Electric Forest

Electric Forest (1979) by Tanith Lee reworks the myths of Narcissus and Pygmalion into a dark speculative fiction. In a society where most people are rich, healthy, and handsome, Magdala, a disabled, impoverished child of a sex worker, has none of those advantages. A Svengali-like scientist transfers her consciousness into a beautiful android body and introduces her to high society and its complex machinations. There is, of course, a catch or two. She has to stay near her old body in its high-tech casket, and her controller can always reduce her to a “mindless stupor with alcohol or dope.”
Lee’s style gives her realistic world-building a gothic frisson.
These days, the novel would come with trigger warnings for rape, torture, and show more body horror. show less

Tanith Lee is one of the authors I should always be reading more of. The cover is fantastic and the synopsis along the lines of one of Lee's themes -- a society where people can basically create designer bodies -- except this book focuses on a character without the good fortune to have had even basic genetic selection, and is considered a monstrosity.

Or so we're led to believe. This book is entirely impossible to discuss without spoilers because of the massive reveal at the end. The revel did answer some reservations I'd had about the plot and about Magda herself -- particularly how easily she seems to adjust to how people treat here in her new beautiful body, after spending basically her entire life protecting herself from the notice show more of others to avoid their negative reactions. At the same time, I was disappointed. I was hoping for more societal critique, but the big reveal turned it more into a sci-fi Mission Impossible.

Still, there was a great deal of cleverness to the novel, and I love Lee's style. show less

Magdala Cled, known only as “Ugly”, lives in a world where people are bred to be beautiful, healthy, normal. But she was born by a natural birth and is seen as a genetic mistake among the perfection of her peers. When a man shows up at her table one day during lunch, Magdala is presented with an opportunity that changes her entire life, but at what cost?

There’s just something about Tanith’s sci-fi (more so than her fantasy) that wraps me up completely in her worlds and characters. Her writing is so rich and I can’t help but feel what her main character feels. She packed a lot into just under 160 pages and this was a thought-provoking read. Without saying too much about the plot, Magdala is given the chance to have her show more consciousness transferred from her slightly deformed, ugly body, into that of a beautiful woman. Her original body must still be kept alive however, as her brain is what controls her new body. The plot becomes even more complex and the twist at the end surprised me.

I’ll be the first to admit I don’t do a lot of deep reading. Normally I don’t sit around after finishing a book to really think about it. But Electric Forest presented a world where someone could transfer their consciousness into a nearly indestructible android and control it in every way they could control their former body. Potentially, if the original body was well cared for, someone could expect to live much longer than they normally would. A tempting proposition! But of course, as the story proposes, there are a host of problems that come with this opportunity.

And of course, I think the cover art is fabulous, and fairly creepy, especially now that I know it reflects the content of the book. If you’re looking for a quick read, with a heavy dose of sci-fi themes, check out Electric Forest. show less

Tanith Lee is one of my favorites from the past, but she's been more miss than hit with me for the last 5 or 10 years. I try to read at least one of her books every year, this was a short one so I might try another.

The plot on this one was pretty twisted and had you constantly wondering who the "bad guy" was and who the main character would believe/what she would do. There was some hard sci-fi and some philosophical stuff thrown in there for good measure. I think it works at this length, but any longer it would have gotten boring.

A strange book that perhaps tries to do too much twisting & turning. The summary report at the end clarifies many preceding incongruities in character behavior but it wasn't quite enough to salvage a higher overall rating.

This was the first Tanith Lee book I have read. I plan to check out more of her work at some point as I did enjoy her writing style.

This is a science fiction novel, which is a break from the pure fantasy ones that I've been reading by Lee. There's still a major amount of science so complicated it might as well be magic, in that a woman with a slew of "birth defects" (aka she wasn't genetically engineered to be perfect, and is usually just called "Ugly") is popped into a tank and her consciousness is transfered to a perfect and beautiful body. The man who masterminds this transfer is an unstable genius and he manipulates her to see how she reacts to various stimuli. The revelations that occur over the course of the story are very interesting and the final one had me rethinking my reactions to the events of the whole story.

One of Tanith Lee's earlier, minor works. It is SF but still has that strange, baroque feel to it that Lee is so adept at injecting into her novels. The story is a grotesque SFnal take on the old Pygmalion myth. Its interesting, and short, but I wouldn't number it amongst her essential works.