Starborne [Paperback]

Robert Silverberg (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 1, 1997

Fifty men and women are chosen as the crew of the Wotan, in what is certain to be the greatest voyage of exploration in human history. Their mission is to travel to the  furthest reaches of the galaxy in search of inhabitable worlds. The crew is shut off from Earth except for a telepathic link between a crew member and his sister back home. But when that connection is broken, the Wotan is lost in space until it encounters a vast alien presence that forces the crew to question everything they know about life and death.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

In Starborne, Silverberg takes the Utopia theme and turns it on its head. The scene is Earth many centuries in the future, where all of life's problems have been solved. But while humanity may be well fed, amply clothed, in perfect health, and rich beyond imagination, people are bored nearly to death. To bring a little spark back into the lives of humankind, the people of Earth band together to build a starship and begin the search for habitable planets in the rest of the universe. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Publishers Weekly

One of SF's most prolific writers, Silverberg (Hot Sky at Midnight, 1995, etc.) seems to be resting on his considerable laurels (which include four Hugos and five Nebulas) with this meandering and talky philosophical exercise. A multiethnic crew of 50 humans are aboard a starship, carrying enough genetic material to populate a new world, and thus to rejuvenate the human race, which is currently stagnating on Earth. As they hurtle through the galaxy seeking a habitable planet, the crew spends much of its leisure time discussing the higher reasoning and visualizing functions involved in playing the game of Go. The narrative focuses on Noelle, the blind mission communicator whose ability to converse telepathically with her sister jumpstarted the mission, and the year-captain, a monk-turned-xenobiologist who tries to hide his infatuation with Noelle. In time, a kind of static impedes communications between the sisters. Members of the crew postulate that "angels" of some type are causing the interference. Will continued attempts at communication destroy Noelle? Silverberg writes compelling prose, flocked with lovely imagery, as always, but this novel falls far short of Geoffrey Ryman's more elegiac and transcendent pieces using similar themes.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 240 pages
• Publisher: Spectra (July 1, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0553573349
• ISBN-13: 978-0553573343
• Product Dimensions: 6.6 x 4.1 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 2.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (17 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,908,808 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Faster than light, and brighter than a thousand suns., August 10, 2001

By 

Esther (Essex) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Starborne (Paperback)

Oh, the joy of discovering (long overdue, in this case) a truly accomplished author! It appears that Silverberg's been at this game for a number of years. However, that doesn't stop him from being right at the cutting edge of what, to me, Science Fiction should be all about. Earth has become safe, practically disease-free, and humans enjoy peace, longevity and total freedom from want. But there are aspects of human nature that remain unfulfilled when people live in perfect contentment. Earth's population is dwindling inevitably towards extinction. There are no challenges remaining to the human intellect, no calls for courage or sacrifice. So fifty intrepid and highly accomplished voyagers set out to discover a new horizon for humanity by virtue of nospace travel at many times the speed of light. The novel is almost wholly focused upon the ship and its occupants, particularly the year-captain, a Scandinavian hero of previous exploratory space missions to the moons of Jupiter, but also an ex-actor and ex-monk, who has a uniquely esoteric logical, analytical yet spiritual personality, deeply appealing but almost totally aloof; his friend and colleague from previous missions, Huw, a good-humoured, practical, reassuring presence in the face of any imaginable kind of adversity, and Noelle, chosen for the mission for her ability to communicate via telepathy with her identical twin sister Yvonne notwithstanding the distance between them. There is a sense of the epic voyage about this novel: Beowulf meets Odysseus meets the Mayflower. The prose is so beautiful that it is practically poetry. Not a word is wasted, and the simplicity of style conveys the complexity of ideas in this novel to perfection. Silverberg pays homage to the literary greats and the classics but is not once deflected from the joyful thrust of extraplanetary, superluminary SF. To fail to read this novel would be to miss a life-enhancing opportunity.

6 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars An irregular book, with a short end for too long a novel., November 26, 1998

By 

Clemente Zamora Ramos (Sevilla, Spain) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Starborne (Paperback)

Such a disapointment! This novel has quite a few weak points that a veteran science fiction writer should not allow themselves, the narration is a bit jumpy, with a varying degree of detail being assigned to unexpected aspects, and some technical details look weird (that is, different from the expected and not explained by any alleged futuristic developments). The ending is not ellaborated enough, which makes you feel even more that the rest of the novel was too long for such a climax. This is the first novel by Robert Silverberg that I read and it does not show me where all the good qualities of this author resides. BTW, does anybody know what the author intention could be in going all that way (at some points the sentences felt forced) to deprive the year-captain from a normal name? And has anyone figured out whether there is any relationship between the "angels" (I don't want to spoil the end) and the psychic powers of Planet A?

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars I couldn't put this book down, April 3, 2008

By 

Kiwireader K (Wellington, New Zealand) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Starborne (Paperback)

Silverberg produced a weird, dreamlike feeling of surreality with this book that I found addictive. There was a cloud of doubt over everyone and everything, which kept the pages turning until the end. Highly recommend it.