Twenty-three years after the publication of The Silver Metal Lover, Lee released a sequel. When I first saw it I hoped it would continue the story of Jane and Silver, though I strongly suspected a sequel would lessen the impact of the original.
It’s twelve years later. Unlike Jane, Loren is street smart and canny. Abandoned as an infant by her unknown mother, Loren grew up in a cult, working the streets proselytising and surviving on crusts of bed. Her life was grim until she discovered, hidden below the floorboards, a copy of Jane’s Story. Like so many others, Loren fell in love with Silver. Inspired by Jane, Loren runs away from the only home she’s known, and joins up with a gang of kids who clean houses to survive. She thrives, and winds up being the leader of a group of Dust Babes. One day, while supervising a cleaning detail, Jane sees a newscast – a company (META - Metals Extraordinary Trial Authority) is releasing a group of humanoid robots. Like the EM models, the robots are metallic (gold, silver, copper and – a new line – asteroid-black), and released in clusters (male/female pairs, rather than the original trios).
The newscast shows a beautiful young man dressed, Renaissance-style, in a white shirt with lacy cuffs, a dark red vest, dark jeans and red boots. His deep red hair tumbles over his shoulders, and his skin is silver.
This time around the robots have capacities undreamed of previously – they can change shape, and communicate with any other robotic device. They also have a freer will than their predecessors, and as Loren becomes more deeply involved with Versil – who looks like Silver, and has his memories, but is not Silver – she falls deeper and deeper into a conspiracy that will change not just Loren’s life but her entire picture of who and what she is.
The book opens with Loren telling us “You’re not going to like me. I apologise for that. It was Jane; she was the one you liked.” It’s true that I didn’t like Loren as much as Jane, or Versil nearly as much as Silver, but more than that I didn’t find the sequel nearly as compelling as the original. Jane’s character was nuanced, and we learned things about her and the other characters that Jane wasn’t aware of – like the manipulativeness of her mother. More than that, The Silver Metal Lover was deeper, more complex in character development and world-building, and had the elements of a great and enduring love story. In Metallic Love the relationship is less developed, less present, and the focus of the story is what happens when people create creatures that are autonomous, self-aware, and smarter than us, then try to use them as tools and entertainment, and about the effect of that on the creators. As a piece of FSF it’s not bad, and perhaps the problem is that I approached it as though it would be like The Silver Metal Lover. But if Lee wanted to explore those themes she could have, even in a universe similar to that of the original, without writing it so closely to its predecessor. I’m glad I read it, but, unlike TSML, I don’t think I’ll be reading it again. - Alex
