Electric Forest

Will review at www.fantasyliterature.com.

A book about whose quality I continually re-evaluated during its duration, until the end when I realized that it's a stone cold classic of the genre.

On the planet of Indigo people are genetically designed and born through IVF. But sometimes a woman conceives naturally, and the baby can be far from the perfection expected. Ugly, that's her nickname, real name Magdala, is such a person. Misshapen and unattractive she lives a secluded life, ignored by coworkers and desperately lonely. But one day a strange man appears in her life.

Claudio effectively kidnaps her and promises to make her beautiful. He puts her through a process of consciousness swapping whereby her whole sense of self is transferred to a perfectly formed android. Her original body is kept in a stasis chamber and has to be maintained. Magdala is now beautiful but totally in the power of Claudio. And he turns out to be a psychopath.

Tanith Lee writes him with surgical precision as he keeps Magdala under micromanaged abusive control. Magdala soon realises that he is following some plan of his own, a plan of hatred and revenge upon the woman her new body is designed to mimic.

The plot expands to include that woman, named Christophine, sometimes Christa, and we come to an awkward linking of names echoing Christ and Mary Magdalene, and of the unlovely being granted a new life. It might be a metaphor Lee is working towards but the novel is better served by being about the abusive relationship under Claudio than some sort of reach towards redemption.

The central part of the book brings us to the scientific conflict between those seeking to make consciousness transfer a reality and the three central characters reach an inevitable crisis.

But then Lee shifts into reverse gear and resets the whole thing. The final ten pages is either a monumental plot twist (if so if fails in my mind) or a low effort in ending the story because it was all headed to catastrophe. I was looking forward to catastrophe.

The character Claudio is so finely written that I was captivated by Lee's skill. His treatment of Magda is constantly and relentlessly undermining, such that although he's elevated her physical beauty he's also intent on keeping her locked into her original body image. The weird ending was almost like an apology for writing Claudio in such surgical detail.