This page contains some more in-depth analyses and commentaries on various of Silverberg's short works. Note that these reviews may contain spoilers. Consider yourself warned.
In the introduction to this story in The Collected Stories of Robert Silverberg: Volume 1, Secret Sharers, Silverberg states the following: "I do think the story recaptures the tone of Son of Man to a considerable extent, but whether it has the headlong wildness of that book is not so clear to me." The reader should obviously judge for himself. I personally think that it is not really possible to create the same effect with a short story as with a novel, especially when dealing with something like Son of Man. I remember reading that book in two afternoons (I actually had to stop my greedy eyes from reading on after getting about halfway through, because I could feel I was becoming overwhelmed with ideas and imagery and did not want to become desensitized through sheer excess). There was something definitely cumulative about it, the sense that not only were things crazy but that they remained crazy and even seemed to get crazier towards the end. The sustained level of it is one of its many qualities that really amazes me. That kind of cumulative energy, or inventive momentum if you will, can’t really be built up in a short story. So even though the style and thematic approach are similar in this story, the overall feel isn’t. It wouldn’t really be fair to either piece to compare this story to the novel: even though they share the setting, they are quite distinct pieces. And yet I can’t help myself from making that type of constrast/compare remark.
In Son of Man I immediately noticed that Silverberg made a deliberate choice not to present the main character as a main character usually would be in a novel. He doesn’t give us his thoughts, his emotions, his background. In fact, if I remember correctly, we are given such sparse knowledge about his situation on Earth that we don’t even know what his job was, whether he was married, what his interests were, etc. In other words, the characteristics we would usually think of as character-defining. Yet this strategy works wonderfully. We are given the protagonist’s actions, and these are fully sufficient. Why? Because it is irrelevant what the specifics of his case are: he is everyone of us, he represents humanity as a whole, and the discoveries he makes and experiences he has don’t so much affect him personally as they affect the very humanity inside of him. Thus there is enough room to explore the new world, the different types of life-forms, the various landscapes, etc. I think it is, fundamentally, this lack of character description that makes the book so unique, so enigmatic, so uncompromising and pure, in its own way, obviously two highly artistic merits that exceed mere storytelling or craftmanship.
The situation is different in this short story. The main character reveals quite a few details about his life, his situation, his job, his surroundings, etc. before being whisked away by the time-flux. This automatically reduces the scale of things, making the story less cosmic and universal in its vision, rather more concrete, more limited. Fair enough: it is, after all, a short story. We can’t expect the same grandeur, the same pouring sense of wonder, as in a whole novel. But, concerning character, there is an added difference: in Son of Man the reader’s point of view was the same as the protagonist’s, the human of our times. This is not the case in this story, since for the first two and a bit pages Oliver van Noort hasn’t even yet arrived into the story’s time-frame. The point of view must therefore be Bhengarn the Traveler’s, although there were a few moments throughout the story when I wasn’t sure whose point of view we were supposed to have. Seeing things from Bhengarn’s point of view is exciting and fascinating in its own way, and possibly creates a more dynamic, surprising start than if the first scene had described van Noort’s arrival in the new world. And in those two pages we learn something interesting about how the world works, namely the cause of the time-fluxes responsible for sweeping up creatures of different places and times. When the Traveler engages an Eater who opposes him:
"There is a dull droning sound that the Traveler knows is the song of the time-flux, an unpredictable force that often is liberated at such moments."
So, now we know, to some degree, how the time-flux currents originate. Perhaps not only Travelers can elicit them, but other life-forms as well, we can’t rule that out. But this is at least one way in which they form. In the story, the time-flux that results directly from the Traveler’s actions is responsible for bringing Noort into the scene. We are given details about Noort’s life for about a page-length, composed largely of phrases linked by a string of gerunds. It’s obvious Silverberg knows a lot about Noort, a true historic figure. He mentions the fact that he had written about him at length "years before in a nonfiction book called The Longest Voyage." Waste not, want not. Of course, Noort’s background in exploration and so forth make him a suitable choice… Still, I’ve always thought a woman’s point of view would be interesting in the world of Son of Man (no pun intended). Apparently Silverberg did too, for he had originally intended for the story to deal with a twentieth-century woman, but then changed this. At one point when Noort asks the Traveler what he is, Bhengarn responds that he is a human being of the Traveler sort. Fair enough. But wouldn’t it have been truer to the book and the universe therein presented to have him answer that he is a "son of man", or at least for Noort to make some reference, mental or spoken, to him being a son of man? One detail I really liked from the original and which Silverberg maintains is that when Noort tells the Traveler that he speaks his language, the Traveler replies that it is actually Noort who speaks his language. A wonderful touch, if you ask me.
Other details I noticed:
The definitive giant-lobster story, and so much more than that. A man of the twentieth century (presumably) McCulloch, offers himself as a subject for time travel into the future-- only problem is, the people who’ve developed time travel aren’t exactly sure how far he will go (although they expect a few decades, centuries, or perhaps even a millennium). To the people around McCulloch it will seem that he has only been gone a few seconds. He is cast into the very far future, and there he encounters an underwater culture, where giant lobsters and other forms of sea-life have developed an entire society, of sorts, including a Pilgrimage to the place of dry land at the Time of Molting, where they perform certain holy rituals. The arrival of McCulloch’s disembodied consciousness into a giant lobster seems to some to be an Omen, a sign that the Time of Molting is at hand, and so the Pilgrimage begins. But one of the lobster’s gods, a great octopus, corrects them and puts an end to the Pilgrimage. McCulloch’s arrival thus causes quite a stir (ouch, that hurts!) and he comes to believe that he has played an important part in this world’s affairs-- which, to some extent, he has. He spends years inhabiting the same body as the giant lobster, even resisting a few attempts from his fellow Earth men to send him back to his time. Eventually, he returns, and gets back together with the woman he loved before he made the trip, Maggie. But his true "home" will forever remain the sea of the future, where he felt, with unparalleled intensity, that he truly belonged.
The story unfolds in a lovely way, alternating modern-day sections and future-earth sections with the well-timed and gentle rhythm of waves. There is certainly a strong sense of suspense, originating from various plot threads, among which the following two are prominent: the meaning of the Pilgrimage and its ultimate success, and the fate of McCulloch. In the introduction to it (in The Collected Stories of Robert Silverberg, Volume 1: Secret Sharers) Silverberg states that he "deliberately intended ‘Homefaring’ as a sleek and modern version of the sort of imagination-stirring tale of wonder" that the editor Donald A. Wollheim had enjoyed reading many years ago, as a young man. He certainly succeeds, but I think goes beyond that, exploring man’s sensibilities and the importance of feeling that one belongs, wherever and however that may be, through excellently-crafted prose descriptions. The protagonist of "Homefaring" feels a sense of complete belonging, with the lobsters, as he has never done before (and never will again, so he says himself). There seems to me to spring forth a wonderful duality from this approach: (1) the sense of disconnection to our reality, to our society, so essential to post-modernism and the angst therewith associated is well treated, making McCulloch feel like a real character, someone with whom it is easy enough to identify, like so many other Silverberg characters; (2) from an evolutionary point of view, our origin is the sea, so there is the undercurrent in the story that returning there would provide some kind of fulfillment, make our cycle of existence symmetrical, even, as it does with McCulloch, perhaps only on a subconscious level.
Some other observations:
Before he
departs, Maggie quotes McCulloch some poetry by Eliot,
from "Little Gidding":
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
It is clear that
these lines encapsulate an idea Silverberg has treated
before and will certainly return to, a truth of our
existence that he considers important. More concretely,
he quotes precisely the same passage by Eliot in
"The Grand Kumpania", the eighth section of his
masterful novel Star of Gypsies (there he provides the preceding
three lines, too), removing all doubt as to the
importance this theme has to him.
This story is additionally interesting because it offers us a fully developed vision of the far future very different from that seen in Son of Man. It’s great fun seeing how accomplished and fascinating Silverberg’s various far-future scenarios are, even the description by the lobsters concerning the various worlds before theirs.
California time in Silverberg-land, once again. This novella, published in 1995, is interesting for several reasons. It clearly belongs to the near-future, L.A. based stories-which of course, though having a common background, share little more. But this story seems to me, more than others with the same setting, to be fundamentally about people in the here and now, not as seen through one of Silverberg's preferred sf-tools, such as telepathy for instance, but seen as normal people, not extraordinary in any way. Au contraire, most of the characters depicted in the novella are less than exemplary specimens of the human species, to put it mildly. They do not posses any gifts. They have not met alternate version of themselves, or traveled through time, or been in contact with aliens. They have only one factor in common: they are in various stages of recovery, personal recovery that is, from some kind of brought-on malady, whether it be boozing or drug-taking or whatever else. The protagonist of the story, one Cal Mattison, used to spend his life cruising from one bar to the next, and generally getting involved in nasty physical altercations the rest of the time. Very well, if the characters do not give the story science-fictional credit, then what does?
The lava-flows? Silverberg has extrapolated from known plate tectonics and created lava-flows and earthquakes in California in the near future. At least from a superficial point of view, this does not seem to be sf. There are quite a few natural-disaster stories that are described as science-fiction nowadays. Some of them, say David Brin's massive novel EARTH (which I don´t entirely like for other reasons) or Charles Sheffield´s AFTERMATH, I think genuinely classify. When the natural disaster that sets things in motion is science-fictional, the rest follows. Consider Arthur C. Clarke's THE HAMMER OF GOD. Summed up, an asteroid disaster story. But, of course, there is a lot more to it, because of the way in which Clarke focuses on the science-fictional details of his future, the technology as well as the emotions. It all depends largely on the approach taken, the style in which the natural disaster is dealt with: if it feels like a thriller or action story it's not likely to be sf. I wouldn't really describe GODZILLA or DANTE'S PEAK as science-fiction, no matter how bad my day (though DEEP IMPACT and ARMAGEDDON, despite many quibbles, would probably make it).There are also various degrees of naturalness to a natural disaster. An asteroid impact is more probable than a black hole coming into contact with Earth, and lava eruptions more probable than an asteroid for that matter. Which brings me to my first point, namely that though Silverberg's setting and characters do not posses any identifiable sf trademarks, his approach at the core is science-fictional, at least the texture of the story seems to feel that way. The lava and magma are described, in several nifty passages, as something science-fictional, some kind of deep, molten, inscrutable force, moving the characters in certain ways. They represent, in general terms of subtext perhaps, the fundamental alienness of the universe against which Silverberg has so often pitted his characters. So, though I don't think the novella fits into any traditional definition of sf, I can still understand it being treated as sf at a more profound level. It contains the classic Silverberg theme of redemption. The characters in the story are low-lives who are trying to move on, to make progress, to deal with their pasts and heal themselves, to whatever degree that is possible. Their work in the half-house is voluntary: as Mattison remarks at one point, they are not forced to do what they are doing. Some seem to be more deserving, or closer to, redemption than others. Mattison is working hard on this, on improving himself, making himself a better person. There are difficult moments, but he does his best. This subject is essential to all good fiction. Change, dynamics, growth, expansion. >From here to the stars. What could possibly be more science-fictional? Reading this kind of story is obviously inspirational, for striving in others always reminds us to strive ourselves. When we read this novella we don't shrug Mattison and his crew off as a bunch of fucked-up losers, and turn, with smug superiority, to another story. Though their problems are largely self-inflicted, they are making an effort to change things. That is what is essential, this drive onward, making one's best effort every waking moment, every instant, no matter what has come before, or how hopeless the situation might seem. Classic stuff, good stuff. Silverberg's skillful writing turns this raw material into a finely homed novella.
It does not burn with intensity. But, in a way, this is good. Most of us to do not burn with intensity everyday of our lives. Still, there are always challenges to be met, ways of improving our performance, both for ourselves and others. While it does not posses the "brutality" of The Second Trip, or smoothness of Sailing to Byzantium, or the darkness of Dying Inside, it does seem to be one of Silverberg's more mature stories of the last few years, not so much in terms of conclusions, but more of premises. Throughout the novella, Silverberg sticks to Mattison's point-of-view: there are no authorial slip-ups (none that I could find), no little jumps out of character that tip-off the author's quiet, wise narrative voice, whispering some bit of information or other into our ears. This means that all events are filtered through Mattison's perceptions. He does not have, for obvious reasons, a very upbeat opinion of humanity. Yet however worthless we are, we are human beings, which somehow, somewhere means something. This dichotomy is nicely encapsulated in the novella:
"Mattison doesn't like the idea of losing a member of his crew, even a shithead like Herzog. He knows that his crew is made up entirely of shitheads, himself included, and the fact that Harzog is a shithead does not invalidate him as a human being. Too much of the human race falls into the shithead category, Mattison realizes. If nobody in the world ever lifted a finger to save shitheads from their own shitheadedness, then almost everybody would be in trouble."
How very true.
I mentioned the lava as metaphor for alienness before. Within the story Mattison reflects upon lava as a metaphor for something else, for the anger he and people who have led themselves down destructive paths in general feel, which "keeps bubbling out all the time". This lava must be contained not only without, but within as well. Sometimes the most alien, incommunicable thing about a person can be what they refuse to acknowledge about themselves, and to confront. Mattison's outlook is about humanity is necessarily cynical (up to a point), like I mentioned before. Which means that, by association, the story's outlook is cynical. The writing reflects this and adapts to the characters, in several ways. Expletives, especially the word fuck, occur frequently, more frequently than anything by Silverberg which I've read since Hot Sky at Midnight. Also, there are certain ironic undercurrents to many descriptions. Consider the way Mattison thinks about his own history:
"Mattison is a former casualty himself, who once carried a very serious boozing jones on his back that had a negative impact on his professional performance as a studio carpenter and extremely debilitating effects on his driving skills. His drinking also led him to be overly free with his fists…"
The use of a mock-politically correct euphemisms like "negative impact" within the context produces a sarcastic overtone. Much of the writing in the novella is sardonic, sharp, sometimes even wry, in the classic underhanded Silverberg fashion. If the story is centrally concerned with the subject of redemption, it also manages to touch upon religion. During the trip from one emergency area to another, Matteson and the other voluntary workers witness a kind of sacrificial offering, being made by a newborn cult, presumably founded on the impressive outpourings of lava from underneath the Earth. I really enjoyed Silverberg's choice of words for introducing this scene: "Just how desperate some of these people are getting is something Mattison discovers when…" Not how carried-away, or extreme, but desperate. Clearly, this implies that resort to religious belief and more so religiously-induced action, as provoked by natural circumstances, is desperate. I couldn't agree more. Of course, Silverberg gives the Mexicans responsible for the sacrifice a collective voice through the character Annette Perez, who says "If this was your neighborhood, carajo, and you had a god, wouldn't you want to ask him to stop this shit?" which, though it does little to justify what is going on, certainly makes it more comprehensible to the reader from the point of view of a cultural/theological context. As is to be expected, the story offers no real resolutions. In the closing paragraphs, the lava outbreaks are getting worse, the situation is becoming considerably graver as a whole. The only way to go on is to keep struggling, to keep pushing on. We do not have solutions to most problems, but we do have the potential for many solutions. This novella, like some of Silverberg's best work, embodies this belief. Mattison sums it up: "What the hell. We do what we can, and hope for the best, one day at a time."
A few additional comments: