Sabella, or The Blood Stone ( 1980) and its sequel, Kill the Dead ( 1980) – both assembled as Sometimes, After Sunset (omni 1980) – associate vampirism with Mars. Day by Night ( 1980) is set on non-rotating mirror-worlds unconscious of each other's existence. Electric Forest ( 1979) depicts the rite of passage of an ugly child on a planet where her appearance is shocking. Don't Bite the Sun ( 1976) and Drinking Sapphire Wine ( 1977), both assembled as Drinking Sapphire Wine (omni 1979), form a genuine sf sequence set in a Far-Future world somewhat resembling that in Michael Moorcock's Dancers at the End of Time series, treated in this case as a Dystopia whose citizens, superficially free to shape-change and cavort, are in fact prisoners of the protectiveness of their artificial environment.
At trilogy's end, blessed with Immortality, and forgiving of one another, they commit incest. The second and third volumes deal primarily with her son, who must deal with his own powers and learn that his mother is not evil.
The Birthgrave sequence, comprising The Birthgrave ( 1975), Vazkor, Son of Vazkor ( 1978 vt Shadowfire 1978) and Quest for the White Witch ( 1978), is sf by virtue of the ending of the first volume, in which Earthmen arrive in a Spaceship to tell the albino heroine the true, non-supernatural explanation for the compulsions she feels and the voices she hears inside her head – having awoken with Amnesia in the heart of a volcano and wreaked considerable damage upon the world with her untutored powers, she is by this time sorely in need of some reassurance.
Lee, however, never assembled her various singletons and series into one shared universe. Both these areas of concentration – children's stories and pure fantasy – lie outside the central focus of this encyclopedia, but it can be said that she was an inventive and fertile writer, that she encompassed her primary theme – the ethical and sexual initiation of an adolescent character into a volatile world s/he herself will shape, often through renunciation – in a wide variety of modes, and that, although her work differs vastly in tone and subject matter from that of C J Cherryh, both writers share a daunting comprehensiveness. Her first books were fantasies for children, beginning with The Dragon Hoard ( 1971) and then, beginning with The Birthgrave ( 1975), she focused primarily on Science Fantasy and pure fantasy for adults, often set in Planetary Romance venues where sf understories are varyingly emphasized, and sometimes ignored completely. (1947-2015) UK author whose married name since 1992 was Tanith Lee Kaiine, though she continued to write under her own name she began to publish work of genre interest with "Eustace" in The Ninth Pan Book of Horror Stories (anth 1968) edited by Herbert van Thal.
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