Sailing to Byzantium
Six Novellas
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3.8 • 12 Ratings
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- $7.99
Publisher Description
Six science fiction novellas by the author hailed as “a master” by Robert Jordan—including two Nebula Award winners and two finalists.
Robert Silverberg’s novellas open the door to new worlds: In “Born with the Dead,” a woman wills her body to be “rekindled” after death, allowing her to walk among the living, while her husband is left in the impossible position of accepting her death when he can still see her. In the Nebula Award–nominated story “Homefaring,” the time-traveling narrator finds himself trapped in the consciousness of a lobsterlike creature of the far future, leading him to reflect on what it means to be human. And in the collection’s Nebula Award–winning title story, the Earth of the fiftieth century is a place where time is elusive and fluid, and young citizens live as tourists in ancient cities. “When Silverberg is at the top of his form, no one is better,” says George R. R. Martin. Also including Nebula Award finalist “The Secret Sharer,” as well as “Thomas the Proclaimer” and “We Are for the Dark," this collection offers an engrossing exploration of the work of this Grand Master, hailed by the New York Times Book Review as “the John Updike of science fiction.”
This ebook features an illustrated biography of Robert Silverberg including rare images and never-before-seen documents from the author’s personal collection.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this collection of five previously published novellas, Nebula and Hugo Award-winner Silverberg interprets literary allusions literally, building complex SF scenarios from fragments taken from English literature. Silverberg's eponymous novella transposes Yeats's poem title "Sailing to Byzantium" to 50th-century Earth, where tourist-citizens spend their time visiting replicas of long-dead historical cities such as Byzantine Constantinople. The narrator of "Homefaring" travels far into the future and finds himself inside the sentient consciousness of a giant lobster, leading him to reflect on time as described in one of Eliot's Quartets. A passage from the Book of Joshua provides the premise for "Thomas the Proclaimer," in which a shaggy prophet's call for a sign from God leads to the sun standing still in the sky. The line "We are for the dark" from Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra becomes the justification for interstellar colonization in the resulting novella here. And Silverberg draws from Conrad's The Secret Sharer for both the title and structure of his novella in which the captain of a starship befriends a disembodied stowaway who exists as an electric matrix inside his mind. The detailed plots and situations represented in this collection cover much futuristic ground, ranging from the physics of time and space travel to the role of God in societies to come. However, the novellas' literary antecedents seem spectacularly beside the point, since, in almost every case, Silverberg has translated their figurative language into "what if" precepts to generate concept-driven stories. Throughout, unusual settings are much more satisfying than the sketchy characterizations and quick plot resolutions for which they set the stage. Unfortunately, the novellas' literary origins throw a very harsh light on what might otherwise have been a sparkling SF display.
