Robert Silverberg’s Letters from Atlantis (1990)

Library Journal reviews this novella as such:

In the future, scientists have developed a type of time travel in which the traveler’s consciousness is transferred into the mind of someone actually living in the past–a useful way to observe history first hand. Roy has been sent into the mind of the Prince of Atlantis; Lora has been sent into the mind of a provincial governor existing at the same time. The title refers to Ray’s letters to Lora, written after putting the Prince’s mind to sleep and using his body. When Roy begins to feel lonely and depressed, he grows careless, and the Prince soon becomes aware of Roy’s presence in his mind. Roy, revealing himself fully, breaks all rules of nonintervention and possibly sullies history. The premise is intriguing, and Silverberg’s portrayal of Roy is convincing, especially his isolation and need for contact with another human. But Silverberg’s vision of Atlantis is nothing new. He falls back on of-aliens-from-another-planet” cliche. He introduces, and then uses this excuse to explain away, without really exploring, topics such as why Atlantis was so technologically advanced, why racial hatred existed between the Atlantans and native earthlings, and why the earthlings kept no remembrance of Atlantis after its destruction. The triteness of these revelations betrays the freshness of the set-up. Readers will be ultimately disappointed because this could have been so much better than it is.

 

The time travel method is similar to that in Silverberg’s novella, “The Homefaring,” where a man’s consciousness is sent into the far future and an earth populated by highly intelligent giant lobsters.

This one falls short, like another time travel novella of his, Thebes of the Hundred Gates; both end too quickly and leave the reader wanting more…and perhaps there was more the writer could have done. Both read like Parts One of a longer novel.

Robert Silverberg’s Nightwings (1969)

A classic of New Wave era SF, Nightwings has seemn many editions over the years, a graphic novel, and status as a prime staple of Robert Silverberg’s career.

The first third, the main novella, was written in 1968 and published in Galaxy as the behest of Fred Pohl, who wanted to draw Silverberg back into the SF field that he had “retired” from in the early to mid 60s, after the magazine market had crashed, writing a lot of softcore titles and YA non-fiction hardcobers, both of which proved to be financially lucrative.

This first novella was the first work Silverberg wrote after his house caught on fire and while he was in rented digs, awaiting the completion of repairs. The somber feel of homelessness and invasion pervades the text.

The setting is a far future earth, where certain cities and continents still possess noticable names with different spellings, the way Iraq was once Urk: Roum for Rome, Perris for Paris, Afreek for Africa…North America is known as the Lost Continent.  People belong to various categories of guilds and orders: the Watches, the Fliers, the Rememberers, the Changlings, and of course there is royalty that oversee each city.

The narratir, Tomis, is an old man of the Watcher Guild. His duty each nght is to psychically wander the skies and space, watchuing for the coming of an invading race that owns earth’s financial debt and has vowed to one day make its claim.  The invaders are of a race whose people were once abducted by earthers of another bygone era and placed in zoos, along with many other alien races.  Primitive at the time, this race vows one day to take revenge for its people. Hundreds of years down the line, earth nearly destroys itself, is saved by a galactic federation and is left with a re-building debt, which this venegful race pays off and is now a creditor.  This situation hs an odd ring of the present, with China essentially owning a lot of the USA’s debt.

The credtor race had vowed to claim earth once its technology and weapons were up to par. This is a race that rememners its ancestors shame deeply.  When they do arrive, the invasion and conquest is swift.

Tomis had been traveling with a young Flyer, a lithe naked beauty with wings, often depicted on the book’s various covers.  Although Tomis is too old for her, she loves him (later, when his body is renewed, they come together).  Tomis switches from the Watchers, a guild now not needed, to the Remembers, basically historians. He travels with a blinded Prince of Roum, who hides as a Pilgrim, his life in danger.

The invasion does not seem too bad; in fact, the aliens, some called Manrule with numbers, inact socialist laws that seem to fare better for the populace.

Tomis’ ultimate goal to to make a pilgrimage to Jorselm where it is possible to be renewed, to have his body returned to a younger form, if his sins and deeds are worthy.

The novel touches on religion, faith, social order and sexual politics and is a fine classic SF read.

The Many Worlds of Barry Malzberg (1975)

in 1975, Barry Malzberg published two collections, this 160 page little book and the massive, SF classic, The Best of Barry Malzberg (Pocket Books). By 1975, however, Malzberg had pretty much stopped writing SF novels and was collaborating on mysteries with Bill Pronzini and writing the Lone Wolff series as Mike Berry. But he was still chrurning out stories; his trademark was the 1500 word quickie tale of strange virtual reality or time travel schizoanalysis.

This one opens with a preface from Roger Elwood, the prolific editor who published many Malzberg stories in his dozens of theme anthologies and commissioning novels for various paperback houses, like Tactics of Conquest for Pyramid, that Malzberg wrote in four days and broke some ground in SF with an explicit gay rape scene. (The story, “Closed Sicilian,” that the novel expands is also in this collection — a short of SF take on Nabokov.)

Malzberg broke many taboos and crossed many lines in SF, including incest and matricide in his work.

Many Worlds collects several much reprinted works, like the novella “Final War,” a Nebula nominated work that I have always been convinced was ripped off by Oliver Stone for Platoon, since it’s about solidiers who turn against and kill a sadistic officer. Malzberg wrote “:Final War” in the late 60s as a Vietnam cautionary tale but was unable to sell it to literary markets, so revised the first page to make it SF and immediately placed it with The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Two other widely reprinted stories are also included: “In the Cup” and “Death to the Keeper.”

“Here they are, what Nabokov calls the sins of youth,” Mazlberg starts the introduction, and notes that he is now thirty and feels old. Ha! I bet he looks back on that statement now and guffaws — the folly of youth! For instance, why did Malzberg include the sub-par story, “Initiation,” as the first story? It’s a weird tale about the narrator and his “Pop” kidnapping a 19 year old girl, and telling her they wish to form a cult of worshippers to usher in a speedy Armageddon event, for they are Satan and the Anti-Christ and demand that she bow down to their power, only in the end she has more power in a twist in semantics. Sounds cool but it falls flat.

Malzberg was writing about the ill effects of virtual realities used for simulations and therapy in the 70s, long before anyone else. One such tale is “The Union Forever,” that starts off with a presidential aide plotting to assassinate the President, and the the President desires to kill the aide, or they kill each other — we find out it is all computer simulations working on a variety of scenarios, and then the President and his aide, mere analogue computer tape constructs, turning against the computer and destroying what gives them reality.

But is Malzberg ever acknowledged for this pioneering vision?

Kung Fu by Howard Lee aka Barry N. Malzberg (1973)

Well, this is a vintage paperback…I am adding it because it has an interesting back story.  I was re-reading it today because it was penned by none other than Barry N. Malzberg, probably the most unlikely fit for a TV tie-in writer.

I’d once asked Malzberg about it.  He of course did it for a quick paycheck, like his adaptation of Phase IV, a strange little low budget SF movie that was more in tune with Malzberg’s style and concerns.  Seems Warner Books needed someone to write this in a week, which he did, and as part of the deal, Warner agreed to publish his 1974 collection, Out from Ganymede, which explains how that book of esoteric and experimental short stories was published by a commercial paperback house.

Malzberg has not found the irony golden that this Kung Fu title sold half a million copies and made the bestseller lists, outdoing any original book he penned, and he saw no royalties, it was  a work for hire, probably feeling the same dismay that Mike Avvalone and Harry Whittington experienced when they were paid $1500 for their Man from UNCLE tie ins which were bestsellers and sold well.

Speaking of which, Mike Avallone seemed to have penned the next two Howard Lee Kung Fu books.  In the arly 70s, Kung Fu was one of the biggest TV shows going — much to Bruce Lee’s dismay, who conceived the show and had it stolen from him.

So how is the book?  It’s okay.  Malzberg was obviously just translating a TV script to prose, but here and there a few Malzbergian sentences make their way in — the fact that Malzberg adapted this is worth the price of purchase alone; many writers have done tie-ins for a buck, and we did get one of his best collections of stories out of the deal.

Here’s the galleys of that book:

Samuel R. Delany’s Empire Star (1966)

Empire Star is a strange novella — minimal in its prose, confusing in its plot.  18-year-old Comet Joe is approached by a dying alien who asks Joe to deliver a message to the Empre Star sector of the Galaxy, a place where time and reality get mised up. The alien turns into a jewel to e carried, and Joe brings his devil cat pet with him, depicted in this later Bantam edition:

The wiki entry talks about the finer points of this novella, intended to be a companion piece to Babel-17.

If this novella had been written by an unknown author today, it would probably not find a home, at least not in commercial publishing.  In 1966, however, Delany already had proven himself and Donald Wollheim at Ace was more than happy to keep buying books from the young writer.

There are some shadows of style and scenery that cyberpunk writers have borrowed down the line.

The narrative is circular — it ends where it begins, from a different point of view: a major theme therein: does reality change depending on the observer/narrator?

Robert Silverberg’s The World Inside (1971)

I’m taking a look at Silverberg’s A World Inside on this blog as a post-Don Elliott work, and a work with sexuality as a strong theme.

Some critics call this a short collection, and the seven chapters appeared as stand-alone stories in Galaxy Magazine and Harry Harrison’s Nova 1.  The same characters pop up in various chapters, and each main character per chapter/story has his/her own crises of social docorum.

A work from SF’s “New Wave,” The World Inside is also sociological science-fiction — it deals with possibilities of how human beings will live together in the future, create new laws and mores, symbolic interaction, new forms of religions (based on old forms), and theories of urban living.  In fact, the first chapter, a “sciocomputator” from Venus comes to earth to study human interaction and social customs in the “urbmons” — or urban monads, 1000 story-high buildings, vertical cities that can house up to 800,000 people each.  The “vertical theory” is that population expansion is not an issue if people live in dwellings going up, rather than taking space on land, land which can then be used for agricultural purposes to feed the 60 billion people on earth.  The urbmons make the World Trade Center look like an ant hill…

Each urbmon has an old city name like Chicago or Shanghai or Calcutta. In the San Francisco urbmon, many artists live.

The sociological fascination the researcher from Venus finds is the urbmon dweller’s mores on sex and procreation; they are all a religious people,always praising a single God whom they believe wishes them to reproduce like rabbits.  There’s room, so why not?  Children are taught sexuality early, at age 8-10, and by 12-13 they get married and start having kids right away.  The more children you have, the higher your social position. A character in chapter one, Charles Mattern, feels shame because he and his wife are in their 20s and only have two children, whereas their friends all have five or six by now.

Swinging free love abounds in the urbomns, a social remedy to envy, greed, and possessiveness…the men go on what’s called “Nightwalking,” looking for sexual encounters.  No homes are locked and any man may enter the dwellings of another family and request sex with the lady of the household or a girl who is ready for sex.  To reject such a request is considered a social deviance and punishable.  The practice is sexist since the women don’t nightwalk — and those who do are frowned upon — and siply wait in their homes, each night never knowing if they will sleep with their husband, a neighbor, or a stranger.  Nightwalking is usually confined to one’s urbmon, rather than going from building (or city) to building, although some do, like the musicians who tour the urbmons.

One character who shows up in many chapters is Siegmund (for Freud?), a 15-year-old administrator who starts to have a crises of faith about living in confinement.  He begins to question the open sexuality and the procreation habits, and wonders about “the world outside.”  He goes to see a “blessman,” or priest, abot his spiritual conflicts; the blessman recommends social reconditioning.

Drugs are also openly used, hallucinogens that help the dwellers “become one” with their buildings.

Another character, Michael, a musician, becomes curious about the outside world and goes exploring, only to be taken captive by a farming commune whyo think he’s a spy.  The dwellers of the outside world have their own social customs, worshipping multiple gods and performing sacrifices.  They do not believe in over-population and have ceremonies where a pregnant woman is beaten and has a miscarriage to ensure low pregnancy and a good fertile year for the crops.

The urbons and farming communes have a symbiotic relationship, although neither trusts the other and they do not share religious and social beliefs.

I read the ebook edition available on iTunes for the iPad, my first purchase for my iPad.  The new edition has a 2009 preface from Silverberg, explaining he wrote this at a time when many SF writers were addressing future population issues — such as Harry Harrison’s classic Make Room! Make Room!, later made into the Charleston Heston film, Soylent Green.

Word has it that X-Files alum Frank Spotnitz is developing The World Inside as a possible TV series. Will it happen? Hopefully so.  I don’t think any of Silverberg’s books have made it to the big or small screens yet.

Are the urbmons phallic images, thus the character Siegmund. A friend who once worked for architects told me that they all competed in ways that their rising towers were symbolic cocks.  Are they Towers of Babel?  Silverberg already addressed that in The Glass Tower.

It is interesting to read this 1971 work, compared to, say, a 1961 work as Don Elliott or Loren Beauchamp, and note the evolution (and similarities) in Silverberg’s prose style and content.

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