Rating: Summary: A book that made me love my job! Review: I'm a translator. Please, keep in mind I'm an Spanish translator, so I usually translate from English into Spanish. So please, bear with my grammar/spelling mistakes...Silver Metal Lover is the first novel I read in English, back when I was eighteen (hey, not so long time ago!). I was in my early translating career then, meaning I was just a very poor student who had to earn her way along University. I translated comic-books, only comic-books, lots of comic-books. I suffered Captain America speeches, Spiderman slang and Kitty Pryde looong teenager years. And then I found Silver Metal Lover, by Tanith Lee.Have you ever tried to read a book before sleeping, with a very huge dictionary at hand? Well, don't try it, it's hard. So I soon forgot about the dictionary and devoted my individed attention to the book itself. And how I loved the love story between the helpless girl and the cold android! Only she was not so helpless and he was not exactly an android at the end... well, I would not like to tell you the whole story. But you should know you will cry, and you will laugh, and you will love both of them.Problem with the books you love is you tend to lend them. And problem with lending books is you tend to find yourself without them... That is the reason now I'm looking for a copy of Silver Metal Lover. And I'll be damned if I lend it again!I translate books now, real books (well, I also translate a comic-book every now and then), but I'm still waiting for a Spanish publisher wishing to hire a translator for this novel. An I hope I'll be the lucky one
Rating: Summary: A wonderful book... Review: I have to say that when I found Tanith Lee's "The Silver Metal Lover" was back in print I was so happy I almost cried. I checked this book out of my university library several years ago and I immediately knew I had to have it. It is one of those books that will stay with you long after you have finished the last sentence. It is a book you don't want to end and I found myself, as I neared the last chapter, trying to read slower to prolong the experience. When I found this book, I felt an immediate kinship with Jain. You feel her pain, her fear, her confusion and her joy. All of these things you share with her and feel as she feels them. And I don't think there is anyone who can read this book and not fall in love with Silver. This is the one book I always wished that I could just enter into the pages and fall into their world (except I get there before the last two chapters and warn them!) It is impossible to rate how I love this book and only hope if you haven't yet read it for yourself that you will do so soon. I don't think you will regret it!
Rating: Summary: One of the best Tanith Lee books Review: I have read most of Tanith Lee's books over the years, but I consider this one as her best. She created a story that is both haunting and beautiful that I cannot forget for years. She created a world that is bored and indifferent, and, in it, she introduced a love that cannot be extinguished. She affirmed that love is eternal and love is beautiful and love can transcend even the differences between men and machine. Comparing to a robot who can love, the human beings who feel indifference to human sufferings are much more like machines than humans.
Rating: Summary: The apogee of Tanith Lee's writing career Review: I first read this book at the age of 16, the age our heroine Jane is in this story; it was almost eerie the way I identified with the character. Even after 16 years I still consider this my favorite book of all time. The story is beautifully written to the very last line. The characters of Jane and Silver are painted so realistically that you can believe this poingnant love story actually happened.This book also puts an emotional element into the sci-fi genre that is usually not there. Tanith Lee is my favorite author; many of her volumes are in my personal library, and I believe "The Silver Metal Lover" is the apogee of her writing career.
Rating: Summary: A book that made me love my job! Review: I'm a translator. Please, keep in mind I'm an Spanish translator, so I usually translate from English into Spanish. So please, bear with my grammar/spelling mistakes...
Silver Metal Lover is the first novel I read in English, back when I was eighteen (hey, not so long time ago!). I was in my early translating career then, meaning I was just a very poor student who had to earn her way along University. I translated comic-books, only comic-books, lots of comic-books. I suffered Captain America speeches, Spiderman slang and Kitty Pryde looong teenager years. And then I found Silver Metal Lover, by Tanith Lee.
Have you ever tried to read a book before sleeping, with a very huge dictionary at hand? Well, don't try it, it's hard. So I soon forgot about the dictionary and devoted my individed attention to the book itself. And how I loved the love story between the helpless girl and the cold android! Only she was not so helpless and he was not exactly an android at the end... well, I would not like to tell you the whole story. But you should know you will cry, and you will laugh, and you will love both of them.
Problem with the books you love is you tend to lend them. And problem with lending books is you tend to find yourself without them... That is the reason now I'm looking for a copy of Silver Metal Lover. And I'll be damned if I lend it again!
I translate books now, real books (well, I also translate a comic-book every now and then), but I'm still waiting for a Spanish publisher wishing to hire a translator for this novel. An I hope I'll be the lucky one
Rating: Summary: In Love With A Robot Review: I all most never like romance novels. However, I very much enjoyed this book written by Tanith Lee. It's one of those few romance novels, that I go back to reading. Lee does a wonderful job writing the complications about being a robot and a girl being in love with a robot. It sounds kind of hockey at first but it's very well done and tragic in many ways. Really good for someone who wants a romance that isn't all kiss, kiss, and lets make up.
Rating: Summary: Amazing Review: I only bought this book because of the amazing reviews it got and because it was by one of my favorite authors, Tanith Lee. I had absalutely no interest in reading it, I thought the plot was going to be horrible. A girl falling in love with a robot? Please. But then I started reading. It was amazing. I even cried at one point in the book, something no book has ever made me do. This beautiful and touching story reveals that love is more than something human. Like the story's protagonist, Jane, I too have fallen for something that supposedly one cannot fall in love with. I have fallen in love with this book.
Rating: Summary: I tried to like this book.... Review: I read this book some twenty years ago at the behest of a close friend who said "it's all about you and me and love and reincarnation." Because it was by Tanith Lee, the author of the Four BEE series and the wonderful Flat Earth books, I read it. I completed it in one night, because once I was into it, I didn't want to put it aside and sleep only to find that upon waking I would have to read the rest. I spent the rest of the night wondering what I should say to our friend. It certainly was not her fault that I did not understand the story or how it related to our friendship (which was based in intellectual creativity, and nothing like anything described in the book). Of course, Silver is capable of giving Jane an orgasm during intercourse -- supposedly the ultimate female fulfillment. And of course, once away from her mother and her regimen of nutrients designed to keep her dumpy and unattractive, Jane becomes a ravishing beauty, unrecognisable even to herself. That theme dates back to Lee's earlier potboiler, Electric Forest, in which a deformed woman is actually beautiful, but has been programmed with a fictitious life history designed to make her think she's ugly. It would have been more interesting had Jane been kept on drugs to make her unrealistically pretty (in keeping with the Stepfordish theme of being a kind of doll or toy for her mother), then on discontinuing them finds that her natural appearance has more genuine beauty. As the previous reviewer points out, it is a plot that has been done to death before and since. In fact, we spotted it immediately as being derived at least partially from an ironic little yarn that ran in F&SF about thirty years ago, "The Robot Who Wanted To Know." It also has hints of Robert Sheckley's wickedly funny farce "Can You Feel Anything When I Do This?" which originally ran in Playboy in 1969 and was anthologised in Damon Knight's A Science Fiction Argosy in 1972. The whole subgenre is based on a Mars-Venus approach to communication between human males and females which is shopworn at best. True love is not always about self-sacrifice; in fact, it should not be, if love is true. The ecstasies of self-abandonment are temporary at best. Try Peter Ibbetson for a story of love that lasts beyond death.
Rating: Summary: Excellent read Review: Excellent book, one of my favorites. If you're a fan of Tanith Lee, don't miss this one!
Rating: Summary: Delete File Review: This story takes place on a reconstructed Earth of the future, following the devastations of a meteor hit. People are either ridiculously rich or unemployed impoverished fringe folk who have been displaced by a multitude of robotic workers. I'm not sure how the rich got richer but this is a sort of not too brave new world where babies selected by type are created in test tubes and delivered from artificial wombs to parents kept eternally young by Rejuvinex. Police keep everyone who's rich safe from everyone who's poor by monitoring them electronically. Kind of like the jail bracelet concept in reverse. The 16 year old protagonist, Jane, is a totally sheltered, spoiled rich girl whose growth is stunted by living in the shadow of her rich, arrogant and self-absorbed globe-trotting mother. Their relationship is more like that of French Poodle owner and pup than it is like mother and daughter. Jane's friends, aren't really friends at all since they are also self-absorbed, spoiled, jaded rich kids who use each other as backdrops to their dramas. One of the things I detested the most about this book is the long pages of descriptions about Jane's friends and their vapid, perverse lifestyles. In a word, BORING. The plot is good though it's been done before a gazillion times with the likes of Star Trek's Data and in D.A.R.Y.L. and in Robin Williams' portryal of Milennium Man and many other AI contributions to the sci-fi literary grab-bag. Jane meets this sophisticated robot model that is capable of pretty much any kind of work including the arts and love-making. He looks and feels like a human except for the faint silver tinge to his skin. No problem, lots of human in this world like to paint their skin silver, too. No one can really tell that he's a robot. Jane falls in love with him and has to give up every bit of her rich girl world if she wants to be with him. They discover and uncover each other's humanity but it ends bad for Robo-honey. Never fear, the trite ending is a surprise. Why wasn't I surprised? Jane is 16 years old and maybe this book will appeal to YA readers because it delves into the areas of first love, and finding one's self, personal discovery, loss and independence and all that jazz in a way that is at least, imaginative. I didn't enjoy it. I thought the talented Tanith Lee dropped the ball here with characters, dialogue, credibility...pretty much everything. With a library of over 4,000 books, I still couldn't find permanent room on my shelves for this one. It should be disassembled like an annoying robot.
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