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Type of bind: Mass Market Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 823.914
EAN num: 9780553581270
ISBN number: 0553581279
Label: Spectra
Manufacturer: Spectra
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 304
Printing Date: May 04, 1999
Publishing house: Spectra
Release Date: May 04, 1999
Sale Popularity Level: 294702
Studio: Spectra
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Editor's Notes and Comments:
Product Description:
Love is made of more than mere flesh and blood....
Tanith Lee is one of the most thought-provoking and imaginative authors of our time. In this unforgettably poignant novel, Lee has created a classic tale--a beautiful, tragic, erotic, and ultimately triumphant love story of the future.
For sixteen-year-old Jane, life is a mystery she despairs of ever mastering. She and her friends are the idle, pampered children of the privileged class, living in luxury on an Earth remade by natural disaster. Until Jane's life is changed forever by a chance encounter with a robot minstrel with auburn hair and silver skin, whose songs ignite in her a desperate and inexplicable passion.
Jane is certain that Silver is more than just a machine built to please. And she will give up everything to prove it. So she escapes into the city's violent, decaying slums to embrace a love bordering on madness. Or is it something more? Has Jane glimpsed in Silver something no one else has dared to see--not even the robot or his creators? A love so perfect it must be destroyed, for no human could ever compete?
Amazon.com Review:
The Silver Metal Lover is a classic tale of transforming love. It's a keeper, a book that gets reread 'til it falls apart. Fans petitioned to get it reprinted, and after 10 years of waiting, here it is. Oddly, the book is seldom mentioned when Tanith Lee's work is discussed, perhaps because Lee's usual milieu is horror, and The Silver Metal Lover is a poignant romance requiring at least two hankies before the end.
Robots have replaced human labor on earth, causing massive unemployment in a world devastated by pollution and natural disasters. Then Electronic Metals releases a new line: performing artists and sexual companions designed to entertain human partners. Jane, a rich, lonely, and insecure 16-year-old, meets one, the minstrel Silver, and falls passionately in love, despite revulsion at the idea of preferring a mechanical man to a human. She gives up everything she has known for him, and discovers herself. Silver becomes more and more 'human' in loving her--a clever illusion created by his programming. Or is it? This unstable society can't afford any evidence that some robots might be indistinguishable from humans. Tragedy is inevitable. Read it and weep--and don't forget to put it on the keeper shelf. --Nona Vero
User popularity level:
Rated by buyers 
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Since the time that I picked it up by accident in 2002 and then proceded to devour it in one sitting, this has remained my favourite book, surpassing even those tried and true favourites of childhood nostalgia and the more mature classics on which I had rightfully bestowed my favour.
The writing is clean, neat and vivid. Tanith Lee brilliantly depicts tragedy and comedy alike, using the precision of words without being overly sentimental. Much is to be taken from what she does not say.
As for the story, many would roll their eyes or scoff, taking the title at its face value and treating it like any other romance. Yet within the binding, there is a world of paradox, a place where humans are flat and robotic and robots are complex and full of life.
Silver Metal Lover is truly a work of art: delicate, sophisticated and thought-provoking. This book will make you laugh and make you cry, and inevitably make you come back for more.
Rated by buyers 
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has a bit of everything i feel a book should have. i discovered this book about 3 yrs ago. this is i feel a great book all around. i have only one prob with the scene in which her very first time having sex occurs. i felt was so far from truth it was a fantasy all in itself.
Rated by buyers -
I will remember this book. It was fresh and light (no detailed sex scenes).It made you think about your own life and where you stand on what you believe and have been taught to believe. Silver Metal Lover also helps you to brake down friendship and (maybe) question it. The context was unexpected and sweet.
Rated by buyers 
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Jane loves robot.
Robot has no heart.
I sense this plot is doomed,
Right from the very start.
And it's not just that Silver has no heart that bothered me. It's that the protagonist simply does not make up her mind as to how she sees him. He's a real person, he's a robot. I understand the dilemma facing Jane socially - falling in love with a machine is still taboo, even in the future - but I felt annoyed that she wouldn't make up her mind, even after she realizes her feelings for him/it.
What I enjoyed about the book were the secondary elements. The description of the future is very interesting, and Jane's posse of friends and enemies is brilliant. Ms. Lee creates some really good villains, as well as a great portrait of a society too isolated from itself to care that a girl falls in love with...a robot. Then, all at once, people care, but for all the wrong reasons (involving a complicated bit about it being okay to want to have sex with a pleasurable robot, but no more). Jane does go through a fun little transformation, of course, where she becomes less of an automaton herself. Ah, a robot teaching a human to be less robotic...
Honestly, I can't empathize with this story because he is a robot. There, I said it - I didn't want to go against the grain, but oh well. It's a stopping point for me. I kept trying, all through the book, to see it as melodrama, to see it as "Romeo and Juliet" or some sort of forbidden love. But in the end, I just felt it was all uneasy. Perhaps it is because unlike Jane, I could not see the heart in Silver. I believed him more than Jane when he told her that as a Robot, he would not feel the same things she felt. She refusing to admit it, then admitting it, then not,only made me think she couldn't get herself right with the idea either.
The conclusion is obvious - Lee wants us to believe that Jane had loved and grown because of her love. But no matter how many times Jane says she loved Silver, I only feel pity for Jane for falling in love with a machine. Lee doesn't convince me.
Rated by buyers -
Nothing intellectual here. Just a good heartbreaking story that takes you back to your youth.
The characters are well developed and storyline is engaging.
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