Lovers’ Lies review on Sabotage

Lovers’ Lies, as a collection of love stories, doesn’t neglect the realm of high romance either. Co-editor Cherry Potts provides a story with overtones of Tennyson and epic loves played out across a lifetime in the surprisingly small and closed world of neighbouring farming estates. ‘Mirror’ takes place with the First World War in the distance, but able to act only as a sideshow to the real conflicts and dramas playing out in rural England and in the hearts of two men.

 

1993 Reviews of Mosaic of Air (no links these were all print!)

Cherry Potts writes with economy, punch, panache.  her voice is lucid and assured as she travels through freshly imagined corners of Amazonia, whether the subject to hand is highly charged lesbian space-opera or a very new slant on old Helen of Troy

Ellen Galford

Definitely about women in space, not the usual glossy tomboys of standard sf.

Gwyneth Jones

Delightful … both a hilarious spoof of one-man-and-his computer myths such as 2001, a Space Odyssey; and a reflection on the limits of love and power.

Zoë Fairbairns, Everywoman March 1993

The Stories vary widely in style, from fairy tales to Greek myths, from wild romance to 20th Century realism, but all contain surprises,and challenge our assumptions about who is, or was a lesbian. Those elderly ladies wheeling stiffly across the floor at a tea dance? Helen of Troy? That stuffy quiet, middle-aged school teacher? Your Mother? Across age and race and history we are challenged.Why do I assume, though I am a lesbian, that all my relatives are not?…This collection trips and twists and jars us into seeing afresh…We are legion and have always been so. After I’d read this book I wandered round Leeds and saw lesbians everywhere.

‘The Lone Dyke’ Northern Star 14/1/1993

An entertaining tale of intrigue in space … the characters develop their own eccentric momentum and I was sorry to say goodbye to them when I reached the end.

Lucy Whitman, Lesbian London

2013 reviews

‘Mosaic of Air’ is an interesting parable featuring a proto-post-feminist lead, a computer programmer whose programme becomes sentient which surprisingly encases an abortion debate.

If you read nothing else in this book you must read ‘Arachne’s Daughters’; this takes apart a myth about Arachne (a human) challenging Athene (the goddess): ‘”Now, can you believe anyone would be so stupid?” ‘.  It’s set as a speech given at a women-only meeting with a clever twist on why so many women shouldn’t fear spiders despite the extra legs and pincers ‘ “Forgot something though didn’t they?…[Men]… How many Cancers and Scorpios are in the audience?”

Read the full review from Andie Berryman on Sabotage

Published twenty years before, these are sixteen short stories including one called Mosaic of Air that can be about several genres; myth, history, science fiction and fantasy. Through Cherry Potts’s prose you can read about almost every theme of lesbian life in the 1980’s. There are some on Helen of Troy, Libraries, Strange computers, and murder with plenty of mayhem.

Read the full British Fantasy Society Review by Sandra Scholes