'The Silver Metal Lover' by Tanith Lee

 

From the BLURB: 

For sixteen-year-old Jane, life is a mystery she despairs of ever mastering. She and her friends are the idle, pampered children of the privileged class, living in luxury on an Earth remade by natural disaster. Until Jane's life is changed forever by a chance encounter with a robot minstrel with auburn hair and silver skin, whose songs ignite in her a desperate and inexplicable passion. Jane is certain that Silver is more than just a machine built to please. And she will give up everything to prove it. So she escapes into the city's violent, decaying slums to embrace a love bordering on madness. Or is it something more Has Jane glimpsed in Silver something no one else has dared to see - not even the robot or his creators A love so perfect it must be destroyed, for no human could ever compete

I don't quite know how I stumbled across this book (first published in 1981) I think I was led here by wanting to read more science-fiction with romantic elements (to try and read more sci-fi generally) coupled with a reminder of the hilariously prophetic old article from The Sun REVEALED: Women will be having more sex with ROBOTS than men by 2025 and also thinking about AI encroachment on artistic spaces.

Enter; Tanith Lee (whom I'd never read before) and 'The Silver Metal Lover' about a 16-year-old girl narrating the story of how she fell in love with the humanoid musician robot S.I.L.V.E.R. (which stands for 'Silver Ionized Locomotive Verisimulated Electronic Robot').

I really loved this, even as it broke my heart. And for a novel written in 1981 it made so many prescient points, particularly about the wisdom of letting young people have "artificial" relationships in lieu of real experiences (not that I think Tanith Lee villainises this most modern of ways to experience love, mind you! She makes a lot of swipes at other artifices we encourage in society to do with beauty-standards, and it makes you question where the line on "real" really lands).

There's also just some *amazing* lines in here. And again, for a pre-smart phone and social media 1981 novel a line like; “… she pours her life like champagne through your video phone.” seriously slays!

While reading this, it also struck me that a parallel for AI and robots that Lee was exploring here was the tale of Djinn and genies - subservient to human masters, human-but-not, inciting paranoia for trickster behaviour ... and humans constantly questioning their autonomy and the ethics of ordering them around. Brilliant!

This is still an 80's not-quite-YA-but-YA-according-to-the-80's novel so it's sometimes a little too flourish-y. Purple prose-y? The protagonist - Jane - is sometimes soooooo over-the-top and soap-opera dramatic, it felt like a very 80's perspective that teens are a little bratty and tragic and hormonal. To the point of high annoyance, which is unfortunate.

But overall I thought this was a very beautiful sci-fi fairytale, and it did exactly what I hoped it would which was get me thinking about the aspects of modernity and society I'd like to further explore in more science-fiction narratives.

4/5