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Love Hurts: Examining the Sequel |
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ARCHIVES
July 2005 Cow Poo: Because Genevieve Thinks That's Funny.
June 2005 The Power of Cruise Compels You!
May 2005 When Authors Attack: from the desk of Faeluver
April 2005 Love Hurts: Examining the Sequel
March 2005: I Can Be Clever. Camus?: How to Be an Intellectual
February 2005: Prince of Thighs: Forgotten Realms and a Little Skin
January 2005: Neil and Worship: Letters to Gaiman
December 2004 And Lo, She Heav'd: The Seedy Underbelly of Classic Literature
November 2004 Pants, Pants, Magic Pants!: Labyrinth Fan Fiction and Your Puberty Celebrity Rebuttal: Faeluver
October 2004 Where the Sun Don't Shine: A Vampire Study Celebrity Rebuttal: Anne Rice
September 2004 A Knocking on Heaven's Door
August 2004 A New Dawn Celebrity Rebuttal: That Guy's Mom
July 2004 Radiodead: A Very Special Correspondence Celebrity Rebuttal: Thom
June 2004 Lizsting to the Left: The Best Concert Ever
May 2004 Circular Logic: The Threat Revolving Doors Pose to All of Us Celebrity Rebuttal: Theopilus van Kannel, Inventor of the Revolving Door
Celebrity Rebuttal: Hellboy
March 2004 Lord of the Bling: How Hip-Hop is Changing Fashion One Velour Ass at a Time Celebrity Rebuttal: P. Diddy's Jewelry Bitch
February 2004 Velveeta Wrestling: Why Gay Marriage Should Be Legal Celebrity Rebuttal: GOD
January 2004 The Magic Flute: Why V.C. Andrews is Rolling in Her Grave Celebrity Rebuttal: V.C. Andrews, Deceased
December 2003 Fifty Ways to Leave Your Lover: Why Men Cheat, Exposed!! Celebrity Rebuttal: Eileen's Ex-Boyfriend
November 2003 'Wuthering Ho'": A review of MTV's Wuthering Heights Celebrity Rebuttal: Hugh Hefner |
SCENE 1 (An office. Present day. Tanith Lee, writer
extraordinaire is meeting with her editor. She is dressed sensibly because she
is British and holds an aura of excitement. The editor is seated behind her
desk. The audience can immediately tell the editor is hard at work by the weary
look in her eyes and also because she is shackled to one of the mahogany desk
legs by a length of chain purchased from Sears)
EDITOR Tanith, how lovely to see you!
LEE Hi there.
(Lee takes a seat and admires the detailing of the Editor’s spiked
manacle)
I’ve been thinking about a new book.
EDITOR Oh really? Well don’t keep me in suspense!
LEE Its very exciting, very exciting. You see it starts out
with a young heroine.
EDITOR Yes, yes.
LEE And it’s set in the future.
EDITOR I see.
TANITH LEE And she’s under the thumb of a very controlling mother.
And then she falls in love with a robot!
EDITOR A robot.
LEE Yes!
EDITOR
(Pause.)
LEE I know it’s a very shocking concept—but I can make it
work.
EDITOR Yes it’s very shocking. Because you already wrote that
book.
LEE I did?
EDITOR Yes. It was called The Silver Metal Lover.
LEE
(Blinks.) Really?
EDITOR Yes. Remember? It was about a girl named Jane in this
future world full of robots and she finds herself desperately in love with a
robot named Silver designed to pleasure humans. She runs away with him and they
find happiness but only for a short time because he’s quickly captured and
dismantled. It’s all very lovely and heart wrenching. One of your best young
adult novels in my opinion.
LEE Oh.
(Pause.) How terribly embarrassing.
EDITOR Oh Tanith, no! You’ve written over a hundred books,
it’s very hard to keep everything straight--especially since your themes are
so similar.
LEE What?
EDITOR Well you know. The mother thing.
LEE I see.
EDITOR And the rape of a naïve young woman—usually of high
status, which is committed by a bloodthirsty but thickheaded warmonger.
LEE Well…why aren’t more people reading it?
EDITOR What?
LEE This Silver Metal Lover. It’s an excellent
premise. I mean—I’ve thought of it twice.
EDITOR Well, it’s barely in print, Tanith.
LEE Then I suggest more press.
EDITOR For a ten year old book? I’m sorry Tanith, I can’t do
that.
LEE Then I’ll write another one. A sequel!
EDITOR Wonderful! A continuation of Jane’s story?
LEE Well. It will be about another girl.
EDITOR Jane’s daughter perhaps?
LEE No—completely unrelated—I’ll throw in some sort of
crazed religious group and make her a little bit of a bad girl to solidify how
different she and Jane are.
EDITOR Okay. So what’s the plot?
LEE Hmmm…
(Pause.) I know! She falls in love with a robot
EDITOR (Hides
head in hands)
END SCENE And so it is written, and so it is that Eileen pours
herself a drink in order to medicate herself for this impending catastrophe.
ACT TWO
SCENE TWO I stumbled upon the sequel to Silver Metal Lover,
aptly titled Metallic Love, purely by accident—like when one
accidentally lights themselves on fire. Tanith Lee is an award-winning novelist
(1984 World Fantasy Award, 1986 Gilgamé³ Award, short listed for the
Guardian Children’s Fiction Award, constantly nominated for the 1975 Nebula
Award for best novel, the British Science Fiction and British Fantasy Awards,
among many others). She is a prolific writer who has written hundreds of books,
effortlessly moving from young adult to horror to historical romance. This genre
hopping goddess, a writer I admire above all others, has decided to pen this
sequel for no other reason then the fact that she has completely gone off her
nut. This calls for another drink! Mmm, delicious. Okay, now lets talk aesthetics. Simply put, the cover art
of this book leaves a lot to be desired. There’s a serpent creature with a
yellow apple and a female person/leopard. I guess it’s a replica of the Garden
of Eden. Silver seems to enjoy hawking. Also, Loren (the narrator and Silver’s
love interest) looks like Vanessa Carlton. When fearfully opening the book (another drink please) the
inside cover is tastefully marketing—Silver Metal Lover. “Tanith
Lee has another winner in The Silver Metal Lover. It’s an aluminum
soufflé that’s both amusing and touching.” –Asmiov’s Science Fiction Hey, Asmiov’s Science Fiction, I just read Metallic
Love and it was like eating an aluminum soufflé. It cut up my
insides. I’m also blind. Thank you. Tanith
quickly starts out Silver Metal Lover Two with an introduction to Loren.
She’s Loren is part of a fanatical group called the Acolytes. OMG
I love X-men! Is Magneto going to fight Professor Xavier in the next paragraph? Nope. Damn. Instead, there’s a lot of exposition about how being part of a religious zealous sect is so not cool. Like having to work all day, wear robes that do nothing for the figure, and downing Kool-Aid laced with cyanide. However, Loren finds a magical book underneath the
floorboards. “Of course I kneeled down and peered in…my heart stood still,
and when I saw that what was wrapped in the scarf was only a battered paper
book, I felt a wrench of bitter disappointment (7).” Yet Loren’s disappointment soon turns into revelation:
“What do I say to you, then, about reading that Book (9).” No she hasn’t found the Bible, you stupid losers. It’s Silver
Metal Lover! Loren is then kind enough to present the reader with THE
ENTIRE PLOT of The Silver Metal Lover. “Okay. Plotline. There’s this
girl of sixteen (Jane), rich and naïve, and under the thumb of her tyrannical,
bloody, mind-fucking bitch of a mother—only Jane innocently doesn’t know how
terrible Mom is—but one day the girl meets a robot. Now we’ve had robots for
ages, right. They do most of the jobs people used to—and so create a permanent
underclass of unemployed subsistence plebs, like me…he’s part of a new line
designed for pleasure…he’s tall, strong, elegant, and handsome. A musician,
a lover…And Jane falls in love with him…So she leaves Dire Momma, and
goes to live with Silver in the pits and craters of the slums…But then the
firm that created him calls back all the robots of that special super-deluxe
line…He’s caught. They dismantle him. They kill him (10-11).” I smell a fucking skunk, Tanith. Drink, please! Soon the foul smell evolves into aged Vieux Boulogne as
Loren becomes entrenched in the story of Silver. Stating that Loren read a
certain paragraph of Silver Metal Lover is not enough. She has to
DIRECTLY quote a paragraph from the book. Quoting a book quoting a book? How am
I supposed to properly cite that?! “I locked the door and sat down on his unmade bed, and
started reading Jane’s Story for the thirteenth time.
She writes:
“’”””””He came within three feet of me, and he smiled at
me. Total coordination…He seemed perfectly human, utterly natural, except he
was too beautiful to be either.
“””””Hallo,””””” he said “”””””
(Silver Metal Lover aka Jane's Story aka Metallic Love 13)…………..“”””””””” So the book completely changes Loren’s life; screw scrubbing for Jesus, she’s going to scrub—er—on her own terms! So that’s just what Loren does. She becomes a cleaning
lady. And who wouldn’t after such a sexy revelation? She’s so good at Windexing
that she gets her own little satellite group called “The Dust Babes”. “My
gang, the Dust Babes, were over on Compton with a new client, when I got a call
at the room in the bat-block.” “Lor—Lor,
wake up. We got some difficulties.” “What?
Can’t you deal with it Jizzle (23)?” Freeze, at ease, now let me drop some more of them
keys/It's 19-9-tre so let me just play/it's Snoop Dogg, I'm on the mic, I'm back
with Dr. Dre!
Oh, sorry. Drink! Loren mostly forgets about Silver with her newfound job
(probably due to the bleach fumes). But something happens! I can’t really
recall what the something was. I was just busily engaged in constructing a noose
out of some frilly summer scarves. But I digress… Loren, with her good looks and whorish charm, ends up at
the corporation that once created Silver and his robot lover cohorts. There’s
some sort of wonderful bazaar, because the company, META, has decided to
reinvest in the line of pleasure robots. So it’s a great big show of singing
and tap dancing and shadow puppets. Wait—that was my 21st birthday. These pleasure robots come in pairs—identified by the
color of their various skin tones and talents. There are the Coppers, who act.
The Silvers, who sing. And the Golds, who perform martial arts: “After the coppers and silvers,
the golds fenced. He and she. They leapt yards upwards, somersaulted and spun in
the air, sprang up cliffs of nothingness and catapulted back (51).” I love Cirque de Soleil. Loren quickly meets the acquaintance of Sharffe. He’s
French, so he’s associated with the finer things in life: wine, food and the
backseat of a car. Loren settles for the latter. He talks to her, half in
French and half in English—because that’s what Frenchmen do, “Quelle joie.
Get in. The seats are fun (55).” He expresses his interest in Loren. Not for himself, as
Frenchman are homosexual, but for an experiment regarding the META robots. You
know what that means—Orgy time! “In the champagne room people
were dancing the Chaste, the two-together dance where you keep both your upper
bodies plastered on each other by sheer ability or determination, not touching
with hands or arms (63).” I’m not even going to comment on that one. It’s like
shooting soccer moms locked in a Starbucks. Oh what the hell. Ahem. The Chaste? That's not being ironic,
Tanith--that's just being stupid. Lucky for Loren (unlucky for us readers) she won’t be
engaging in an orgy—but a one on one—with, OMG SILVER! “His clothes were white as ice.
His red hair was longer than it had been earlier. It ran right down his back. He
smiled. Calm as silence (65).” Loren compounds her shock by once again directly quoting Silver
Metal Lover like the good Cliff notes reader she is, “””””””””””““His eyes were like
two russet stars. Yes…exactly like stars. And his skin seemed only pale, as if
there were an actor’s makeup on it…it was silver...that flushed into almost
natural shadings and colors against the bones, the lips, the nails. But silver.
Silver (65).”””””””””””……………… We Interrupt this Column to bring you an Important Survey: In Tanith Lee’s next novel, Ms. Lee will:
Pencils down. So Silver and Loren meet, and it is quickly decided that
Loren is there to “test” Silver like the highly motorized vehicle he is.
Like a Saturn. I have one, very comfortable. Loren takes Silver to her apartment, which is on Tolerance
Street. Oh, God I can’t take this. Can you mix gin and beer? Loren confronts Silver about Jane. Silver tells Loren he’s not Silver, but Verlis. He’s a changed man. Like I haven’t heard that line before. “Are you telling me---” “I’m telling you that those
things belong in another life. And that, just possibly, what Jane innocently
wrote in her book wasn’t entirely either what anyone else supposed had
happened or what in fact did happen. The one she thought she knew as
Silver—isn’t necessarily who I am (74).” Is it true? Was Silver Metal Lover a lie? Or is
Silver/Verlis (heck, lets call him Livers. Anagrams ahoy, mateys!) just lying in
order to make it with a hot chick? Historically this has been done before. But Livers is different from Silver. Not because he was
recycled from Silver’s parts like a Coke can, but because he’s a virgin and
Loren was his first! Shit, girl, now you’re stuck with him. Livers leaves and promises to come back. Loren ponders
their night together and is kind enough to use her own thoughts instead of
directly quoting from The Silver Metal Lover. Such a nice blessing. Sharffe meets up with Loren. Offers her some cheese. They
talk about Loren’s wild romp. Sharffe doesn’t utter a single French
colloquium he learned from that French dictionary he picked up on the way to
Loren’s place. He’s in a serious mood. After a pointless conversation where it is inferred that
Frenchie is checking up on Loren, we are led to Part Two, aptly title, “A
Flyer Names Desire”. I am so not shitting you. Drrrrrriiiiinnnnnkkkk! Verlis comes by to visit with Loren. He takes her out and
he notices her nervousness. “We can have,” he said, “the rest of the day.
All night, if you want. Not for sex, if you don’t want that (113).” I’ve heard that one before. Loren and Livers start arguing because Loren refuses to
believe Livers is not Silver and doesn’t remember Jane. They make up. Livers gets Loren into bed, and another woman
again realizes that when a man says he’s not in it for sex, he’s a total
liar. A liar who is also a robot. A lying robot that can make daiquiris. It is then that I decide to start drinking heavily. My
vision gets somewhat blurry, as does my mind. I can’t tell you whether or not
the book improves—only that there’s a part where Jane comes in, but she’s
actually a robot Jane, and some subplot with murderous robots. Livers keeps
telling Loren they’re being watched by some high tech organization. He then
proceeds to hump her against a tree. Ow, bark chafes! Other things happen and Loren finds out that Jane’s evil
mother is the one who has been running the META corporation all along. Livers
turns into a dragon. Loren finds out she’s half robot. She doesn’t turn into
a dragon. She and Dragon Livers run away and melt together into some sort of
weird 7th grade science project. But I’m drunk now, so whatever. END |
(c) Defenestration Magazine, 2004
