You ever read a book in one sitting? I did that with the 1979 sci fi novella Electric Forest by Tanith Lee last night when going to bed. Ended up getting to sleep a bit later than intended because of it.

Anyway, here’s a review.

In a far future world where humanity exists on hundreds of planets, most people are genetically engineered to be beautiful, and not just the wealthy, but everyone. However, some rare accidents happen.
Magdala was born crippled and ugly in a beautiful world. Given up by her prostitute mother to a state-run orphanage, she was mercilessly bullied by other kids. Now in her 20s, she works a menial job, lives in a tiny apartment, and has no friends or partner. She has considered plastic surgery, but it’s too expensive, and for her full-body condition it wouldn’t be enough to fix the issues anyway. Thus, she lives in a perpetual state of loneliness and melancholy.

Then one day, a scientist shows up and says he can make her beautiful. And as a reader will expect, it certainly does come with a catch. What follows is a generally social-intrigue type of plot, where beautiful-Magdala has to do various things for her benefactor.

Overall, I’m glad I read it, but cannot really say I liked it. I’ve been meaning to read more of this era of sci fi.

The prose was quite good. The opening premise was interesting. I genuinely couldn’t really predict where the plot would go. A few individual scenes were great.

But I did not particularly like the characters, nor did I view them as making understandable choices. Of course, plenty of characters in fiction make bad choices, but when well-characterized, those bad choices are understandable, like we see the cause and effect, we know the character enough to be like, “yep, they’d do that.” I mostly didn’t feel that here.

I did not like the details/choreography of the one action scene (I mean, if you have exactly one, then do it really well), nor did I like the epilogue.