Fantastika

Well, this is a bummer. Tanith Lee has passed away:

Lee was the author of over 90 books and 300 short stories, as well as four BBC Radio plays, and two highly-regarded episodes of the BBC’s SF series Blake’s 7 (Sand and Sarcophagus). She was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award at the World Fantasy Convention in Brighton in 2013 and the Horror Writers Lifetime Achievement Award this year, which joined her British Fantasy Award from 1980 for Death’s Master, and her World Fantasy Award for her short story “The Gorgon”.

Once upon a time Tanith Lee was an incredibly important author to me, back in my early teens. I’d been reading science fiction and fantasy for years at that point and was looking for something with more bite than the stuff I had been reading. That’s when I discovered Lee’s Flat Earth series of dark fantasy, which was literary and erotic in ways that were perfect for a young teenager like me. She has always had a queer subtext to her stories too, which again was great when learning to read more interesting, more complex, more challenging science fiction and fantasy. Michael Swanwick said it well:

There is more to these stories than the sexual impulse. But I mention its presence because its treatment is never titillating, smirking, or borderline pornographic, as is so much fiction that purports to be erotic. Rather, it is elegant, languorous, and feverish by turns, and always tinged with danger. Which is to say that it is remarkably like the writing itself.

For Locus she talked about her writing, back in 1998:

Writers tell stories better, because they’ve had more practice, but everyone has a book in them. Yes, that old cliché. If you gave the most interesting (to the person who’s living it) life to a great writer, they could turn it into something wonderful. But all lives are important, all people are important, because everyone is a book. Some people just have easier access to it. We need the expressive arts, the ancient scribes, the storytellers, the priests. And that’s where I put myself: as a storyteller. Not necessarily a high priestess, but certainly the storyteller. And I would love to be the storyteller of the tribe!

And for Nightmare Magazine about her writing process:

I write in a sort of (so occasional observers, mother and husband, tell me) trance. As the story comes, even if it ever sticks (this one certainly didn’t; most don’t luckily) I’m there more as transcriber than participant. Although sometimes I am the participant—male, female, old, young, nice or nasty—and then it’s like being an actor immersed in the role, and too, to some extent, I imagine, strangely protected. However, it’s only a reading through, post writing, that I think/say, “My God, how awful/wonderful/disgusting,” etc. Or merely, “Eeeek!”

Over the years and decades Lee has dropped out of sight for me, replaced by other, newer writers. In general, Lee’s career seems to have stalled in recent years:

Now though most of the so-called big publishers are unwilling even to look at a proposal. They aren’t interested in seeing anything from me, not even those houses I’ve worked with for many years. Where any slight interest in my turning in a book exists, I find I must work inside certain defined formulae. And to me that’s one of the arch inspiration-stranglers. I have at this time no new book, adult or Y.A, either out or due to come out, let alone any contract to produce a book for any of the main companies. And besides that only a couple of things are scheduled to appear from small, if reputable and elegant houses.

Which is sad, because Tanith Lee was and still is an important writer for the vision and style she brought to fantasy and science fiction, something not seen before her. I’m going to go back and reread the first novel in the Flat Earth series and see if it’s as good as I remember.