Robot Love

The Silver Metal Lover was a great introduction to Tanith Lee for me. This particular month, Vaginal Fantasy focused on a robot theme with authors questioning the power of love with an artificial being.

This particular love story is about a young, naive rich girl named Jane. She lives a pretty sheltered life in a beautiful mansion in the sky with her mother. All her friends are jaded and mean, living quite the hedonistic lifestyle on their parents money. One day while walking with her gay friend Clovis, she comes across a beautiful silver skinned man named Silver singing in the street. He transfixes her with his song and dazzling eyes. Much to her surprise, he is a limited edition love robot built to amuse. In this futuristic setting, robots are omnipresent but none yet have been built solely to entertain. This discovery of desire to a machine makes Jane sick. She is quite a sensitive girl. Clovis tells her to stop being such a prude. Later that night, she visits her friend Egyptia, a wannabe actress, at her house where she is entertaining her theater group. To Jane’s horror, Egyptia has hired Silver for a private performance. Jane can’t look away and becomes even more disgusted when Egyptia disappears into her bedroom to get the full-service package from Silver.

Jane returns home in tears, completely lovestruck with jealousy. She becomes crazed and sells all her belongings to make Silver her own. Nothing goes as planned but eventually, she gets Silver all to herself. Clovis arranges it so she can ‘rent’ him indefinitely from Egyptia who has already grown bored of the whole thing. Silver and her move into a cheap apartment together and with his urging, they earn money singing on the street. And a most unusual thing occurs, Jane begins to blossom. Her infatuation is the excuse she needed to escape the stifling rule of her mother and her rather shitty friends. Will she be able to live forever in this bliss with Silver? God she hopes so!

Jane was quite the whiner, so it took a couple chapters for me to warm up to her. But once, Silver broke her out of her shell, I was on her side. The idea of having to rent a robot to learn about yourself seems ridiculous. But this is exactly what she needed, someone’s whole purpose who was to be kind and amuse her. Silver was not a slave, but built to be as close to human as possible. He turned out to be more sympathetic than all the flesh and blood people in her world. In the end, he went beyond being just a machine. I’d recommend this book for fans of ‘Blade Runner’ and artificial beings surpassing their code.

Read my other VF book reviews on my blog.