and Starhawk confronts the pain and difficulty and ultimate rewards of pacifism.
Characters: Madrone, Maya, Bird
Further reading
- Book discussion group on feministSF mailing list (Aug. 2002)