Tanith Lee has died. She was a year younger than my mother. That is not reasonable.
I can't calculate her importance to me as a writer. I encountered her very young, almost glancingly; I remembered her short story "Ceres, Passing" for years without knowing who had written it (I had it associated with Diana Wynne Jones, who was the editor) and Black Unicorn (1991) permanently affected the way I think about the mythical beast, as well as the moon (the furry peeve, rapturous, plaintive, and passive-aggressive: "Moon"). Then there was a lacuna of some years during which I didn't think about her much, and then in my senior year of high school I borrowed through interlibrary loan and read in two days all four Secret Books of Paradys, mostly straight through, enthralled, on my parents' couch, and that same year The Silver Metal Lover (1981) and the omnibus edition of Don't Bite the Sun (1976) and Drinking Sapphire Wine (1979) came back into print and I would never have her out of my head after that. I spent most of my spare time in college trawling used book stores for her back catalogue. There was a lot of it.
Even now I haven't read her complete oeuvre. She was insanely prolific; she wrote so many stories that wired themselves instantly into my brain that even the rare bounces like Heart-Beast (1992) or Vivia (1995) or White As Snow (2000) did little to alter my opinion of her, except for teaching me that the failure mode of decadence is boredom. If I start listing favorites, I'll be here all afternoon. The Book of the Damned (1988) rewrote the ways in which I thought about language and gender; in later years I realized she might be more binary than I'd thought, but that smoky, feverish triptych of jewels and transgression told me liminality was possible. I still haven't seen Blake's 7 (1978–81), but knowing Kill the Dead (1980) came into the world as a sideways kind of fanfic for the series has always made me want to. (I've suspected for years that Sung in Shadow (1983) is retelling Romeo and Juliet by way of Zeffirelli more than straight Shakespeare, but I've never blamed her for it—I imprinted on John McEnery's Mercutio, too.) Faces Under Water (1998) gave me a cranky heroic Jewish alchemist and The Gods Are Thirsty (1996) gave me Camille Desmoulins, whom Lee would clearly have invented if she couldn't find him in history (and kind of did anyway). I find almost everything about Piratica: Being a Daring Tale of a Singular Girl's Adventures Upon the High Seas (2004) absurdly heartwarming and I never want to see it made into a movie; it needs a stage. The Gorgon and Other Beastly Tales (1985) lives on the nightstand in semi-permanent rotation, mostly because I love the story "Sirriamnis" so much. I saw FKA twigs' "Two Weeks" in December and thought of The Birthgrave (1975) and Anackire (1983). I still don't own most of her short story collections, probably because they don't fetch up in used book stores as often as Death's Master (1979) or Dark Dance (1992).
(In her own heavily fetishizing, almost always partly alternate way, she was one of the best writers I've ever read about the ancient world. The kingdom of Akhemony is a fictitious, tragedy-bent blend of archaic Greece and pharaonic Egypt, but as a novel Mortal Suns (2003) conveys more strongly than anything except perhaps Samuel R. Delany's Phallos (2004) the ways in which classical antiquity does not think like the present. Her novella "Into Gold," which I own only in Donald A. Wollheim's 1987 Annual World's Best SF, is the best post-Roman Arthurian-Demophoon fusion I never knew I wanted. There is very often a classical allusion moving underneath the surface of her stories, whether it's appropriate or not. I can sympathize with that. I expect there's some of her in "ζῆ καὶ βασιλεύει." She was one of my models for historical fantasy in every century. Occasionally a negative one, but still: when I went to Paris with the rest of my high school's concert choir in 1999, I recognized the rooftops from Paradys.)
This isn't an obituary. I slept very badly and had disjointed, familial dreams that I almost remember for the first time in weeks. If I want to figure out how Lee's use of color, rhythm, simile, and idiosyncratic verb choice affected mine, I'll be here even longer than the afternoon. If I want to write a chronological appreciation of her work, call back next month. She didn't drop wholly off my radar in recent years, but a combination of reduced budget and small press meant that I'm pretty sure the last new book of hers I read was the somewhat disappointing Disturbed by Her Song (2010). Short fiction fared better; see Mike Allen's remembrance for her presence in Clockwork Phoenix. I managed to appear in an anthology with her once in 2009, which blew my mind a little whenever I thought about it. I was always curious what she was doing, even if I couldn't afford to read it. I didn't expect to lose her this year.
Her language changed me.
Soon wonderful shops began to open in the buildings. She saw shelves of cakes like jewels and trays of jewels like flowers and sheaves of flowers like lances and, in an armorer's, lances like nothing but themselves.
I can't calculate her importance to me as a writer. I encountered her very young, almost glancingly; I remembered her short story "Ceres, Passing" for years without knowing who had written it (I had it associated with Diana Wynne Jones, who was the editor) and Black Unicorn (1991) permanently affected the way I think about the mythical beast, as well as the moon (the furry peeve, rapturous, plaintive, and passive-aggressive: "Moon"). Then there was a lacuna of some years during which I didn't think about her much, and then in my senior year of high school I borrowed through interlibrary loan and read in two days all four Secret Books of Paradys, mostly straight through, enthralled, on my parents' couch, and that same year The Silver Metal Lover (1981) and the omnibus edition of Don't Bite the Sun (1976) and Drinking Sapphire Wine (1979) came back into print and I would never have her out of my head after that. I spent most of my spare time in college trawling used book stores for her back catalogue. There was a lot of it.
Even now I haven't read her complete oeuvre. She was insanely prolific; she wrote so many stories that wired themselves instantly into my brain that even the rare bounces like Heart-Beast (1992) or Vivia (1995) or White As Snow (2000) did little to alter my opinion of her, except for teaching me that the failure mode of decadence is boredom. If I start listing favorites, I'll be here all afternoon. The Book of the Damned (1988) rewrote the ways in which I thought about language and gender; in later years I realized she might be more binary than I'd thought, but that smoky, feverish triptych of jewels and transgression told me liminality was possible. I still haven't seen Blake's 7 (1978–81), but knowing Kill the Dead (1980) came into the world as a sideways kind of fanfic for the series has always made me want to. (I've suspected for years that Sung in Shadow (1983) is retelling Romeo and Juliet by way of Zeffirelli more than straight Shakespeare, but I've never blamed her for it—I imprinted on John McEnery's Mercutio, too.) Faces Under Water (1998) gave me a cranky heroic Jewish alchemist and The Gods Are Thirsty (1996) gave me Camille Desmoulins, whom Lee would clearly have invented if she couldn't find him in history (and kind of did anyway). I find almost everything about Piratica: Being a Daring Tale of a Singular Girl's Adventures Upon the High Seas (2004) absurdly heartwarming and I never want to see it made into a movie; it needs a stage. The Gorgon and Other Beastly Tales (1985) lives on the nightstand in semi-permanent rotation, mostly because I love the story "Sirriamnis" so much. I saw FKA twigs' "Two Weeks" in December and thought of The Birthgrave (1975) and Anackire (1983). I still don't own most of her short story collections, probably because they don't fetch up in used book stores as often as Death's Master (1979) or Dark Dance (1992).
(In her own heavily fetishizing, almost always partly alternate way, she was one of the best writers I've ever read about the ancient world. The kingdom of Akhemony is a fictitious, tragedy-bent blend of archaic Greece and pharaonic Egypt, but as a novel Mortal Suns (2003) conveys more strongly than anything except perhaps Samuel R. Delany's Phallos (2004) the ways in which classical antiquity does not think like the present. Her novella "Into Gold," which I own only in Donald A. Wollheim's 1987 Annual World's Best SF, is the best post-Roman Arthurian-Demophoon fusion I never knew I wanted. There is very often a classical allusion moving underneath the surface of her stories, whether it's appropriate or not. I can sympathize with that. I expect there's some of her in "ζῆ καὶ βασιλεύει." She was one of my models for historical fantasy in every century. Occasionally a negative one, but still: when I went to Paris with the rest of my high school's concert choir in 1999, I recognized the rooftops from Paradys.)
This isn't an obituary. I slept very badly and had disjointed, familial dreams that I almost remember for the first time in weeks. If I want to figure out how Lee's use of color, rhythm, simile, and idiosyncratic verb choice affected mine, I'll be here even longer than the afternoon. If I want to write a chronological appreciation of her work, call back next month. She didn't drop wholly off my radar in recent years, but a combination of reduced budget and small press meant that I'm pretty sure the last new book of hers I read was the somewhat disappointing Disturbed by Her Song (2010). Short fiction fared better; see Mike Allen's remembrance for her presence in Clockwork Phoenix. I managed to appear in an anthology with her once in 2009, which blew my mind a little whenever I thought about it. I was always curious what she was doing, even if I couldn't afford to read it. I didn't expect to lose her this year.
Her language changed me.
Soon wonderful shops began to open in the buildings. She saw shelves of cakes like jewels and trays of jewels like flowers and sheaves of flowers like lances and, in an armorer's, lances like nothing but themselves.
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