Roman déroutant, où les personnages changent de corps et de sexe au sein de cités autonomes, profitent oiseusement d'une existence désintéressée et frivole, bien au chaud et à l'abri des intempéries et du désert du monde. Evidemment, l'un d'entre eux, le narrateur (parfois narratrice), fatigué des jouissances sans fin d'une vie sans but, ira perturber l'ordre régnant dans sa cité et provoquera son exil, à la découverte d'autre chose, quelque chose d'oublié et d'ancien, mais d'indispensable : l'espoir.

Sorte de version hippie de la Cité & les Astres de Clarke, un roman d'initiation à rebours plein de jolies trouvailles mais manquant de cohésion et de passion. ( )

I'm blogging about this right now! Tanith Lee is a beautiful writer addressing the hard problems of consciousness in the ancient way - through storytelling. ( )

This is the second and longer half of the story begun in Don't Bite the Sun. Calling it a sequel is as misleading as calling the 2nd and 3rd novels of the Lord of the Rings sequels. This tells the real story of the main character's quest for some form of inner fulfillment. To get there, she has to be banished from the domed city where she has wasted most of her life. While exiled to the desert, hers is no hardship tour. She's provided with robots and supplies to meet every need except human companionship. But that soon changes. Rather than being the object lesson for the citizenry that the ruling Quasi-Robots had intended, her story becomes an inspiration for the sex and drug-addled population. Where the main character was pretty much as scattered and unthinking as everyone else in Don't Bite the Sun, here she has grown in maturity, intelligence, and determination. She accumulates a community, much in the the loner Josey Wales accumulated one in the Client Eastwood film. The whining has gone. She has a real mission now and the book is the better for it. Recommended. ( )

I first read and Bite the Sun and this sequel in my teens. Tanith Lee writes so lyrically with such evocative prose of this loopy dystopic utopia in a far away post-apocalyptic future. And yes, the domed city of Four Bee is both. What do you do in a hedonistic world where everything can be and is done for you by android servants? You can even change bodies and genders. Eternal vacation--or eternal childhood. Drinking Sapphire Wine picks up the narrative where the first left off with Jang exiled from her pampered existence--but she doesn't remain alone for long. And I rather loved what it had to say about the price of staying in--or leaving--Eden. And on your own two feet. Recently a book combining both short novels was released as Biting the Sun. ( )

My copy is copyrighted 1977 by DAW publishing. I don't see why the only option here says 1980? Could I have a time-traveling book here?

Anyhoo, I picked this one up at a thrift store and realized that I had an autographed book. Lee's signature is, famously, "an ode to minimalism," so it's just one dramatic scrawled line through the author's name on the title page, plus the date: 1983. Nice for me, since I've collected almost all those yellow-spined paperbacks along with her later works.