My article on Tanith Lee’s weird short story, “Yellow and Red,” is now live at Weird Fiction Review. Weird Fiction Review is also running another short story by Tanith Lee, the creepy “Where All Things Perish” — which I also touch on in my essay. There is also an interview with Tanith Lee.
I discovered Tanith Lee’s work in 2002, on one of those serendipitous library strolls. (I worked in the stacks at Emory’s Woodruff Library, so those happened a lot.) At the time, her work was a revelation for me. I devoured The Silver Metal Lover and Electric Forest, amazed by the aesthetic. I’d never read such lush, bewitching romantic science fiction. For the first time I began to imagine, in the larger sense, what a feminine voice in science fiction might look like. And so, I began to think that I might be able to find my own voice, one influenced but not dictated by the boy’s club of cyberpunk and postmodern metafiction.
All that to say, Tanith Lee will always be one of my heroes, and I jumped at this chance to revisit her work. Please, if you have a moment, go read about Tanith Lee!
