T - Novels
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From the cover blurb (Bantam 1992):
This is quite an enjoyable read, fascinating in historical detail and character development. The time travel scenario is reminiscent of "The Far Side of the Bell-Shaped Curve". The cover blurb is pretty accurate, though I don't remember talking beetles. |
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Silverberg's first "adult" novel.
From the cover blurb:
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| Nominated for Nebula for best novel, 1967. Triangle is not exactly the right word, as Chalk does not participate directly in the affair he arranges for Lona and Minner, only leech off the inevitable pain when they don't get along. The picture of human relationships given is a bit grim, though there is a kind of hope offered. That function of the media which feeds off people's pain is quite prevalent in the story, as it is in "The Pain Peddlers". A very good book, and not as depressing as it may sound. And note that the cover art on the 1967 Ballantine edition has nothing whatever to do with the story. The Jim Burns painting on the 1983 edition is the most accurate of the cover illustrations for Minner's deformity. |
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From the cover blurb (1967):
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I can't say what reading this book
would have been like back when it was written, but today
it reads a lot like an episode of The X-Files.
All we're missing is the intrepid FBI agents tracking
down the aliens. In many ways, Those Who Watch
is a good light read. The plot buzzes along nicely, and
the characters are for the most part well-drawn. The
whole thing tends to fall apart if you examine it closely
however, and it is this that keeps the book from joining
the ranks of Silverberg's finest. As with a number of the other earlier works (notably Seed of Earth), I find it frustrating to read. There really is the core of a good story in here, but Silverberg just hadn't found the proper way to tell it yet. I like the idea of the aliens watching the earth with strict rules against being detected; I like the idea of the emergency landing separating the aliens; I like the idea of humans nursing them back to health. Problems crop up if you analyze or ask many questions. How could Colonel Falkner get Glair to his home without raising suspicions? How did the American military search turn up nothing? What happened to the ambitious Captain Bronstein? If these questions and others had been worked out more carefully, the story would have been a lot more suspenseful. I can picture Falkner holed up in his house with Glair, all unaware that the authorities are closing in on him. There's also a rather blatant "smoking gun" in Chapter Nine that is never followed up. But enough of what's not in the book. The alien culture is intriguing but mysterious, never explained very much. Their motivations for watching us are more hinted than spelled out. The story takes place in a 60s version of the 80s, with some technology more advanced than really happened (common electric cars, personal jet aircraft) and some less advanced (no satellite communications). The six main characters are well-rounded, though some of the secondary characters are little more than placeholders. All in all, it's a quick enjoyable read, though not among Silverberg's great works. This is the last of Silverberg's early novels. After Those Who Watch he moved into the "classic" period of the late 60s and early 70s. |
From the cover blurb:
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| The
"two other men" are Anthony Leswick, a bookish
student of the impractical "science" of
Metaphysical Synthesis, and William Dombey, an uneducated
deckhand ("jetmonkey"). Rand spends much of the
early part of the book bemoaning the uselessness of his
companions. Luckily, it turns out that each of them has
skills that are as useful in some situations as Rand's
logic and math. The story centers around Rand learning to
respect the other men for what they can do instead
of dismissing them for what they can't. For a juvenile book, I found the story a little harsh in some ways. The disaster on the spaceship, and the ensuing death, is described in some detail, and there are hard decisions to be made. Once the men get to the planet, however, things are comparatively easier for them. Which makes sense--when you're in space, the slightest mistake can mean instant death, whereas on an Earth-like planet, even an unknown one, you can at least breathe. All in all, not a classic, but a decent read. It is apparently based on the 1957 short story of the same name. |
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From the cover blurb:
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| An expansion of the short story "Hopper". |  |
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From the cover blurb:
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Winner of Nebula
Award for best novel, 1971.
A shorter version appeared in Galaxy Science Fiction. All of Velada Borthan (the northern continent of the planet Borthan) abides by the Covenant, a set of guidelines laid down over a thousand years ago, not long after the planet was settled by humans. The Covenant holds that we should keep our problems to ourselves and not burden others with them, that we should be strong and self-contained. The greatest sin they can imagine is self-baring, the sharing of thoughts and feelings with another. In fact, it is a breach of etiquette to use a first-person singular pronoun. When they speak of themselves, they must use the third-person "one." An offshoot of this is that it is improper to say "I love you." The closest they come is "One feels love for you," which is not quite the same thing, and is a risqué thing to say, as it shares too much self. But on the southern continent, called Sumara Borthan, people do not hold to the Covenant. They use a drug there which is the supreme abomination to the northerners: it dissolves the wall between people and enables complete sharing of thoughts and emotions. In this book Silverberg invented a unique society--I can think of nothing very like it in all of science fiction. It may sound bizarre in the brief description I've given, but in the book it is explained so well that it seems plausible. And those who hold by the Covenant are (for the most part) treated sympathetically, not ridiculed for their beliefs. In fact, the only people who are shown negatively are the hypocrites who claim to hold the Covenant but in fact violate it. There are some veiled criticisms of aspects contemporary religion, particularly the Catholic practice of confession. After Kinnal takes the Sumaran drug, he becomes a sort of evangelist for a new way of living, one where people can share their lives and emotions with others, where it is possible to love one another. For when people share the drug, they are not horrified by each other's inner thoughts and petty faults, but see them so completely that there can be nothing but love between them. Deep down, we are all worthy of love. This is a fiercely positive statement for the Silverberg of the early 1970s, who was known for his dark and even depressing stories (like Dying Inside and The World Inside). But don't expect a happy ending. |
From the cover blurb (Ace 1980):
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| In his Introduction to the Ace reissue of 1980, Silverberg says that this story was inspired by the harsh winter he spent in New York in 1962-63. As he spent many hours shoveling his "fine grand driveway" free of snow, he imagined a world once again in the grip of an Ice Age. How would people cope? Could civilization survive? So he proposed writing a book for the young readers' division of Holt, Rinehart & Winston. As it turned out, he did the actual writing for the book during the summer of 1963, which was unusually hot, but he conveyed the arctic conditions well. The story moves along nicely, with some social commentary which sets it above many other young reader titles (not really a "juvenile" but not really an adult book either). The underground cities are very claustrophobic, the primitive surface-dwellers are reasonably portrayed, and the science is sensible. One thing I couldn't help noticing, however, is that there is not a single female character who so much as speaks a line of dialog. Not that it's entirely "men doing men things". In fact, two of the main characters (Dr Barnes and his son Jim) are refreshingly lacking in macho posturing, preferring to reason or talk their way out of confrontation when possible. |  |
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From the Dell cover blurb:
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The cover
blurb on the Dell edition is very misleading. The bit
about a rebellion of the dead is not even mentioned in
the book, though it might be an interesting idea. Not one of the great works of the sixties, but I did like a little incident involving the Golden Gate Bridge on page 8: "The actuarial sign over the row of toll booths announced the day's vehicle toll: $0.83. As the car passed through a booth, a brief data interchange took place between the bridge computer and the car's, and Roditis' central bank account was automatically billed for the amount." A very nice bit of future-seeing there. The Berkley edition of 1978 contains an Introduction explaining the roundabout course this story took from initial conception in 1966, through numerous rejections by publishers in 1966 and 1967, extensive revisions in 1968, to its initial publication in 1969. |
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From the cover blurb (1967):
From the cover blurb (1984):
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| This book was originally published
in five parts in Galaxy in 1966. See the
individual story entries for commentary. Some
bibliographies list this as a short story collection
rather than a novel, but it seems to me that the stories
were written to fit together, and work much better as
part of the whole, so I call it a novel. The book
presents a design for a religion based not on faith but
on science. To some degree, the founders of this religion
design it specifically to draw followers (such as funding
research into longevity), and to accomplish their own
goals, but they do have the best interests of the human
race at heart. Of course, any time you have a single
person or a small group manipulating people "for
their own good" you run the danger of disaster. What
if that vision of the greater good is wrong? Spoiler alert: The descriptions of later stories may give away the endings of earlier ones. Contents:
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From the cover blurb:
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| This fits
(more or less) into the shared universe of Hell lorded
over by C.J. Cherryh
and Janet Morris, though it's not mentioned in this book
(probably due to somebody's contracts with somebody
else). It continues the adventures of the mythical
king into a strange version
of the afterworld. I call it strange because it does not
fit completely with any religious vision of an afterlife.
In the other Hell books, there is a basic Christian
slant, with demons presiding over the dead and occasional
references to a satanic being in charge, but Hell is not
just for sinners. Everyone is there, from Hitler
to the saints, from the beginning of the human race to
sometime in the 21st century. Silverberg takes a more
general view, and the Christian elements of Cherryh and
Morris's scenario are not present, and in fact this book
stands a little outside the general tone of the rest of
the series. One of the basic ideas of the Hell books is that once a person is there, it's forever. If you get "killed" you come back in a new body after a short time. Another basic idea is that there is no way out. Gilgamesh makes it his quest to find a way out of Hell, a way back to Earth. The irony is that in life, his quest was to make it to the land of the dead to be with his friend Enkidu, and now that he's there, he wants to leave, though he still seeks Enkidu. The book started as the novella "Gilgamesh in the Outback" in Rebels in Hell and in that form was nominated for Nebula Award for best novella, 1987. Chapters 1-5 are that novella. Chapters 7-11 were published as "The Fascination of the Abomination" in Angels in Hell. The title character of Lord of Darkness features prominently in this book as well. I've read a number of the other books in the series, and while they're sometimes enjoyable, I'm not sure I can recommend them. Cherryh's stories are particularly grating to me (which is unusual as she is one of my favorite writers), with their idea that only the famous people of history are important and ordinary people don't even rate bodies in Hell. |
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From the cover blurb:
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| A post-holocaust novel that really got to me. Quite emotional in ways that so little science fiction is. I'll need to re-read it, however to make more specific comments. | |
From the 1971 cover blurb:
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| Simeon
Krug designed and created the androids in an era of human
underpopulation and labor shortage in response to the
poor decision-making and lack of creativity of mechanical
robots. In chemical vats, the building blocks of life are
assembled into living, thinking synthetic humans. By
design, androids are distinct from natural humans in a
number of ways: their skin is a bright scarlet color,
they have no hair, and they are incapable of
reproduction. There are three classes of androids: the
gammas, designed for strength and reliability but not
very smart; the betas, designed for supervisory roles,
smarter than gammas but also strong; and the alphas,
designed for intelligence and leadership. You have to
suspend your disbelief to imagine such a project actually
getting off the ground over moral objections, but once
you do the story unfolds very compellingly. The androids
especially come alive, with their hopes and dreams of
freedom, and their religion devoted to their
creator. Aside from the androids, the other main focus of the book involves Krug's project to respond to the mysterious message from space, the first proof of extraterrestrial life (rather like the movie Contact). It is for this purpose that he builds the tower, for it is a giant transmitter with the sole purpose of answering the signal. The technology of "shunting" (from "Ringing the Changes") figures prominently in the story, as do "transmat" booths, teleportation devices allowing instant transport around the globe. Nominated for Nebula Award for best novel, 1970. I probably would have voted for it had I been eligible. |
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Last updated October 21, 2002