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I hadn't read any of his work, so when I found Roma Eterna with claims like "This may be his best book yet." all over it, I decided to pick it up. I got to tell you, for a multiple Hugo and Nebula Award winner, it surprised me to find that this is mostly a 449 page infodump.
True, he poses the question: What if the Roman Empire never fell?
But it consists of a series of short stories, threaded throughout an alternate history, and only a few have an real characterization in them.
So, I ask the question: Is his "celebrated Majipoor Cycle" much like this? I want to know if I should give him another chance.
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I know his name but do not recall any of his books, though I must have read some. So I found a bibliography. He seems to have found an alternative interpretation of the 'S' in SF.
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I'm fond of several of his works...early stuff, 1950s and early 1960s, like The Silent Invaders, a period that culminated in his semi-withdrawal from the SF field...mid-period, 1960s to 1970. more literary-minded work, like Downward to the Earth or Hawksbill Station, a period that ended with a more fully articulated withdrawal from the field...then stuff from his eventual return in the late 1970s like Sailing to Byzantium or Thebes of a Hundred Gates or The Alien Years or, yes, Roma Eterna. Plus a host of shorter works too numerous to name. (Plus being a writer of good non-fiction like his column for Asimov's...plus being an anthologist editor of note, original and reprint. He's done it all in the field.)
I've read and liked some of the Majipoor stuff, but not all---Silverberg is a very prolific writer, and I haven't kept up with everything...but you can do a lot worse than pick up a book by Silverberg, any book, even the Majipoor books.
(This thread reminds me of another book I want to name in that "Writing Books" thread over in the other forum...)
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I should say he's prolific: 280 fiction novels (81 major novels, 199 minor--whatever that is) and 95 non-fiction books (70 major and 25 minor) and over 276 short stories (152 major and 124 minor). He has at least 375 novel-length books, and the list on his site (Quasi-Official Site) may not be complete. That's astounding. The only person I've heard of writing more is Asimov (at 500).
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posted
Someone's started a "Collected Short Stories" series for Silverberg---I have Volume One somewhere---but I don't know how they'll manage, 'cause I gather he's kinda disowned a lot of his earliest work (from the abovementioned first period).
How do you decide whether some work is major or minor? I read---Silverberg has written a lot of intros to his work---how he didn't like and didn't think much of Downward to the Earth, thinking it second-rate imitation Conrad...then it started getting praise and award nominations, and on a reread he liked it better. Major or minor? Whose judgment?
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I have no idea who decides whether a work is major or minor. I was thinking that it had to be about length, until it was evident that short stories, novels, and non-fiction works all carried those distinctions.
My post was originally asking the question: If I didn't like Roma Eterna, would I like anything else?
Or Is Roma Eterna an example of his "best work"?
[This message has been edited by InarticulateBabbler (edited January 08, 2008).]
posted
Roma Eterna is just a collection of Silverberg's short works, with the common background, as you know, of the Roman Empire never falling. It's good, but, no, I wouldn't say it's his best work.
I don't know what ones Silverberg would pick---and there are a couple of praised works of his, like Born With the Dead, that I don't much like---and there are many other works of his that I haven't read at all---but, on my own favorites, I'd go with the aforementioned Downward to the Earth and Sailing to Byzantium.
It's odd that the advertising doesn't mention that it is inteded to be a collection of short stories. I had thought that maybe it was supposed to be an intentionally disjointed way of telling a novel length story--what with continuing and relevant references to his extended line of Ceasars--until the last short story offered no real conclusion.
I actually went through an entire range of emotions while reading Roma Eterna, and that's a good thing, but some stories were info-dumpish, and others sucked me in. I think I'll have to check out something intended to be longer.
Thanks, Robert, I had a feeling that you'd be the one to have read him.
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Well, The Alien Years was also a fix-up novel with a bunch of short stories, but the genesis of that was more interesting. I gather some of the stories went back to the late sixties...that the stories had nothing in common other than human-alien contact...and that Silverberg filed off all the rough edges to make them connect up. I got an enormous chuckle every time I reached a story I'd read years or decades earlier and got the thrill of recognition...
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