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49 of 50 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
A good book, but not as strong as it's prequel., March 5, 2005
This review is from: Metallic Love (Mass Market Paperback)
Metallic Love is set 12 years after the events of The Silver Metal Lover, and though a sequel, it is not really a continuation of the previous novel. The book, its characters, its readers and even (it seems) its author are all haunted by Silver and the doomed love he shared with Jane. Both Verlis and Loren carry the memories of what happened to Silver and Jane (though for different reasons), and the pages of ML are peppered with quotes from TSML, forcing the reader into constant comparisons, just as reading Jane's book forces Loren to constantly compare Verlis to Silver. Unfortunately, ML comes up lacking when held up to TSML, because it is not what I expected the next story would be, given the way TSML ended.
Let me start by warning you that ML ends the way anyone who read TSML would expect it to begin, leading me to hope (please) that this will be a trilogy. If it is, let us all hope there isn't as long a time between books, and that like most trilogies, the third book has more to do with the first book then the second generally does.
From the start of the novel, we have 2 constants: 1. Loren tells us if we loved Jane, we will not like her. I did not find this to be true. Loren is interesting, strong and likeable, but simply lacks Jane's often overly emotional responses, which I would not mind (didn't we all want to occasionally tell Jane to get a grip?) but this lack of emotion prevents us from knowing Verlis the way we get to know Silver, thus preventing us from feeling the connection between the two protagonists as deeply as we felt for those in TSML. 2. Verlis is NOT Silver, as the reader is told often. The robot that lived to please humans, who had humor, wit and the ability to pass himself off as a very gifted human, is not present in this story. Verlis does not want to be human, nor is he designed to pass as a human; his skills, abilities and appearance are intended to be superhuman. He is also in large part absent from the book making the love story feel a bit forced. I kept asking, why does Loren keep going back to Verlis if she barely sees him, does not trust him and admits to hating him?
The answer is, this book is the mirror image of TSML, not a new story. Here we are not given the story of an emotional female who teaches an unemotional male to love. ML is the story of an emotional male who teaches an unemotional female to love. Here Loren is sexually experienced, but does not reach climax with Verlis (as Silver did not initially with Jane) and Verlis is the virgin that reaches fulfillment (like Jane). Verlis openly admits to wanting and loving Loren, while it takes her almost the entire book to fully realize her feelings. In understanding that the roles were reversed, it makes me think better of the book and of Verlis.
After all, what would TSML have been like if seen through Silver's eyes? Would he have not have wondered about Jane's motives, a Loren does of Verlis'? Did it not take him almost the entire book to find love and fulfillment? If we followed Silver and not Jane, we would have witnessed a series of events that did little to forward the love story (ie: where he went after they first met, what he was like with Egyptia and Clovis) as we follow Loren through scenes that do not futher her story with Verlis. In that case we would have felt Jane was in large part absent and the reader would have felt distanced from the love story and wondered why and how Silver came to love Jane, just as we wonder how Loren came to love Verlis. Because Jane was the emotional one, we were so caught up in worrying, along with her, about Silver's whereabouts; we did not see him as missing from the story. Jane told us, with her interpretations of Silver's emotions, how he reacted when she was "missing" or we would never know he felt worry. As one who is emotionally disconnected, Loren could not do that for Verlis, making him distant even when present.
If you are looking for the heart-breakingly poignant love story of TSML, ML may not be for you. Instead of furthering the story of Silver and Jane as many hoped for, it gives a look at what Silver's perspective might have been in TSML and at what Jane hinted might be the next step in humanity's evolution (there is a reason it is called Metallic Love). There is only one tantalizing glimpse at what may come in respects to Silver and Jane. However, if you accept that this book is the companion to TSML, a reversal of points of view, and a stepping-stone to the next part of the story, then it is worth a read if only to catch a brief look at what fans have loved for decades. So I gave it 3 stars for being a decent read, but for falling short of expectations and very short of the first novel.
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13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
This wasn't what I so badly wanted it to be, and it wasn't even that good, January 17, 2006
This review is from: Metallic Love (Mass Market Paperback)
I have some odd feelings about this book. You will have to accept, at some point while reading it, that this not a story about Silver and Jane. In fact, the quasi-Silver robot in this book isn't Silver at all. He is his body and memories brought back from the dead, but not his heart, soul or emotions. He doesn't have the soul that Silver had. So it made me, very, very sad that this book wasn't the reincarnation of Silver and Jane as the ending of Silver metal lover seemed to promise.
In fact, the robots in this book are kind of evil. Scary. Verlis, who really isn't Silver, is kind of evil and scary and this book really isn't romantic because of it. The heroin Loren, just strikes me as stupid and whiney and she has no depth to her, she doesn't come close to Jane in terms of emotional expression in this book.
Mostly though, this book just broke my heart because of Jane. You'll know what I mean if you read it. I almost wish I never read it, although there was one uplifting happy moment at the end. Who knows? Maybe there will be one more book about Silver (the real Silver) and Jane coming out in the future. Until then, if it ever happens, I think I'll just imagine that somehow, sometime they lived happily ever after and the events of this book never happened. In fact, I'm going to try to forget I read this. It's just to dam depressing.
So, only three stars. It wasn't what I thought it would be, it wasn't what I hoped it would be, and It's just not as good as Tanith Lee's other books that I read.
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9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Can't match the original, January 14, 2006
This review is from: Metallic Love (Mass Market Paperback)
"Metallic Love" is meant to be a sequal of Lee's sci-fi classic "The Silver Metal Lover." TSML is one of my favorite books of all time and Lee one of my favorite authors. Lee's strength is creating vivid, imaginative worlds that completely suck you in. This book is no exception. However, as a sequel to TSML it falls short. It's hard to stay away from it if you loved TSML, but it really doesn't satisfy any of the questions raised by TSML, and it almost feels as though it was written by a different person.
"Metallic Love" has a new main character who is in many ways the opposite of Jane, the hero of TSML. Loren grows up poor on the streets, and she is emotionally tough. But much like Jane and every other Lee heroine, she is also intelligent and contemplative. She does have a romantic spot, and reads and reread's "Jane's Story," Jane's published tales of her adventures with Silver (known to us as TSML). She is constantly repeating quotes from the book. However, "Metallic Love" fails to sustain the tone and flavor of the original. What was amazing about TSML was the emotional depth and beauty in Jane and Silver's relationship. It felt completely authentic and breathtaking. It raised important questions about consciousness and what it means to be human.
In "Metallic Love," Silver is brought back to life 12 years later by another corporation and renamed Verlis. The soul that Silver possessed is seemingly absent in Verlis. To someone who fell in love with Silver in the first novel, he seems more like a cruel parody. He has Silver's memories, but lacks his emotions. Even so, Loren and Verlis start up a romantic relationship which can only be described as "creepy." Although the couple claim to be in love and hopelessly attracted to one another, the love scenes seemed hollow and inauthentic, especially when held up in comparison to TSML. To be honest, I couldn't figure out their attraction to one another at all. Jane makes a brief reappearance, if only to inform us that Verlis is NOT Silver.
The plot takes some bizarre twists also. Verlis is accompanied by 7 other robots like him, whose new powers and abilities defy scienfic explanation. In TSML the robots were meant to imitate humanity, and gain unrobotic but at least somewhat feasible abilities such as creativity, consciousness, and emotions. In "Metallic Love," they are meant to exceed humanity, and could in no way be mistaken for human. They gain abilities such as forming solid matter out of nothing. They can shape shift into dragons 10x their original size. They can fly. They can break themselves up into atoms and put themselves back together at will. They also are bent on world domination. It seems like Lee is experimenting with how ludicrously extreme she can go in this novel, and it just doesn't work that well.
That being said, I don't think this novel is terrible. It's an interesting experience, and Lee's descriptions never disappoint. But in comparison to "The Silver Metal Lover" it's an inferior book.
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