GNU Tanith Lee

It seems there has been an awful lot of deaths this year. I personally have sent out, oh, six or eight sympathy cards in the past few months, when last year, it was one. A dear friend’s sister was killed in a car accident. Another friend’s papa died. The aunt and uncle of another friend died, both within a few days of each other.

Then we lost Terry Pratchett, one of my very favorite authors, in March.

And then, as if that loss wasn’t enough, another wonderful voice has left us: Tanith Lee, a prolific British writer for over 40 years, who died this past Sunday at the young age of 67. She was only nine months older than Sir Terry, who by the way, I’m sure would not mind having her name continue through the clacks with GNU (for explanation on what that means, visit gnuterrypratchett.) I don’t know if Terry and Tanith were friends, but I’m sure they knew each other, both being British. (Plus, my keen eye has discerned that there is a picture of her raising money for the Alzheimer’s Research Trust as part of the Match It For Pratchett campaign (2011) on her Wikipedia page.)

All of the females writing fantasy and sci-fi today owe a great deal to Tanith’s groundbreaking, genre-bending work. She was as comfortable writing YA as she was sci-fi, horror, alternate history, fantasy, gender-bending works, detectives, adventures… You name it, she wrote it. Truly, something for everyone’s tastes. In fact, over her lifetime, it’s reported that she wrote over 90 novels and 300 short stories, along with poetry, radio plays, and scripts.

And she won many awards as well: she was the first woman to win the British Fantasy Award, in 1980, with her novel Death’s Master. More recently, she was named a World Horror Grandmaster in 2009, was presented with the World Fantasy Award for life achievement in 2013, and won the Bram Stoker Award for life achievement in 2015.

Despite her many achievements, and her unique voice, and her great success in the past, she had sadly fallen out of favor with the publishing world. As she states in an undated interview for Realms of Fantasy:

In the beginning I seldom even had to offer a synopsis or proposal, either. As I hardly ever work from a synopsis – I find they act like chains, besides anyway not often knowing where exactly the book will go until I am writing it – the earlier state was a happier one. But I did my best when a synopsis of some sort began always to be required, only adding a note to the effect that some things might change during production! Now though most of the so-called big publishers are unwilling even to look at a proposal.

How sad is that? I can only imagine how much more rich and nuanced her works would be now, but unless she has completed manuscripts in her closet that a publisher would take on, we’ll never know. We’ve been deprived of her words.

And I wonder: is it, in some small way, my fault?

You see, it seems I’ve always known the name Tanith Lee – after all, it’s a fantastic name. In the 90s, I subscribed to lots of sci-fi magazines, and I’m certain I read stories of her in those pages, though I couldn’t swear to it. And a quick perusal of the excel spreadsheet where I keep track of my books read indicates that the first book I read by her was Winter Moon, which was actually a compilation with Mercedes Lackey and C.E. Murphy. (I have of course read quite a bit of Mercedes Lackey, and the book introduced me to C.E. Murphy, whose works I still read.)

Beyond that, I’ve only read Tanith’s Piratica trilogy for young adults, a rip-roaring adventure on the high seas, with clever language, fun plots, wacky characters (including Piratica herself), and amazing imagery. It took me forever to find a copy of the third book in the series, and now I know why: according to an article that I read a couple days ago but can’t seem to find right now, her American publishers didn’t want it. (The shame! The shame!) (My copy was indeed printed in Great Britain.) And she’d written a proposal for a Piractica IV, which her publisher ignored. Which is beyond sad, as there is more to the story.

I feel guilty I didn’t buy more of her books, support her more, because a voice like hers needs to be read. It sounds, from what I’ve read, she felt very alone, starting over at 60. The world had moved on without her, which is a crying shame. And I pledge, as I get more funds, I shall add more of her work to my library. And you should too. There’s plenty to chose from.

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