Drinking Sapphire Wine by Tanith Lee
My rating: 4 of 5 stars Leaving Utopia to Remake Eden In Tanith Lee’s Don’t Bite the Sun (1976), the anonymous 25-year-old narrator repeatedly burns her mouth by biting the sun--challenging the system of her perfect, post-scarcity, dome-enclosed city run by QRs (quasi-robots or androids) and worked by robots for their pampered human charges—by trying and failing to do meaningful things like work or make a baby. She and her Jang (young) friends take drugs, “have love,” play sabotage, make social circles, pay for things with “emotional energy,” change genders, commit suicide, and exit Limbo in new bodies ready to resume their hedonistic lives. All that continues in the sequel, Drinking Sapphire Wine (1977), but the narrator is now a he (wearing the body of a handsome consumptive Romantic poet) and is immersing himself in the History Tower, researching forgotten customs of humanity like God and dueling. As his frenemy and occasional lover Hergal “the Turd” tells him, “You sit up there on your tail in the History Tower, in the dust with a couple of rusty robots that don't know what rorl [century] it is. You read about things that don't exist anymore and won't ever exist anymore. Adventures, wars, illness, obsolete social behavior patterns--poets.” Needless to say, the narrator is still unfulfilled by life in his society, and his friends can’t understand him: “And your vocabulary!” she bawled. “Those words! Factory? What's that?” “A place where they make audio plugs,” I said. The plot of this second novel begins with the return to the narrator’s city Four BEE of a former lover/friend Danor (currently female), a duel to the death with an envious jerk called Zirk (currently male), and an exile from the utopia-dystopia city into the harsh, hostile, beautiful desert: “Now’s your chance to prove you can do more than sit on your tail complaining and drinking sapphire wine with your tears of self-pity. Come on, come and do battle with me, come and fight me. I'm more than a match for you. I'll devour you if I can, but I'll do it cleanly and openly, not with words and dark little tanks in Limbo. Don't be afraid of human death and human age. I've seen it all, and I know it. It's just dust blown over the rocks. Look at me, how dead and old I seem, and yet, watch me grow, watch me live. Come on. Come and find me. I'm waiting.” Will the narrator find a way to stop drinking sapphire wine and to live a “real” life? What gender body will he (she?) choose to live out his (her) life in? Will he (she?) go crazy in isolated exile in the desert? Will dome city life continue carrying on stagnantly and safely without him (her?)? Like the first novel, this one is bleak and humorous, Lee revealing how, despite all their gender and body changes, people remain essentially the same, and how living an immortal life of ease with robots doing all the work and androids making all the decisions may not be so enjoyable, if you are a thinking person who wants to live a meaningful life. There are some neat surprises and twists and developments and characters. I like the love between the Jang Danor and the Older Person Kam and between Hatta the Horror and the narrator. I like the narrator trying to make “My Garden” in the desert. I like the benevolent QR Committee starting to act a little less benevolently. And the rediscovery of the ancient human past here and there is neat. I also liked the Jang slang used (though it’s really not necessary, because Lee uses plenty of regular slang): “My name’s Esten,” he said. “Derisann to meet you.” “Damn you, you’ve got a farathooming bloody cheek. What are you up to, you bastard? What’s the grakking game, you--” I like the decadent sf descriptions: “Kley was female right now which meant watch out, but when I glanced about, in a new body. Dazzling. Hair like lava, eyes like raw gold, skin like polished brass, and dressed to kill in see-through pattern with gold daggers, and with a brazen skull--of all antique masterpieces--grinning on her groin shield.” The novel is pretty conservative re gender despite all the gender changing. There are hints of the narrator in her female body being attracted to another Jang in a female body, but she never acts on that and remains heterosexual, like almost everybody she knows (apart from her makers—parents—who do live together as males). Though it is neat to find out that Hatta became female for a while to try to understand the narrator, he says he’s 80% male, and everyone is predominantly one or the other. There are no hermaphrodites or neither nor or neutral or non-gendered bodies; there are only male or female bodies. Although the novel is promoting living a real life in the real world rather than in a druggy VR, does Lee make it too easy (via “water mixer” machines etc.) for the narrator to make her My Garden in the desert? There apparently aren’t any predators, and the insects don’t bite or bother but just make pleasing whispering noises with their wings. Is this really “real” life?! Anyway, for 1977, the novel feels ahead of its time and is a compact, strong, stimulating read, and fans of Tanith Lee (like me!) should like it. View all my reviews
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