The Silver Metal Lover by Tanith Lee
This is a very nice SF love story that, if I had read it when I was a teenager, would probably have crept into my soul and stayed there. The protagonist, Jane, is a spoiled rich girl who knows she’s a spoiled rich girl and feels enough chagrin about it that we don’t hate her for her life of luxury. She knows how sheltered and inexperienced she is.
When Jane meets Silver, a musical android, she falls instantly in love with him, though she’s so mentally disturbed (or is that normal teenage irrationality?) that she conflates her love with hate and revulsion. Jane is a messed up girl, and her emotions run the gamut from fear and loathing to desire, jealousy, joyful ecstasy, and complacency, even when not influenced by external events. I don’t remember being so moody as a teenager, but I know other people were, so perhaps some may find that familiar.
One could claim the core of this book was whether or not Silver does have human emotions, and if he is capable of human joy. Jane spends a lot of time wondering, and she goes back and forth and back and forth on her decision in that regard, but in the end it doesn’t matter. Machine or not, Jane loves him.
So for me, this is principally about a young woman defying her mother to fall in love with someone her mother doesn’t approve of. It’s an ancient story, so familiar and so common that it resonates with all of us when it’s told well. And it is told well. I cried in public reading this novel, cried for Jane and her broken heart, her young person’s delusion in the notion of one true love. We were all that naive once, and some still are.
This is a well done, tragic love story, with sci-fi elements that don’t overwhelm.
