Friday, 27 March 2015 03:21 pm
Book Review: Sailing to Byzantium
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deckardcanineMy prior experience with Robert Silverberg was limited to Science Fiction 101, a collection of 13 short stories by other writers. While I didn't always agree with his taste, the stories were generally fun, and his introduction and follow-up commentary enhanced them a little. I may yet make use of his lessons.
Now that I've read his five novellas in this collection, I'm undecided on whether Silverberg does better at writing stories or writing about them. He's no John Ringo, thankfully. I suspect that the main problem is the medium: From the few novellas I know, they're less like abridged novels and more like stretched short stories. They keep to simple themes, and their endings are unsurprising if not predictable well in advance.
Still, it wasn't just stubbornness that got me to the end. I can see why three of the novellas either won or were nominated for esteemed awards. The other two have less obvious merits; one had gone out of print, but Silverberg thought it deserved more popularity. More on that later.
Sailing to Byzantium. I can only wonder how many customers bought this book expecting only this story, as the front cover says nothing about any others. It's the Nebula winner and thus the main selling point. It's also the one I read maybe more than a decade ago, so I don't have much confidence in my review of it.
In a way, it feels like a companion piece to Otherland by Tad Williams. It takes place entirely in a set of virtual simulations, only not of fictional worlds but of real historical settings. People regularly move from one "era" to another for fun. It makes for some interesting culture clash with the AIs, who appear unaware of their unreality.
Unfortunately, the plot is hard to talk about without spoiling anything. There isn't much sense of conflict until the twist arrives, and just telling you that there is a twist almost spoils it. Let's just say that the final scene brings up a philosophical conundrum without delving far in: the prospect of becoming fully virtual, leaving the flesh behind. I'm not sure what side Silverberg is on, but I think it's not mine.
Homefaring. This Nebula nominee might be the most creative of the bunch. In a semi-reversal of X-Men: Days of Future Past, researchers find a way to send one's mind into the future and back -- only not to one's own body. Nobody seems to question the ethics of the experiment, but fortunately the protagonist ends up sharing a brain with a superhumanly placid mind...in a highly evolved lobster, long after the Earth floods. There's no major language barrier between them, except that many human concepts have no meaning to the lobster, including individual names. Other lobsters have different ideas of what to make of this visitor (wanderer, revenant, hallucination, herald of the next apocalypse?), tho none are terribly alarmed or bewildered. Ultimately he finds acceptance, only to get yanked back to the human era.
Would I miss living among creatures reminiscent of disciplined Buddhist monks? While I didn't get bored reading about them, it sounds like I would've lost interest in their more repetitive activities if present. The conversations primarily make it interesting. Some of their values would take an awfully long time to stop being foreign to me, unless I allowed my mind to meld with the host's. I've given thought to starting an interactive fiction inspired by this story, but I'd have to downplay their alienness, as well as the jackassery of deliberately invading someone without warning or consent.
Thomas the Proclaimer. Finally, a story not set in the far future. In fact, it's set in 1999, shortly before the publication of this collection. (Silverberg assures us that he meant nothing predictive by it.) I wouldn't even classify it as sci-fi rather than magic realism. Figures that he took the idea from someone else, namely Lester del Rey, as part of a challenge to a trio that included Gordon R. Dickson and Poul Anderson: What if a modern televangelist prayed for a sign and then the Earth stopped rotating for 24 hours?
Silverberg took this what-if to a rather logical conclusion. Atheism certainly declines, but it's not good news for theists. Consider that the sign alone doesn't really say anything besides "A powerful intelligent entity has listened to your prayer." People can't agree on whether it came from God, Satan, or a mighty alien, let alone what to do about it. As Y2K approaches and weeks go by with few definite answers from older established institutions (including, quite credibly, the Roman Catholic Church), the world grows more and more chaotic.
Thomas himself strikes me as a stereotypical pseudo-pious fraud, chosen for his figurehead charisma more than anything else. I'm more curious about his agent, Saul Kraft, whose very name might hint at Mephistophelian motives. We don't get inside his head much, and perhaps that's just as well.
It's never a happy tale, but you might read the whole thing just to fill in details of the possibilities. Will it make you grateful that God isn't like that in real life? Perhaps, but the Bible doesn't typically depict God leaving people to parse miracles for themselves; he talks. In that sense, this novella has rather limited use as a fable.
We Are for the Dark. More new religiosity, this time in the form of an order sending believers to colonize planets in their image. But when the protagonist gets demoted from a high rank and sees fit to leave Earth himself, he finds cultures moving further from the order's tenets the further out they are. It turns out that the ancient alien technology that made such travel possible has introduced something that can revolutionize how one sees the universe....
Why didn't this story have readers loving it as much as Silverberg does? Probably because it takes too long to go anywhere. We learn too few specifics about what the order stands for and how it came to exist. Even the first-person narrator seems underdeveloped for a while. I'd say that characterization is not the author's consistent strong suit.
The Secret Sharer. This Hugo nominee could be my favorite. It keeps moving along and maintains a sort of tension while allowing variation in emotion. Sure, some of the early statements are jarring at first, like calling space "heaven," but we come to understand the narrator soon enough.
The young starship captain feels most at home in space, tho as a sort of hazing ritual, he has no friends among the crew. The ship is transporting both comatose people and electrical matrices representing people's minds, to be transplanted into presently lifeless bodies on other planets. One matrix of a teen girl can't stand staying in storage and finds a way into another passenger's brain, causing him to panic and die. Fearing execution, she flees and begs to hide in the captain's brain, which he permits despite the legal risk to himself. (Elements of the first two novellas, no?)
I am not fond of the girl. She sounds more emo than pitiable, caring almost exclusively about herself, and impulsive to the point of near-idiocy. But I respect the captain's desire for secret companionship in context. Had I done the same, I might just develop a love for her myself. If only he'd realized before she did that there was no way it could end well.
Next up is Owlflight by Mercedes Lackey and Larry Dixon. I can't tell that it'll feel original, but it's high time I returned to pure fantasy. At least I dig owls.
Now that I've read his five novellas in this collection, I'm undecided on whether Silverberg does better at writing stories or writing about them. He's no John Ringo, thankfully. I suspect that the main problem is the medium: From the few novellas I know, they're less like abridged novels and more like stretched short stories. They keep to simple themes, and their endings are unsurprising if not predictable well in advance.
Still, it wasn't just stubbornness that got me to the end. I can see why three of the novellas either won or were nominated for esteemed awards. The other two have less obvious merits; one had gone out of print, but Silverberg thought it deserved more popularity. More on that later.
Sailing to Byzantium. I can only wonder how many customers bought this book expecting only this story, as the front cover says nothing about any others. It's the Nebula winner and thus the main selling point. It's also the one I read maybe more than a decade ago, so I don't have much confidence in my review of it.
In a way, it feels like a companion piece to Otherland by Tad Williams. It takes place entirely in a set of virtual simulations, only not of fictional worlds but of real historical settings. People regularly move from one "era" to another for fun. It makes for some interesting culture clash with the AIs, who appear unaware of their unreality.
Unfortunately, the plot is hard to talk about without spoiling anything. There isn't much sense of conflict until the twist arrives, and just telling you that there is a twist almost spoils it. Let's just say that the final scene brings up a philosophical conundrum without delving far in: the prospect of becoming fully virtual, leaving the flesh behind. I'm not sure what side Silverberg is on, but I think it's not mine.
Homefaring. This Nebula nominee might be the most creative of the bunch. In a semi-reversal of X-Men: Days of Future Past, researchers find a way to send one's mind into the future and back -- only not to one's own body. Nobody seems to question the ethics of the experiment, but fortunately the protagonist ends up sharing a brain with a superhumanly placid mind...in a highly evolved lobster, long after the Earth floods. There's no major language barrier between them, except that many human concepts have no meaning to the lobster, including individual names. Other lobsters have different ideas of what to make of this visitor (wanderer, revenant, hallucination, herald of the next apocalypse?), tho none are terribly alarmed or bewildered. Ultimately he finds acceptance, only to get yanked back to the human era.
Would I miss living among creatures reminiscent of disciplined Buddhist monks? While I didn't get bored reading about them, it sounds like I would've lost interest in their more repetitive activities if present. The conversations primarily make it interesting. Some of their values would take an awfully long time to stop being foreign to me, unless I allowed my mind to meld with the host's. I've given thought to starting an interactive fiction inspired by this story, but I'd have to downplay their alienness, as well as the jackassery of deliberately invading someone without warning or consent.
Thomas the Proclaimer. Finally, a story not set in the far future. In fact, it's set in 1999, shortly before the publication of this collection. (Silverberg assures us that he meant nothing predictive by it.) I wouldn't even classify it as sci-fi rather than magic realism. Figures that he took the idea from someone else, namely Lester del Rey, as part of a challenge to a trio that included Gordon R. Dickson and Poul Anderson: What if a modern televangelist prayed for a sign and then the Earth stopped rotating for 24 hours?
Silverberg took this what-if to a rather logical conclusion. Atheism certainly declines, but it's not good news for theists. Consider that the sign alone doesn't really say anything besides "A powerful intelligent entity has listened to your prayer." People can't agree on whether it came from God, Satan, or a mighty alien, let alone what to do about it. As Y2K approaches and weeks go by with few definite answers from older established institutions (including, quite credibly, the Roman Catholic Church), the world grows more and more chaotic.
Thomas himself strikes me as a stereotypical pseudo-pious fraud, chosen for his figurehead charisma more than anything else. I'm more curious about his agent, Saul Kraft, whose very name might hint at Mephistophelian motives. We don't get inside his head much, and perhaps that's just as well.
It's never a happy tale, but you might read the whole thing just to fill in details of the possibilities. Will it make you grateful that God isn't like that in real life? Perhaps, but the Bible doesn't typically depict God leaving people to parse miracles for themselves; he talks. In that sense, this novella has rather limited use as a fable.
We Are for the Dark. More new religiosity, this time in the form of an order sending believers to colonize planets in their image. But when the protagonist gets demoted from a high rank and sees fit to leave Earth himself, he finds cultures moving further from the order's tenets the further out they are. It turns out that the ancient alien technology that made such travel possible has introduced something that can revolutionize how one sees the universe....
Why didn't this story have readers loving it as much as Silverberg does? Probably because it takes too long to go anywhere. We learn too few specifics about what the order stands for and how it came to exist. Even the first-person narrator seems underdeveloped for a while. I'd say that characterization is not the author's consistent strong suit.
The Secret Sharer. This Hugo nominee could be my favorite. It keeps moving along and maintains a sort of tension while allowing variation in emotion. Sure, some of the early statements are jarring at first, like calling space "heaven," but we come to understand the narrator soon enough.
The young starship captain feels most at home in space, tho as a sort of hazing ritual, he has no friends among the crew. The ship is transporting both comatose people and electrical matrices representing people's minds, to be transplanted into presently lifeless bodies on other planets. One matrix of a teen girl can't stand staying in storage and finds a way into another passenger's brain, causing him to panic and die. Fearing execution, she flees and begs to hide in the captain's brain, which he permits despite the legal risk to himself. (Elements of the first two novellas, no?)
I am not fond of the girl. She sounds more emo than pitiable, caring almost exclusively about herself, and impulsive to the point of near-idiocy. But I respect the captain's desire for secret companionship in context. Had I done the same, I might just develop a love for her myself. If only he'd realized before she did that there was no way it could end well.
Next up is Owlflight by Mercedes Lackey and Larry Dixon. I can't tell that it'll feel original, but it's high time I returned to pure fantasy. At least I dig owls.