Review by Win Wiacek
In 1985 pioneering cartoonist, feminist, author and comics historian Trina Robbins began adapting this deceptively powerful and effectively bittersweet romance from Tanith Lee’s short tale about an earnest young girl in a spoiled, indolent world. She discovers abiding love in the most unexpected of places.
In the far-flung, ferociously formal and crushingly civilised future everything is perfect – if you can afford it – but human nature has not evolved to match Mankind’s technological and sociological advancements. Jane has everything she could want at sixteen, but remains unhappy. Her mother Demeta provides all she needs except human warmth, whilst her six registered friends do their best to provide for her growing associative and societal needs. Of her carefully selected peer circle, Jane only actually likes flighty, melodramatic, needy and narcissistic Egyptia, whom Jane’s mother approves of, but considers certifiably insane.
In this world people can live in the clouds if they want, with robots performing most manual toil and providing all those tedious but necessary services, but it’s far from paradise. Humans still become suspicious and bored with their chatty labour-saving devices and monumental Electronic Metals, Ltd strive constantly to improve their ubiquitous inventions.
One day Jane accompanies Egyptia to an audition where the fully made-up thespian is accosted by a rude man who mistakes her for a new android and persistently seeks to buy her. Ruffled by the pushy lout’s manner, Jane’s attention is suddenly distracted by a beautiful metal minstrel busking in the plaza. The robot’s performance and his lovely song move and frighten Jane in way she cannot understand. When S.I.L.V.E.R. (Silver Ionized Locomotive Verisimulated Electronic Robot) affably introduces himself the flustered girl bolts run for the relative security of the nearby home of sardonic friend Clovis, where the beautiful man-tart is in the process of dumping yet another lover.
He proves unsurprisingly unsympathetic to Jane’s confusion and distress, telling her to go home where, still inexplicably upset, she tries to talk the experience out with mother. Impatient as always, the matron simply enquires if Jane is masturbating enough before telling her to record whatever’s bothering her for mummy to deal with later…
Lyrical and poetic, this is a grand old-fashioned tale of doomed love which still has a lot to say about transformation, growing up and walking your own path, with Robbins’ idyllic and idealised cartooning deceptively disguising the heartbreaking savagery and brutal cruelty of the story to superb effect, making the tragedy even more potent.
Regrettably out of print for years, the 21st century reissue isn’t easily located. A new commercial experience is long overdue, perhaps in conjunction with new interpretations of the author’s later sequels to the saga of love against the odds.
