Customer Reviews

The Face of the Waters: Limited Edition

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

For those who reach the voyage's end, the last chapter of The Face of the Waters will determine whether one loves or hates the book. Till that point, though, the voyage presents heavy sailing.

The author starts with a strong premise: human criminals have been exiled to Hydros, a world of floating artificial islands whose inhabitants, the "Gillies," grudgingly grant the intruders asylum. After the earth's destruction makes their exile permanent, they must build a society on the fringes of the Gillies' world.

Conflict arises on Sorve, where the family of Valben Lawler, the island's hereditary doctor, has lived in precarious contentment for generations. When, though, Nid Delagard, a crass, but powerful shipowner who makes Sorve his port, accidentally kills some semi-intelligent marine mammals, the Gilles peremptorily order him and all of the other humans on the island to leave it within thirty days, on pain of death. Even the intercession of Lawler, who trades on his family's services to the Gillies, fails to move them, and he and his companions are cast out of their marginal Eden.

The story of their quest for a new home follows the traditions of the great novels of the sea, in which the sky is the face of an impersonal god of nature, the surface of the sea a mirror of the human soul, and the depths a crucible of human experience. The goal of the islanders' quest mutates under the influence of the endless sea and of Father Quillan, an apostate priest who both doubts and longs for the exsitence of a personal God. Heeding Father Quillan's exhortations, Delagard turns his fleet away from the inhabited islands and towards the Face of the Waters, a mysterious natural island taboo to the Gillies. There, the voyagers learn the true nature of their adoptive world and face a choice that will evermore alter their nature.

In telling his sweeping tale of a voyage of discovery, Mr. Silverberg deliberately frustrates many of the conventions that would involve the reader in it. Meticulously described, fascinating alien organisms emerge from the depths, only to play apparently no further role in the story. Other creatures, for no apparent reason, attack the fleet and destroy persons and ships as abruptly and unsentimentally as death does in real life.

The characters are often more frustrating than the setting is. Coarse, selfish, and short-sighted, they speak, not in the artificially clear and significant speech of conventional fiction, but in a style that faithfully reflects the ambiguities and banality of everyday fiction, and the narrowness of their own lives.

Mr. Silverberg's greatest challenge to the reader is his choice of a viewpoint character: a man alienated from his society and even from himself. Although Valben Lawler holds a respected position in his society, he himself is a loner, largely content to be a passive observer of life. (As a symbol of his distance from the world around him, he regularly doses himself with an extract of numbweed, which dulls his perceptions as well as his pain.) Wishing to preserve his memories of a happier past (the earth's and his own), he interacts only reluctantly with his crewmates. Thus, whatever joys and sorrows they feel reach the reader through the filter of an outsider's mind

In the end the novel's seemingly pointless events and disagreeable characters fall into a pattern: looking back from the Face of the Waters, one can see why the sea had to be hostile and the characters petty. At this point one's response to the ending will be as personal as an evangelist's presentation of the Gospel. What the reader brings into one's reading will determine whether one finds the ending triumphant, tragic, or trivial. Mr. Silverberg has created a work that challenges rather than caresses the reader, and leaves one to find for oneself the work's significance.

Robert Silverberg's novel, The Face of the Waters, is one of his better novels. I believe that the soul of the novel lies not in the characters themselves, but in their reactions to the situations presented. If I were to pick one character which Silverberg has developed, it would be the Doctor. He is pretty much the only character that Silverberg chooses to develop well, but this does not detract from the novel. Instead, it gives the reader insight enough to understand the implications and strength of the end of the novel. Without the Doctor's inclination to be a loner, yet his desire to fit in, the ending could not have the impact it does.

Yes, the journey/plot sometimes lags, but one has to admire the richness of Silverberg's world of Hydros. Many other authors simply leave it at the fact that the world is an alien one and that it's different form Earth. Silverberg, on the other hand, shows the biodiversity of Hydros (which is a key aspect of the novel).

Overall, Silverberg creates a rich world teeming with alien life and infested with the few humans who live on Hydros. In my opinion, he develops well the only character who matters and creates a great story. Unlike some of his other books (namely The Stochastic Man and To Open the Sky), Silverberg does not let his apparent fatalism, cynicism, and pessimism influence the novel too much, leaving the reader with just the right combination of all three, with even a bit of optimism thrown in. In general, I think Silverberg did a wonderful job in writing this novel, and, unlike another reader, I'm going to keep it and not return it to the second-hand bookstore.

My guess is that Silverberg's intention with this novel was to take the Campbell/Heinlein/Golden Age paradigm of man mastering his environment and turn it on its head. The end, which I won't spoil for you Silverberg fans intent on reading it, strikes this individualist as the most philosophically corrupt ending he has ever read. That said, the book is written with Silverberg's usual intelligence and skill; he brings a hellish world to horrifying life.

A pretty forgettable book. Most of the characters are not well-developed, so as various disasters happened on the voyage and characters were killed off one-by-one or in groups I didn't feel too upset as I hardly knew who they were anyway. That 95% of the story is one ill-fated adventure after another gets tedious. The religous aspect of the story is trite and predictable. Likewise the ending was pretty obvious. This is the first novel I've read by Silverberg; I hope his other ones are better. Off to the second-hand bookstore this one is going!

Gripping in Silverberg's usual way because even his heroes are all too human--flawed people doing their best in extreme situations. The books sags a bit in the middle, but features a masterful and mind-blowing conclusion with both metaphysical and religious implications

This is definitely one of Silverberg's greatest books. It starts out as a sea adventure story that turns into a powerful metaphor of spiritual surrender and Oneness

Moby Dick meets Homer's Odyssey in this sci-fi adventure by Robert Silverberg. The planet Hydros is almost completely covered by water, and given the lack of sufficient metals to support a technological civilization, there is no escape. Our hero is Dr. Lawler, a respected healer and voice of reason, whose tiny collection of Earth-made artifacts ties him to the dreams of a lost past on a distant home world. Captain Delagard is the irrationally motivated merchant prince who uses his dreams of greatness to justify the most disreputable sort of means. Tricked into a seemingly endless voyage to nowhere, the ragtag crew of human survivors faces terrible dangers before deciding if they want to maintain their essential humanity, or trade it in for the possibility of something far greater.

From a sci-fi perspective, the best part of this novel is the dazzling array of bizarre alien life forms, but most are just one-shot threats, and only the island-building Gillies are really developed to any extent. There are long sections where Silverberg seems to be more interested in the psycho-social dynamics of the ship's crew than in the voyage itself, a tactic that only emphasizes how wooden and one-dimensional these characters are to begin with. Our perspective being such that only the doctor is really important to us, none of the others are sufficiently realistic, complex, or engaging to sustain the kind of psychological thriller that Silverberg seems intent on creating. So while this book is not a bad read, there are too many long stretches where the writer seems to be killing time before the next alien attack. And after the long journey's end, the grand conclusion we were waiting for is based on one of the more tired clichés in science fiction. Silverberg's fans will surely enjoy this book, but given his prodigious output, casual readers would be better advised to pick one of his better novels over this substandard effort. I personally suggest the beautiful and delicate Nightwings, or the monumental The World Inside.

A small human population lives on an oceanic planet with only floating land masses, nothing that could support a spaceport, no humans will ever leave. They have an uneasy relationship with the native amphibious Gillies and at the story's opening the occupants of island Sorve are told they must leave.

The real gem of this novel is the strikingly dangerous native life, the ocean's red-in-tooth-and-claw life, killing on member of the departing expedition after another.

Misses five stars only because their ultimate destination, named in the title, is too mystical and vague, something about hive mind and living in accord with the planet.

In "The Face of the Waters" Robert Silverberg has created a frightening and imaginative water-world. Humans have spread across the galaxy. Earth is only remembered in myths and rare artifacts. And prisoners are sent to settle a hostile aquatic planet known as Hydros. Generations of humans live on floating islands of organic matter constructed by an amphibious species of natives. For centuries there is an uneasy peace between humans and their much stronger native hosts until one day the inhabitants of one island anger the natives and are forced to leave. A small fleet sets sail looking for another island that will take them in, and they discover the secret of the legendary Dry Land.

This book is both imanigitive and intensely suspenseful. Both of these elements are brought to fullness in the prologue in an intense scene in which an alien species which looks like a fishing net drags a ship's captain overboard to his watery grave. Silberberg fills Hydros with unusual and plausible forms of life, and he manages to keep up both the sense of wonder and the sense of danger throughout the book. Hydros is a hostile, alien world; and humans are not welcome here.

Great book. Unfortunately I thought the ending totally sucked.

This book has one big problem; more than half the novel is set on water, where the only thing to do is watch the native lifeforms and wonder which crewman is going to be the next to be picked off.

The protagonist, as has been mentioned, is not the most likable, and the entire crew seems lacking in different ways -- there is little love or comfort between people who have supposedly lived their entire lives on the same tiny island. In some ways the mood reminds me of Dying Inside, but without the complex interpersonal reactions and introspection. This is just down.

Ultimately they reach their goal, but I found even this unsatisfying. It's a perfectly reasonable science fiction novel, but there's nothing that indicates Silverburg was trying with this one.