Lord Prestimion (Prestimion Trilogy) [Hardcover]

Robert Silverberg (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 1999 | Series: Prestimion Trilogy (Book 2)

King of the world! Prestimion is Coronal Lord of Majipoor. The Starburst Crown is his at last.

The 30,000 rooms of the castle are crammed with eager guests and exotic gifts from the farthest corners of the largest and most wondrous planet in all the galaxy. Jubilation--not unmixed with greed and lust--sweeps through the Fifty Cities, which crowd the heights of the thirty-five-mile-high Castle Mount.

The coronation, its solemn ceremonies and bawdy delights, are Prestimion's to savor. Even love is possible again--a love that might replace the soaring passion he once knew. So why is he so sad? From whence this emptiness that darkens his soul like night?

Prestimion is burdened with a great secret, perhaps the greatest ever known. For he gained the throne through a bloody civil war, which stained the rivers crimson and strewed the fields with severed limbs. And yet it is a war no one remembers!

Prestimion swore an oath after his victory at Thegomar Edge. The war had left a scar upon the world--a scar he vowed to heal. With a phalanx of sorcerers, he invoked the awesome Spell of Oblivion and dropped it over his ravaged people like a cloak. Forgotten were the betrayals of Korsibar, the intrigues of the two-headed Su-Suheris, and the slaughter wrought by Dantirya Sambail at Mavestoi. It was as though the war had never been. Only Prestimion and two of his surviving comrades-in-arms remembered anything happened at all.

So how can Prestimion, now Coronal Lord of Majipoor, account for the devastation that still lies upon the land? How can he mourn the fallen sons and brothers who never died because they never existed? And most troubling, how can he bring to justice the kinsman who languishes in the dungeon because no one remembers his unforgivable crime?

Yet in this, his hour of triumph, Prestimion faces a rebellion far more insidious than war. When something, even sorrow, is taken away, something else rushes in to fill the void. In this case it is a global madness: a twisted violence that no ruler can control, no kingdom can keep away, and no love can long survive

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Robert Silverberg has been one of SF's most prolific and popular writers since the mid-1950s. His science-fantasy stories set on the huge, exotic world called Majipoor began with Lord Valentine's Castle (1980), which the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction calls "polished but rather languid." In Lord Prestimion, the hero Prestimion takes the throne as Coronal, coruler of Majipoor, a millennium before Lord Valentine's reign. His crowning follows the long, ruinous civil war to overthrow a usurping Coronal, a war now literally forgotten: Prestimion's sorcerers have imposed amnesia on the people of Majipoor in hope of preventing any further uprising. Such a memory wipe reeks of wrongness and seems to have caused the infectious plague of insanity. Meanwhile, one very bad man, who is a leading rebel and warmonger, recovers his memories and escapes to make new mischief. After various colorful, almost dream-like travelogues, the situation is saved--a little too easily?--by telepathic gadgetry. (The device in question and several crossover characters appear in the 1982 story-cycle Majipoor Chronicles.) Smoothly written but somewhat short on real suspense, even in the swashbuckling comic sequence when Prestimion's Regent fights and kills at least 21 would-be assassins during one morning's office paperwork. It's just another day in the life of a Majipoor civil servant. --David Langford, Amazon.co.uk

From Publishers Weekly

The latest volume of Silverberg's colossal Majipoor cycle (Sorcerers of Majipoor, etc.) makes a respectable addition to the series of fantasy tales set in a far-future, far-distant human-settled world. Just after he is crowned Coronal, and thus ruler, of Majipoor, Prestimion faces a number of problems. The treacherous rebel leader Procurator Dantirya Sambail has escaped from the royal dungeons, and Prestimion must pursue him across the vast face of Majipoor. A plague of madness has spread through his subjects, with more gruesome incidents cropping up every week, and Prestimion must struggle to contain it while he wonders if he himself caused the trouble when he cast a spell to make everyone forget the bloody civil war that brought him to power. At the same time, the Coronal is recovering from the death of his last love and growing increasingly interested in the graceful daughter of a boorish merchant. Eventually all the quandaries are resolved in a climax so fast and so furious that it is over before it can build up any proper emotional impact. Silverberg gives over much space to travelogues on Majipoor, a vividly described setting that is as captivating as any of the people who inhabit it, but he fails to spend the same amount of care developing Prestimion's character. In contrast, he does a fine job on minor playersAthe precocious Lord Dekkeret; brave Prince Akbalik; the two-headed sorcerer, Maundigan-Klimd; and Prestimion's brother, Abrigant. These personalities keep the novel lively enough to please Majipoor's many dedicated followers. (Aug.) FYI: Silverberg has published more than 100 books of SF, fantasy and nonfiction.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 416 pages
• Publisher: Harpercollins; 1st edition (August 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0061050288
• ISBN-13: 978-0061050282
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.9 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 2.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,241,093 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars For Majipoor hardcore only, July 5, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Lord Prestimion (Prestimion Trilogy) (Mass Market Paperback)

Actually, until I read this book I would have considered myself among the Majipoor hardcore. I've read and enjoyed all of the Majipoor books immensely.

This book however, was a major disappointment. It's really an extended travelogue of the major continent. Character development is given short-shrift, plot is one-dimensional, motivations are not explained, etc, etc. The publisher could have cut the book in half without losing any relevant content.

A book has to be really dreadful for me to start start skipping sections. It usually starts with me skipping a sentence or two, then a paragraph or two, then entire pages if the book is terrifically bad. With Lord Prestimion I was skipping the pages like there's no tomorrow.

On the other hand, if you enjoy reading about the strange and bizarre lands/plants/animals or Majipoor, this is your book. For me, the scenery should be the background to the story. Here, it's the whole story.

I would give this book a one-star review, except I have to reserve that dubious distinction for Robert Jordan's "Path of Daggers". At least there's no spanking, although there is a marriage proposal even though the two characters have only spent a whole hour face-to-face.

6 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Just a travelogue..., November 18, 2000

By 

C. S. Junker "soul_survivor" (Burien, WA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Lord Prestimion (Prestimion Trilogy) (Mass Market Paperback)

This sequel to "Sorcerers of Majipoor" has to rank as one of Silverberg's weakest efforts. "Sorcerers" was a simple enough story but it was reasonably compelling; however, in "Lord Prestimion" not much happens. The Coronal and his lieutenants traipse about the globe for several hundred pages unitl it's time to wrap things up. Even Silverberg's luminous prose can't make up for the fact that there isn't much of a story to be told.

Fundamentally, Majipoor makes no sense. The larger a planet, the less unified it would be and the more unstable the politics. On Majipoor, we are asked to believe, not only is there one language and culture but the same political system has existed without change for thousands of years. With a sufficiently vigorous plot, one can overlook this and suspend one's disbelief, but there's not enough going on here to distract you from the man behind the curtain (so to speak).

Jack Vance's Big Planet, by contrast, depicts a giant-size world as it probably would be --- a thousand contentious cultures, no central political control of any kind, technology limited only by the lack of metals. Surely Silverberg is familiar with this venerable work (in many ways, one of Vance's best); but Majipoor is fantasy, not SF. Still, we know Silverberg can do much better.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars YAWN... Very boring.. the worst of the series thus far., September 7, 2004

By 

C. T. Hunter "chips_books" (Gainesville, FL United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Lord Prestimion (Prestimion Trilogy) (Mass Market Paperback)

Well, even though this book was quite long, not much actually happened in it. The storyline at the end of this one hasn't really changed much at all since the last book. Basically this whole novel was centered around the Procurator of Nimoya's escape from Prestimion and the Coronal's efforts to locate him.. The spreading madness on Majipoor was emphasized but nothing was ever done about it be Prestimion.. Most of the book was taken up by descriptions of the landscape and fauna of the places that Prestimion journeyed through.. Nothing really exciting or surprising happened at all. Yawn.. Wouldn't reccomend this one. I guess I'll go ahead and read the last of the series since I've already come this far, but I don't really have high hopes for it..