poor Ugly! her misshapen appearance really sticks out on the planet Indigo, where everyone is practically perfect in every way. Ugly needs to trade up! time to move into a new body, freshly made and certainly more pleasing to the eye.this is a futuristic morality tale in which Pygmalion is a beautiful, psychopathic young genius and Galatea his equally beautiful handmade toy. it is also a chilly deconstruction of independence and class with a sad-at-heart, sadistic Henry Higgins transforming, degrading, and abusing his elevated Eliza Doolittle. all in all, quite an unpleasant tale. our heroine is an intriguing cipher capable of who knows what but she's also an irritatingly unformed pawn. I was happy to cheer her on when she demonstrated small moments of defiance and independent thought, but those moments could have come more frequently. but it's absorbing too, in its own odd way. the prose is hypnotic, which is par for the course for Lee. in Electric Forest the author had yet to reach her zenith and her lush prose is heavily reliant on the naming of various colors - but she still demonstrates how strong of a stylist she can be in her striking descriptive passages, the ambiguous and sinister characterization, and offhand moments of mannered conversation.the dreamlike narrative increasingly centralizes a corporate espionage plot. the espionage is interesting enough but seems to be working at cross-purposes with the main goals of the novel - which at first appeared to be the examining of various forms of control and various uses of beauty. the author also does the novel no favors by including an epilogue which repositions the entire narrative as a surprisingly benevolent exercise in role-playing. although the subject matter made my skin crawl, I don't like it when an author so rigorously attempts to make her tale less disturbing in the end. sort of takes away the whole point of this creepy anti-romance.overall an intriguing little novel but mainly of interest to Tanith Lee completists. like myself!
Electric Forest is classic Tanith Lee science fiction. In a world full of trilogies and 1000 page novels, 150 pages of a compact story with rich, descriptive writing is a breath of fresh air. The story itself is not very remarkable; like plenty of science fiction, it focusses on alterity...an investigation of what makes the "other," even when that "other" is oneself. Ugly girl in beautiful society is transitioned into a beautiful, android body by enigmatic stranger bent on some sort of retribution. It's a theme directly in the same vein as Frankenstein. The story is somewhat predictable, until the very end, where Lee changes the writing altogether and shifts the perspective of the story dramatically. It is that change and shift that still sits with me, and keeps me wondering if such a thing was actually possible or practical...and I think this is what has caused me to up my rating after initially giving it three stars. Hollywood should leverage this as a movie. It would be pretty perfect on the big screen...
What do You think about Electric Forest (1979)?
The protagonist is a female which is described as ugly in a world full of perfectly, while genetically engineered, beautiful people. She is given the chance to become beautiful; by a man which motives aren't as benevolent as they seem at first glance.The story is quite intriguing, playing with the image of one self, the idea what really defines how we see ourselves, and how the perception of others shaped our image of ourselves. I enjoyed reading this book but it takes a while until the true plot of the story unfolds and the ending as well as the explanation took me by surprise, as only a small hint was given at the beginning of the book.Not my favorite from Tanith Lee but worth reading.
—Christin
