[Heather’s note: I had read THE SILVER METAL
LOVER some time ago and enjoyed it very much. Strangely, however, I had never
blogged about it at length before. So when TGE regular contributor Diane
Dooley approached me about doing a post on it, I jumped at the chance.]
I often think of science fiction romance as a
shiny new genre, ripe with infinite possibilities. I’m wrong. It does have
infinite possibilities, but it’s not new. It has its own rich history and those
of us who aspire to write it would do well to investigate our forerunners. One
such classic of science fiction romance is The
Silver Metal Lover by Tanith
Lee.
It has long been on my list of books I really need to read, yet it was a happy
accident that led me to finding it recently.
On vacation in a book-stuffed cabin on a lake in
Canada, my husband handed me a
much-thumbed, brown-paged, coverless paperback of this book. “Looks like your
kind of thing,” he said, grinning, as I swooped on it with excitement. I fully
expected to love it to bits. I didn’t, but it was one of the most interesting
reading experiences I’ve had in a while. Let me explain.
I plunged into the book, but even from the first
page I was struggling. The story is told in first person, from the perspective
of the whiny, spoiled, teenaged Jane, who was much given to frequent bouts of
self-pity and copious weeping. Ugh. It had a very YA vibe to it. (I have
an unfortunate love/hate relationship with YA literature.) For the first few
chapters the only thing that kept me reading was Lee’s rather lovely prose and
my interest in her world building. But then something happened. It wasn’t a
particular event in the story or anything I can really pin down, but I found I
couldn’t stop reading. As much as I disliked Jane and her awful set of friends,
I was as hooked as one of the big mouth bass my husband and sons were landing
with regularity out on the lake.
The closest I can come to pinning it down is to
just give props to the writer. Lee’s development of the characters of
Jane and her beautiful, doomed, robot lover was masterful. The plot is
slight. Not much happens, but the developing relationship between the two
touched me so deeply I was, at times, reading with a big, nasty lump in my
throat and a passionate desire to see these two happy and safe. I am not a
reader that always needs a huge, fat happy ending and will warn prospective
readers that The Silver Metal Lover does not provide such. It is, at base, a
tragic Romeo and Juliet-type of story.
The ending is somewhat upbeat, but I actually
thought it a little silly and incongruous. I would have enjoyed the book
more if it had ended a little earlier, even if it did leave me in floods of
tears. Despite this, Tanith Lee has surged to the top of my
must-read-more-by-this-author list. I’m open to recommendations.
Although I had some problems with the book, I
highly recommend it to lovers of YA fiction, romance readers, and writers of
science fiction romance. Has anyone else read it? What was your reaction? Do
you agree that it is a classic of science fiction romance? I’d love to hear
your thoughts.
* * * * *
Diane
Dooley is the author of science fiction romances, Blue
Galaxy from Carina Press, Mako’s
Bounty from Decadent Publishing, the forthcoming Blue Nebula, also
from Carina
Press,
and numerous short
stories. You can find her on Twitter and Facebook.