Tanith Lee: "You Are My Sunshine," "The Unrequited Glove," and "Mirage and Magia"

There are a lot of Tanith Lee collections out there.  Let's read a few stories from 1989's Women as Demons, published by The Women's Press as part of their science fiction series, which is meant "to present exciting and provocative feminist images of the future" that "offer an alternative vision of science and technology" and "challenge male domination of science fiction itself."  On the title page the collection has a long subtitle, as might an academic treatise: "The Male Perception of Women Through Space and Time."  Of the book's sixteen stories, I've already read, I believe, four: 1978's "The Demoness," 1979's "The Thaw," 1981's "Gemini," and 1982's "Written in Water."  Let's read three more tales from the book, those  with titles that are striking me: "You Are My Sunshine," "The Unrequited Glove," and "Mirage and Magia."

"You Are My Sunshine" (1980)

"You Are My Sunshine" debuted in Roy Torgeson's Chrysalis 8 alongside Barry Malzberg and R. A. Lafferty stories I don't think I have read.  Two years after being reprinted in Women as Demons, "You Are My Sunshine" would reappear in the Lee collection Space is Just a Starry Night.

"You Are My Sunshine" begins and ends with excerpts from a transcript of an interrogation by some officials of the only survivor of a space ship disaster.  The middle, the lion's share of the story, is the story of the disaster, told in the third person but only depicting events the sole survivor, a good-looking thirty-something guy named Leon Canna, experienced.

It is the future of interstellar civilization, in which solar-powered starliners carry thousands of passengers at a time between star systems.  These huge ships closely orbit stars for a few days before an interstellar jaunt to charge their batteries.  The vessels' shields filter out all dangerous radiation, so only beneficial radiation reaches the crews and passengers of the ships--this beneficial radiation provides tremendous health benefits, and people who can afford it flock to the "Solarine" ships to bask in this health-giving radiation while they are charging up.  

Canna is a "Passenger Link," a sort of morale officer, geisha man and liaison between the technical crew who operate the ship and the civilian passengers; he makes sure everybody on the cruise is having a good time and if anything goes wrong makes sure the passengers don't panic or get too angry.  It seems that he regularly has sex with female passengers as one means of keeping their spirits up.

Canna notices a shy and plain girl passenger, Apollonia Hartley, boarding the ship right before one of these popular charging-up periods.  He encourages her to come out of her shell, go tan in the solarium, and he flirts with her.  Lee portrays his dealings with the girl as somewhat predatory, but also suggests Canna himself is being manipulated--Canna is not sure why he is attracted to this girl who is not very good-looking or interesting.

Over the course of just a couple of days the plain girl seems to blossom, becoming the hottest girl Canna has ever seen and pursuing Canna sexually--now Canna is scared of Apollonia, and he tries to avoid her but she finally succeeds in coupling with him in his cabin.  Parallel to this erotic drama, a technical drama is proceeding.  The levels of radiation on the ship are rising, and the computers and technicians can't find anything wrong with the ship's shields or its other systems--where is the radiation coming from?  Of course we readers know it must be coming from the mysterious Apollonia.  After she has sex with Canna, she goes out to the solarium--the solarium has been declared off limits because it gets more solar radiation than anywhere and the crew assumes if the dangerous rise in radiation is coming from the star they are orbiting so closely then the solarium is the most dangerous place to be, but the Ms. Hartley stole the key from Canna right before losing her virginity to him.  The tech boys detect that the radiation in Canna's cabin is higher than anywhere else on the ship and tell him to get in his space armor tout suite.  Right after he dons his vacuum suit the no-longer-plain girl explodes, destroying the ship and killing everybody aboard except the fully armored Canna.

Lee, as I have told you a hundred times, is a great writer who is very skilled at putting sentences and paragraphs together and creating moods and painting characters, and so "You Are My Sunshine" is an entertaining and exciting story and of course I am giving it a thumbs up.  As for the plot, it works fine if we accept it as a horror fantasy set in a future starfaring civilization and not a serious science fiction story that is trying to teach you science or make an educated guess about what the future will be like; one might complain that Lee never makes clear what is going on with this exploding young woman--is she an alien or something?--but fantasy writers don't need to explain trolls and ogres and dragons and demons, they are just there, perhaps as symbols.

So, this is a good story I recommend.  But, considering where I am reading it, maybe we should assess if "You Are My Sunshine" really is a feminist story that is all about male perceptions of the female and offers an alternative female or feminine vision.

For one thing, early in the story there is a throwaway line that suggests that in the future people will realize women are smarter than men and stop stifling women's superior brains and superior ambition:

...the Solarines had a low percentage of female crew—since women had realised their intellectual potency, they tended to go after the big-scale jobs which pleasure-cruisers didn’t offer.

This female superiority doesn't manifest itself any other way in the story, unless we think that the passenger who seduces Canna and then kills everybody (and herself?) is demonstrating some kind of superior ambition and cleverness by doing so.

The board of inquiry that hears Canna's story accuses him of making up or hallucinating the story of a plain girl blossoming sexually under his influence and then exploding, saying he has "managed to turn a naval tragedy into an exercise in masculine ego."  This sounds like feminist talk, but Lee undercuts this assessment by offering unmistakable clues that indicate Canna really is telling the truth to the investigators.  I'm not even sure "You Are My Sunshine" really works on the simple level of feminist revenge fantasy in which a woman turns the tables on a male aggressor--sure, Canna has contempt for the young woman and manipulates her, and then she turns the tables on him and he suffers, but he lives through the disaster, suffering far less than all the people on the ship who never did anything to hurt her, hundreds of whom must be women passengers.  

In the context of the story, the girl in "You Are My Sunshine" really was something of a demon, a creature who used her sexual wiles to get something she wanted out of a man and then callously or cruelly killed thousands of people--Lee's story doesn't seem to be questioning men's perceptions of women as trouble so much as instantiating it.  The final image of the story is the burns on Canna's back in the shape of Apollonia's arms and hands that Lee compares to those left by branding irons--sex with Apollonia physically injured, perhaps permanently scarred, Canna, which feels like Lee's symbolic representation of men's fears of disease and of permanent attachment should they have sex with a woman.  Well, maybe if we go full "meta" we can say by writing a story in which a woman's blossoming, triggered by a man flirting with her, kills thousands of innocent people and permanently damages the man, Lee is offering a vision of what men think, providing a peek into the male mind.

"The Unrequited Glove" (1988)

In 1988 four issues of the widely beloved Weird Tales appeared, including special issues devoted to Avram Davidson, Gene Wolfe, and Lee.  "The Unrequited Glove" debuted in the Lee issue, which is full of illustrations by Stephen Fabian, so his fans as well as Lee's should seek the issue out.  Besides Women as Demons, you can find "The Unrequited Glove" in the 2017 collection The Weird Tales of Tanith Lee.

"The Unrequited Glove" is a lot like "You Are My Sunshine," and many of my comments about that story apply to this one.  A good-looking, confident guy trifles with a virginal and shy young woman in an exotic locale frequented by the wealthy, and when he loses interest in her she achieves a terrible revenge on him.  While written in the third person, it is mostly written from the perspective of the male lead, with the female avenger "on screen" relatively rarely.  The man had some level of contempt for the woman, but didn't intentionally set out to harm her, so is her use of her supernatural powers to commit murder justified, or is she the villain?  

Jason Drinkwood is a wealthy Englishman who spends long periods of time in some kind of coastal tropical "colony" in the New World where lots of rich or artistic Europeans and Americans hang around.  These jokers all have servants and sit around drinking and attending parties and having affairs with each other and so forth.  Jason has a brief affair with a female painter who owns a gallery where she sells her work, Alys Ashlin.  Jason doesn't take women too seriously, going through them at a rapid pace, and he soon tires of the painter and tries to break off their relationship.  But she has fallen in love with him.  She comes to his place, to tell him she loves him, and then departs, leaving behind a glove.  The glove is animate, and terrorizes Jason for weeks, throwing things at him, cutting holes in his expensive clothes, etc.  It toys with him, I guess the way Alys thinks he toyed with her.  The glove follows him everywhere, and is too magical for him to actually destroy, even though he does catch it once.  Jason begins to lose his sanity.

Finally, by taking a "steamer" back to London and bringing no luggage so the glove has nowhere to hide, Jason escapes the glove.  But Alys figures out a way to get the glove across the pond (a friend of Jason's has a crate of oranges from the colony shipped over to Blighty and the glove hides in the crate--some friend!) and this time the glove is not playing--it murders Jason.

This is a superior horror story that perhaps we should see as the wish fulfillment fantasy of shy sensitive girls who think of themselves as smart and who resent the good-looking but not-quite-as-smart guys whom they desire but who reject them.  Is the idea that, if you fall in love with a guy but he doesn't fall in love with you, he deserves capital punishment, a feminist idea, making this a feminist story?  Or is "The Unrequited Glove" just a reworking of the traditional theme that women are trouble and every time you get involved with a woman you are taking a terrible risk because women are irrational and calculating and play by different rules than do men, or respect no rules at all?

"Mirage and Magia"  (1982)

"Mirage and Magia" debuted in the DAW witch story anthology Hecate's Cauldron, which was reprinted in Germany as Hexengeschichten. The story has been reprinted in multiple anthologies and Lee collections in our own 21st century so all you admirers of the female form have a wide array of hubba hubba sex-sells covers to choose from.

"Mirage and Magia" immediately reminded me of Clark Ashton Smith.  The story takes place in some exotic fantasy world in which there are "balloon-ships" and "carriages" that walk on giant insect legs, in a remote city of rococo towers and fantastical mansions terrorized by a witch.  This witch, Taisia-Tua, only appears in public in a mask and wig, never wearing the same mask and wig twice, so nobody knows what she looks like.  She seems obsessed with her own image, carrying a little mirror around with her in which she often gazes upon herself.  TT has the ability to summon men to her; against their will, men she accosts on the street with the phrase "Follow me" walk to her mansion, through its 30-foot-high gates.  When they come back out through those gates their souls are absent, apparently awarded to some demon or evil god--the men are vegetables, unable to clean or feed themselves, and those who look into the empty eyes of one of Taisia-Tua's victims see not their own reflections, but the back of the victim himself!

Over the years, many men lose their souls this way.  Attacks, physical and magical, on the witch and her mansion come to nothing.  Taisia-Tua arrogantly flies a kite over the city trailing a banner that boasts that she is the greatest of all magicians.  The city's greatest thief, in return for a hefty fee, sneaks into the mansion and investigates, finding the place's interior a labyrinth of mirrors of dizzying variety.  The thief witnesses one of the witch's victims losing his soul, apparently merely from looking at his own many-multiplied reflection in all the mundane and magical mirrors.        

Years later another magician arrives in the city, a sorcerer skilled in the making of music and the performance of acrobatic feats.  He advances to Taisa-Tua's mansion and proves immune to her mirrors.  We learn the witch's story.  A man broke her heart and she came to the city of mansions to work her revenge on the world, using men's own vanity to stupefy them.  But this new man falls in love with Taisa-Tua after convincing her to reveal her true face and hair to him, and wins her love.  This love connection causes the mirrors to shatter and the witch's apparently soulless victims to recover their senses.  The lovers leave the city, and in the abandoned mansion the city dwellers, now liberated from her campaign of terror, find a note which bears witness to Taisa-Tua's recognition that love is the greatest magician of all.

An unexpected happy ending, but not necessarily a feminist happy ending!  A woman lashes out at the world because one man broke her heart, and then another man comes along and his love cures her and ends her reign of terror--"Mirage and Magia" suggests that even the most able of women's whole outlook on life and her behavior are determined by the response of men to her!

A quite successful fantasy tale; Lee piles on the extravagant descriptions but "Mirage and Magia" does not feel overwritten--all the descriptions paint a vivid picture in the mind or convey to the reader a powerful mood--every sentence is entertaining.  

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These are three good stories, and the Women's Press has done the world a service making them available to more people by printing Women as Demons.  I'm skeptical that these fantasy stories of women abusing people with their magical powers further the mission of the Women's Press of exposing people to "provocative feminist images of the future" and "alternative vision[s] of science and technology," but I suppose the most powerful and least controversial feminist act is giving a woman an opportunity to demonstrate her abilities, and Lee is a writer of high ability and these stories certainly prove that.  These stories specifically and Women as Demons as a whole are highly recommended to fantasy and horror fans and to those who enjoy speculative fiction that emphasizes traditional literary values over teaching you science or beating you over the head with some kind of obvious political or social commentary.