Released in 1970, "Tower of Glass" was Robert Silverberg's 42nd sci-fi novel...his 18th since 1967 alone! The amazingly prolific author had embarked on a more mature phase of his writing career in '67, with an emphasis on ideas and a distinct literary quality, and "Tower of Glass" is yet another ...
A varied collection of short stories involving time travel. Individual stories vary in length from a few pages to several dozen. Tones of the stories range from comedic to light to serious to disturbing.I am not typically a fan of time travel stories. I find usually that the author has a very ant...
Up until last week, I hadn't read Robert Silverberg's brilliant sci-fi novel "Downward to the Earth" in almost 27 years, but one scene remained as fresh in my memory as on my initial perusal: the one in which the book's protagonist, Edmund Gundersen, comes across a man and a woman lying on the fl...
After four years of successive losses, sci-fi great Robert Silverberg finally picked up his first Nebula Award in 1972. His 1967 novel "Thorns" had lost to Samuel R. Delany's "The Einstein Intersection," his brilliant '68 novel "The Masks of Time" had been bested by Alexei Panshin's equally brill...
Although author Robert Silverberg had come out with no fewer than 21 major science-fiction novels between the years 1967 and '71, by 1972, his formerly unstoppable output was beginning to slow down. He released only two novels in '72, "The Book of Skulls," in which four young men seek the secret ...
Elevator pitch time: Robert Silverberg's "Sci Fi Masterwork" The Book of Skulls is In the Company of Men meets The Holy Mountain* but in, you know, prose. Only I'm pretty sure I'm expected to forgive all of the scorchingly misogynist** elements of the former because it's a product of its time. On...
Valentine finds himself outside the city of Pidruid one afternoon, completely bereft of memory, as the city makes ready for the arrival of Lord Valentine - one of the four great Powers of the mega-world of Majipoor. what's a man to do in such a situation? why, join a traveling band of jugglers, o...
ORIGINALLY POSTED AT Fantasy Literature.In the year 2381, the Earth contains 75 billion people. Despite the dire warnings of 20th century prophets, humans have not exhausted the Earth’s resources. There is plenty of food for everyone, but because 90% of the land must be covered in farms, most of ...
In one of Robert Silverberg's novels from 1967, "Thorns," the future sci-fi Grand Master presented his readers with one of his most unfortunate characters, Minner Burris. An intrepid space explorer, Burris had been captured by the residents of the planet Manipool, surgically altered and then rele...
Nightwings is another great Robert Silverberg science fiction novel. This edition contains an introduction written by Silverberg in 2002, which provides a very interesting discussion of how he came to write the three novellas that make up Nightwings and what his life was like when he was writing ...
Robert Silverberg’s 1985 collection of six award winning novellas ranks high on a list of excellent publications for this Grandmaster of the genre. His mastery of this short medium is akin to Ursula K. LeGuin.Silverberg’s magnificent title novella, “Sailing to Byzantium” reminded me of his 1966 n...
Una gran obra de Silverberg, a pesar de muchas opiniones en contra. El elemento de ciencia ficción está muy diluído, pero es que se trata de una historia alternativa en la cual el cristianismo "no se produce", y entonces, tenemos a un Imperio romano que supervive hasta el presente... con altas y ...
As the Majipoor Cycle continues, Prestimion, the new Coronal Lord of Majipoor, has finally earned the Starburst Crown, after a bloody civil war no one remembers. In his hour of triumph, Pestimion will face a threat to his kingdom far more insidious than war--a twisted madness that cannot be contr...
At first, I thought I would hate this book thanks to the insect-people (was not a fan of Kafka's The Metamorphosis), but I ended up getting really into it. I think one of the reasons I like sci-fi/fantasy so much is that it's a genre that can deal with big issues like racism, discrimination, reli...
Yakoub was once the legendary King of the Rom, the Gypsy race that has evolved from the days of caravans into lords of the spaceways - the only pilots capable of steering ships safely between the many worlds of the Galaxy. Weary and proud, Yakoub has relinquished his power and lives in exile on a...
"What a cruel and dark place the world is, for all its beauty, all its wonder! We have miracles around us on every side-a spider web is a miracle! But we also have violence, insanity, terrible disease, sudden death. The same Nature that brings us the mountains and the rivers and the green glisten...
For more than a thousand years, Homeworld has been unchanged: the Great Houses rule and peace between them is enforced by unbreakable webs of kinship. The Folk accept what the system offers them - stability, prosperity and peace - and the Indigenes are placid. Then, on one night of rebellion ev...
Parts of me wanted to give this book five stars, other parts, one star, so to compromise, three seems a good bet. This is a ludicrous book, truly, it is a bizarre and incredibly dated read which includes the best and worst of timetravel stories, often on each page. The structure of the story is m...
I was unshure whether to give it two or three stars. Maybe it deserves three and I reacted negatively because I read "Ship-Sister, Star-Sister" - the short story that was to become Starborne, and was spoiled about the ending. But then again... the book offers very little that is not found in the ...
A gathering of the SF Grandmaster's early pulp stories, collected for the first time!
A brother's "message cubes" to his twin sister relate the unusual adventures of the archaeological expedition he accompanies into space in the twenty-fourth century.
Stasis Technologies Ltd has perfected a way to reach back into time and bring forth objects for scientific study. Their most recent triumph was a baby dinosaur and now they’ve taken a Neanderthal child from the Ice-age to the 21st century. The nurse assigned to care for the child must somehow br...
Robert Silverberg returned to his magnificent creation Majipoor in his 1982 collection of loosely connected short stories Majipoor Chronicles.Using as a connecting instrument archived research done by Hisune, a minor character in Silverberg’s 1980 introduction to Majipoor Lord Valentine's Castle,...
After Lord Valentine's Castle, epic science fantasy novel, Silverberg wrote a follow-up called the Majipoor Chronicles. Why not pursuing the serie even longer? Valentine Pontifex describes the reign of Valentine once he recovers his Coronal title.To some extent this novel focuses on the right the...
Sorcerers of Majipoor takes place one thousand years before the start of Lord Valentine's Castle. The traditional passage from Coronal to Pontifax and the choosing of a new Coronal will be challenged when the blood heir of the soon to be Pontifax desires the throne. Though there is no written law...
עם עובד, מד"ב, 1997, 174 עמ´(ספר רביעי בסדרה). אני חייבת להקדים ולאמר כי לא כולם מוצאים את הכתיבה של סילברברג מעניינת, מרתקת או מושכת לקרוא. בד"כ עד שהספר נכנס לקצב לוקח זמן, בו על הקורא ללמוד פרטים על העבר, על ההווה , על תנאי החיים, הסביבה האקולוגית על הדמויות הראשיות והמשניות וכד´ ובזמן זה להתא...
Contains the rest of Tenn's short fiction (not included in Volume 1), the novel Of Men and Monsters, the essay The Fiction in Science Fiction, and several other long pieces. Introduction by Robert Silverberg. Afterword by George Zebrowski. Dustjacket art by Rolf Mohr.
In a nutshell: Sturgeon is still on the verge of becoming a moving force. And his knowledge of, of, of everything still astounds me. (Everything but deeply appealing characters. Of his cast, only the children really appeal to me. Just you wait, though; they're growing up. ;)My impressions as I re...
It Was The Worst of Times... Fifteen feet tall, the Entities land in cities across Earth. Ignoring humankind, they wall themselves in impenetrable enclaves, enslaving a few willing collaborators with their telepathic PUSH. Then they plunge humans into a new Dark Age without electricity, allowing ...
Although his previous output had for several decades been nothing short of prodigious, by the mid-'70s, sci-fi great Robert Silverberg was finally beginning to slow down. The author had released no fewer than 23 sci-fi novels during his initial, "pulpy" phase (1954 - '65), and a full 23 more from...
Sequel to Silverberg's "Gilgamesh the King". I don't own a copy of the first book, and hadn't read either for over a decade, so my memory of the first is pretty hazy at this point. However, the all seeing eye of Google confirms my impression that this one is different in tone to the first. It's s...
The byline on this novel lists both Asimov and Silverberg. I'd be very, very interested to know who did what. I've read a lot of Silverberg's stuff, and this doesn't read like his style, nor is the plot anything like one of his. And by "not his style," I mean clunky, anachronistic, and at times f...
This longtime sci-fi buff has a confession to make: Some time travel stories leave me with a throbbing headache. Not that I don't enjoy them, mind you; it's just that oftentimes, the mind-blowing paradoxes inherent in many of these tales set off what feels like a Mobius strip feedback loop in my ...
Silverberg has always been one of my favorite sci-fi authors. This novel, published in 1994, is one of his later efforts and I wasn't sure if it would hold up against his classics from the 60s and 70s like "Book of Skulls" and "Nightwings", but I was pleasantly surprised. I really enjoyed this on...
It was a time of Decision. The bureaucrats of Earth, the stark pioneers of "terraformed" Mars, and the proud gill-altered rulers of Venus were torn between two techno-religions - one offering the certainty of eternal life; and the other, a far-flung destiny among the stars.
Starting in the 1400s, children with gold-colored eyes and strange abilities--telepathy, telekinesis, and the like--began to be born into the world. For centuries, these "mutants" kept themselves hidden for fear of persecution, but in the latter part of the 20th century, they found more and more ...
Each year twenty men and twenty women brave death and insanity in order to reach the Summit, a place where humans have the opportunity to learn directly from the gods. Poliar Crookleg has waited his whole life to go on the Pilgrimage to Kosa Saag. With his childhood friend Traiben, he is determin...
Tom Rand, a practical engineer, and two other men are the only survivors of a spaceship explosion. Marooned on a hostile planet, they are being held captive by a group of “aliens.” Their one slim chance of survival is to reach a rescue beacon placed on the planet years before by men from Earth. ...
There was a throbbing in his left knee and a stiffness in both his ankles, and the chill wind cut through his fur as though he had none at all. His eyes were swollen and pasty from the glaring sunlight. There was no hiding from that great angry blare of light. It filled the sky and reverberated f...
Twenty-six spacesuit-clad figures, Barsac among them, emerged from the hatch of the ship—seventeen Cult candidates, nine watchful members. Even through the thick folds of his spacesuit, even despite the protective warmth of his suit’s energons, Barsac shivered. Azonda was a dead world. The golden...
FEIST THE RIFTWAR SAGA: MAGICIAN (1982, REVISED EDITION 1992) SILVERTHORN (1985) A DARKNESS IN SETHANON (1986) THE EMPIRE TRILOGY (WITH JANNY WURTS): DAUGHTER OF THE EMPIRE (1989) SERVANT OF THE EMPIRE (1990) MISTRESS OF THE EMPIRE (1992) STAND-ALONE RIFTWAR-RELATED BOOKS: PRINCE OF THE BLOOD (19...
During the day they walked until they were exhausted. At night they camped, built a fire and rested. Rand let Dombey run the whole show. He was still unhappy over the way Dombey had pushed him aside. But he had to admit that the big jetmonkey was doing a good job so far. T...
Glowing spheres of imprisoned radiant energy drifted at random near the vaulted ceiling, occasionally bobbing down to eye level. The tables themselves were banked steeply toward the outside edge, and in the very center of the room, where the floor level was lowest, a panchromaticon swiveled slowl...
The planet had been dead about a million years. That was our first impression, as our ship orbited down to its sere brown surface, and as it happened our first impression turned out to be right. There had been a civilization here once—but Earth had swung around Sol ten-to-the-sixth times since th...
HE looked through the apartment with great care, methodically passing several times from one room to the other and quickly doubling back, as though she might be slipping invisibly through the door just ahead of him; but no, she wasn’t anywhere around. He checked the bathroom and the closets. Her ...
Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. EOS An Imprint of...
I had to turn back for that fatal glance, just as Oedipus had to slay the old man he encountered at the crossroads and thereby set in motion the relentless machinery that the gods had devised for him, and Agamemnon the lord of men had to bring his mistress Cassandra back from Troy with him and th...
"Its on the books," Dr. Barnes said. "Expulsion from the city is the punishment for a crime against the city." "But that law hasn't been enforced in decades," Dave Ellis said. "When was the last expulsion, anyway?" "Twenty-five ninety-three," Roy Veeder said. "It's an historic case. I studied it ...
Just as I had been, he was an avid science-fiction reader who longed to have his own stories published in the magazines he had read in his teens, and very quickly he joined Howard Browne’s team of staffers at Amazing and placed material with three or four other titles. But he had a knack for writ...
Chalk's minions had conveyed them nonstop from the hospital to Chalk's private spaceport; then, after their flight around the world, they had been sped to the hotel. It was the most magnificent hotel the Western Hemisphere had ever known, a fact that seemed to dazzle Lona and that obscurely bothe...
No one regretted that more than Ghambivole Zwoll, licensed dealer in potions and spells: a person of the Vroonish race, a small many-tentacled creature with a jutting beak and fiery yellow eyes, who represented the fourth generation of his line to hold the fifth stall in the leftmost rank of the ...
He had heard about it, of course, but that wasn't the same as hearing it. He turned eagerly to Margaret. "She really can—?" "Of course she can, darling. But what's more important, she can even do nice normal things like other babies do, even stupid ones. Watch her crawl!" Margaret set the baby on...
The king went out each day without fail from his palace at the heart of the city to inspect the ongoing work of wall-building. Standing at the foot of the wall, he would stare toward the battlements and embrasures far overhead, measuring them against the burning need he felt within his soul. Then...
Gunn, science fiction as a genre finds its peak in the novella (17,500–40,000 words) and novelette (7,500–17,500 words). Both forms have the length to develop ideas and characters fully but do not suffer from padding or the hortatory aspect present in most modern science fiction novels. The longe...
But no: the Jaqqas dined that night as we did, on roasted goat, and beef, and copious draughts of the palm-wine. With this was much loud harsh music of a very barbaric kind, made on drums and fifes and mpungas and a thing called a tavale, which is a board rising on two wooden sticks that they bea...