Tanith Lee has written more than 50 novels, some 250 shorter works, episodes for television series and radio plays, poems, and books for younger readers. Her work is science fiction and fantasy, but she distinctively blends many popular subgenres, including horror, dark fantasy, and sword-and-sorcery fiction. Her tone is equally diverse, from the barbaric sensuousness of her epic fantasy to the caustic spareness of some of the short stories and the sly humor of her revisionist treatment of fairy tales. Traces of myths, legends, and folktales underpin her narratives, which draw on such wide-ranging cultural topoi as European monsters (such as the vampire and werewolf) and Indian myth. Some of the fiction speculates on varied future worlds (of the highest technological sophistication or postholocaust degradation and decay). However, Lee is equally imaginative in her heroic fantasy, focusing on the degenerate remnants of great civilizations; she also reinterprets historical periods such...