At Winter's End covers the first years out of the cacoon - it is an investigation of the new
world and of the characters within the group. Evolution, mutation, manufacture have changed
the world into a new biological wonder - more fantastic than scientific extrapolation could
tolerate, a lot seems to be vermillion or blue furred, and while tentacled things writhe
ubiquitously, sheep-like life has disappeared - but Silverberg clearly enjoys his descriptions.
The book is plotted in the sense that several discoveries, revelations and catastrophes move
it along, can be foreseen and later have significance. The first big revelation, a quarter of the
way through, came as a surprise and a pleasure in the way it was done.
Characterisation is better than the Valentine books, although I grew a little tired of Hresh
the know-it-all kid who becomes shaman to the tribe. The rite of passsage Hresh has to
undergo seems overused.
Several Silverberg themes re-appear here - the importance of intimacy and coupling, for instance, or the ruin of civilisations, but they are put to good use and are not simple repititions. They have a role to play in the plotting.
I have not outlined the main story of the book and the troop's adventures. I will leave the the pleasure of reading them to you. Other commitments meant it took me three days to read At Winter's End but I wished I did not have to put it down to go to work. It seemed good in almost every way.
A group on a small boat, their minds those of modern men and women, but their technology that of Columbus, begin this book with their number being reduced as one of them is pulled off the boat by a thing that looks like a fishing net, but still manages to poison and eat its unwilling dinner. Things don't look as if they're going to get any better.
How they got there in the first place is another matter: these are residents of Hydros, a planet covered almost entirely by water, and a few sargasso-like islands. "It was a life sentence, being born here". Along with his fellow human islanders Dr Lawler is expelled from their island, by the other sentient race - the Gillies, slow unfathomable creatures, a bit like Capek's newts - after the sleazy human leader has started exploiting yet another animal race and used them as deep sea divers without providing decompression chambers.
No other island will take the tribe, and they quickly discover that almost everything in the sea wants to hurt them a lot and then eat them. As their doctor, Lawler sees a lot of the human side of the pain, if not the being eaten. He does not have much to offer to take away the pain.
Lawler is an introverted character, with a failed marriage behind him, a renegade priest appears as well, as well as various kinds of salty dogs of both gender. Oddly, though, for all of them their search never leads them to think of getting off the planet. Weirdos arrange to be dropped, but no one of any sanity tries find a way to lift off.
The final solution, when it comes is unexpected, and requires a sort of change of attitude in the reader as to the nature of their problems. Most of the book has been an adventure, it turns into mysticism and did not seem really valid.
I was left a bit surprised because I did not find this book as good a read as, say, At Winter's End, and I was left with the vague impression of someone who'd read too much Graham Greene or J.G.Ballard and then turned into Steven Spielberg, rather than Robert Silverberg.
I say all this because Robert Silverberg's STARBORNE is just as much soap opera as a novel such as PEYTON PLACE. Silverberg's setting is the FTL starship Wotan, setting off from a tired Earth to find new planets on which humankind can launch itself with a renewed vigour. That tired society is not completely degenerate, unlike Michael Moorcock's Dancers At The End Of Time. In fact they are rather boringly like a lot of people today - just getting by. The hero is the unnamed Year- Captain of the ship, and the other two main characters are his current girlfriend, Julia, and the blind telepath, Noelle, through whom the ship remains in contact with the Earth.
The ship is slightly different from today's society in its more free sexual swapping of partners, though similar to Silverberg's earlier account of an enclosed society, THE WORLD INSIDE (1971), which is set in an arcology (tower block). In fact, the whole book is similar in more ways than one, including its being written in the present tense.
What is unusual about STARBORNE is its unbalanced structure - for a long time nothing happens. Noelle begins to lose touch with her sister, and worries about it, but it hardly changes life on the ship. Then about half way through, the ship explores its first habitable planet. Two explorers go down, and are seized by a psychic miasma, fear so great that one dies. After twenty pages the ship goes on to its second planet, vine-covered and inhabited only by giant worms.
That's all that happens to them physically.
However, Noelle's problems with telepathic communication concern the party more, and in the end, without any evidence, the ship's party attributes the interference to ethereal beings who inhabit the no-space through which the ship is travelling. The last effort of the ship must be to contact these "angels".
So this ending makes STARBORNE very similar to Silverberg's 1991 novel THE FACE ON THE WATERS, which also ends after a voyage across unknown territory with its heroes facing a supernatural experience. And I found it then to seem just as much a weakness as I do now. I can't see how supernatural transcendence can be offered so repeatedly as a satisfying conclusion. It seems just as much out of place as it would in Coronation Street or Knott's Landing.
However, it does provoke some interesting paradoxes, and you might like to compare and contrast STARBORNE with Paul Davies' non-fictional ABOUT TIME: EINSTEIN'S UNFINISHED REVOLUTION, just published by Penguin. Wotan's communication revolves around the telepathic communication between Noelle and her twin sister on Earth. Davies (who won lots of money for a book about quantum physics and religion, the Templeton Prize) has a long discussion of the "twins paradox", in which he shows that twins separated by FTL travel age differently, because time is passing at relatively different rates for them (ten years on Earth, is six years travel at close light speed). Now what this also means is that a thought which lasts, say, ten seconds on Earth lasts six seconds at FTL rates. Since Noelle and her twin Yvonne, communicate immediately (although with the interference they have to re-think, like a computer modem resending a signal which has been NAKed - negatively acknoweldged), ten seconds and six seconds are being treated as identical in both places. This cannot be true - Noelle is experiencing Earth time while in no-space, with no suggestion that she is having to make sense of time compression or dilation. She does not hear her sister's thoughts speeded-up or slowed down - they are as her thoughts, and they cannot be.
I don't know whether STARBORNE ignores the science, and then uses transcendence as an easy plot element to tie up its story, though I do feel that the Davies book is an attempt to smuggle supernaturalism into natural science. What is interesting, though, is the way in which two writers on a similar subject cannot make their stories agree. It makes me very suspicious. Which takes us back to plots. Which is where we began.