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 ...
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...
"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...
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 ...
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...
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...
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...
