Biting the Sun (Mass Market Paperback)

by Tanith Lee (Author) "Of course, when I woke up in the Limbo Tub I'd changed my mind..." (more)
Key Phrases: provision dispenser, vacuum drift, meal injection, Committee Hall, Dream Rooms, History Tower (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review
Tanith Lee, winner of the August Derleth Award and several World Fantasy Awards, is best known as a fantasy and horror writer, but she has written several fine SF novels, two of which, Don't Bite the Sun and Drinking Sapphire Wine, form a duology now available in the single volume Biting the Sun.

The far future has brought freedom not only from material want but also from rules, responsibilities, and risk. You can change bodies and genders like clothes, make love with whomever you want, live forever, and kill yourself as often as you like. You can have everything, except a meaningful life. Then one day a restless soul discovers an act so shocking and terrifying that human society has forgotten its existence. --Cynthia Ward

Product Description
In a world dedicated to pleasure, one young rebel sets out on a forbidden quest--.

Published for the first time in a single volume, Tanith Lee's duet of novels set in a hedonistic Utopia are as riveting and revolutionary as they were when they first appeared two decades ago.

It's a perfect existence, a world in which no pleasure is off-limits, no risk is too dangerous, and no responsibilities can cramp your style. Not if you're Jang: a caste of libertine teenagers in the city of Four BEE. But when you're expected to make trouble--when you can kill yourself on a whim and return in another body, when you're encouraged to change genders at will and experience whatever you desire--you've got no reason to rebel...until making love and raising hell, daring death and running wild just leave you cold and empty.

Ravenous for true adventures of the mind and body, desperate to find some meaning, one restless spirit finally bucks the system--and by shattering the rules, strikes at the very heart of a soulless society....

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Product Details

• Mass Market Paperback: 384 pages
• Publisher: Spectra (October 5, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0553581309
• ISBN-13: 978-0553581300
• Product Dimensions: 6.3 x 4.1 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars See all reviews (38 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #527,764 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

37 of 37 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Fun and Wonder; One of the Best Sci-Fi's, November 30, 1999

By	Jessica (Seattle) - See all my reviews

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!

19 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Wonderful!, December 14, 1999

By A Customer

Although I have been a devoted Tanith Lee fan since I discovered her work sometime last year, I had only experienced her science-fiction work with "The Silver Metal Lover." I shamelessly adore that book; thus, when I heard that another of her earlier science-fictions was being reprinted, I both jumped to buy it and worried a bit about what it might be like. I shouldn't have even bothered to worry. "Biting the Sun" is fantastic.

The book is really two novels in one. The first, "Don't Bite the Sun," deals with traditional dystopian themes, all written in Lee's brilliant, colorful prose and enacted by a crazy and fascinating set of characters. From the beginning the story throws you off balance and pulls you in: come on, what other novel opens with its narrator committing suicide? In the futuristic city of Four-BEE a strict age-based caste system dictates its inhabitants' lives, particularly the lives of the Jang, whose adolescence seems to last at least fifty years. You can do anything when you're a Jang. Drink, do drugs, marry, have love, kill yourself, all as many times as you like in whatever body you prefer; the only thing you can't do is...stop being a Jang. Thus when the anonymous, mainly-female protagonist decides to rebel against Four-BEE, but it's hard. When nothing is forbidden, what can you protest? Apparently there's something, because the second novel, "Drinking Sapphire Wine," deals with the other half of the story: what happens when the narrator finally ticks off the Powers That Be and is exiled from Four-BEE. Although I understand that the books were originally published as separate works, they mesh seamlessly into one another. In theory one could read "Drinking Sapphire Wine" without reading "Don't Bite the Sun"...but why miss the fun? Lee's Four-BEE is a weird and wild place, where pure hedonism is ultimately revealed to be hollow, but it's a delight to read about.

(By the way, I would like to agree wholeheartedly with the prior reviewer: the moment "the pet" entered the action, I thought immediately of Tanaquil's peeve. Those of you who have no clue what we're talking about...read "Black Unicorn" and its sequels and find out!)

Having enjoyed immensely both "The Silver Metal Lover" and "Biting the Sun," two very different looks at the future, I will continue look out for more of Lee's science fiction. Meanwhile, those of you that have never read "Biting the Sun," stop wasting your time reading this review, go out and read the book! Not as though the Quasi-Robots will enforce this suggestion, but unless you do so, I doubt the following song will make much sense: "I only want to have love with you, for you are so derisann..."

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The meaning of life is sought here, and found., August 28, 2001

By	NaviEpona (NH) - See all my reviews

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.