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Summary: The meaning of life is sought here, and found.
Review: To start off, Biting the Sun is a beautifully written novel. Tanith Lee uses excellent language that is both intelligible and fun to read. The book opens up into a world that could very well someday turn out to be earth, revealing a very high tech, but also empty society. When you are a human in the three cities, robots make the rules. The robots are in charge, and indefinetly decide the fate of the humans. It would be hard to say that the people of these cities do not have everything they want. They can be beautiful, do not have to work, and have a very select set of rules. When they buy something, they pay by saying thank you, and a machine sucks the emotion from them, turning it into energy to run the cities. Suicide is not forever here, just until you're body is taken by robots to limbo to design a new one. All you could ever want, right? Wrong, our main character, the lovable protagonist is anything but satisfied. She (being predominately female) begins to feel empty, and begins to search for satisfaction. She searches, but cannot find, for she wants true adventures, and wants life to be like what she has read and heard of in the history tower. She seeks to bite the sun, to rebel against society, and in the end pays a price for it. But what she gains is more valuable then what she has lost.
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Summary: Another favorite
Review: Together with The Silver Metal Lover, these are my favorite Tanith novels to-date. Tanith shows us a futuristic world that is beautifully rendered, colorful, utterly believable and slightly frightening. I would love to see this made into a movie, perhaps with the help of Luc Besson (director of The Fifth Element) they would be able to capture this extraordinary sci-fi world. But beyond this, Tanith gives us so much more. She does what a good sci-fi writer should, presents us with future possibilities and variables and lets her characters respond, react and be shaped by them. She does this so exquisitely that her worlds become utterly believable and her characters real. I recommend this novel; even if my opinion means nothing to you, please do give this book and TSML a try. You will not regret it!
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Summary: Good but there should have been more.
Review: When I was younger, a teacher sent a story I'd written into the writer's workshop at one of the universities in our state. It came back with great comments and the writer's seemed to like it alot. One comment stuck in my mind: it is bigger than this you know. That is how I feel about the two novels of Tanith Lee presented in this one volume. The first, "Don't Bite the Sun", does a great job of laying the background, getting us into the mind of the main character and helping us feel "her" disillusionment with the utopic life that resembles hell more than heave. However the second novel, "Drinking Sapphire Wine" is too short -- I needed and wanted more background, more connection, more feeling, and more time between the characters. Given that this is a collection of two novels, it would have been great to expand on each.
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Summary: Fun and Wonder; One of the Best Sci-Fi's
Review: Wow, what a great book. Originally two separate novellas, Biting the Sun was written in the 70's, back when Tanith Lee was writing exuberant, happy, bouncy stories with charming characters and wild plots. Her more recent writing is perhaps more polished, beautiful, and spare, but it's nice once in a while to read her earlier work, which make up in color and voice what they perhaps lack in streamlines and thoughfulness. Biting the Sun takes place in a future trio of cities where no one ever dies, they just get new, personally-designed bodies. Read the previous review if you want a really good summary of the novel. The first part of the book, Don't Bite the Sun, is my favorite; it centers around the (forever unnamed) protagonist's strangling, suffocating boredom with *her* city, her life, her forced role as Jang--a young, drug-taking, factory-sabotaging, thieving teenager. The second part of the novel, Drinking Sapphire Wine, is equally entertaining; it explains what happens to the protagonist when she breaks one of the city's few rules and chaos ensues. The good thing about Biting the Sun is that even at its most depressing and unhappy, there's still a feeling of fun and hope in the novel that never goes away. Tanith Lee is at her most imaginative, and the book is worth reading for the hijinks and misadventures of the protagonist and her friends alone. The main character is engaging and easy to like, the supporting characters are equally entertaining and interesting, and to anyone who's read Lee's Unicorn series, the pink pet in this book seems to be a prelude to Tanaquil's peeve. All in all, Biting the Sun is a totally fun experience, light and frothy, but not without true substance and thought-provoking themes. Lee's signature is that even in her lightest works she keeps the reader wondering and thinking and questioning; Biting the Sun is no exception. Enjoy!
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