Customer Reviews

Starborne

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

 

 

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.

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?

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.

This book is a complete waste of time. It's a fast read, but it has no substance. It has no narrative tension. It has no characters. It is a sloppy amalgamation of all the "telepathy with aliens" stories every published, written in what is probably supposed to be chic and spare present tense. To be fair, I did enjoy one page of it, in which the aliens join with Noelle's mind, and it is described only in terms of the features of the brain. I found this a very effective narrative device. But the ending is entirely brainless. I plan to try a different Silverberg novel, if I can bring myself to do it.

The first two-thirds of this book were intriguing, and as the crew discovered and explored planets, I was on the edge of my seat in suspense. The ending, however, is just plain stupid. Silverberg takes a crewmember's random guess and builds it into a non-believable and unrelated second plot line that finishes the book far too rapidly and unsatisfyingly.

If the last few pages of this well written book do not heighten your sense of wonder, you shouldn't read real SF. Stick to your weak novels made from TV shows. I was kissing the book after I finished. It was a very tight book. You felt as if in a dream state throughout. You could feel the harshness of the metal surrounding the crew. You could feel the Year-Captain's confusion. A beautiful piece of art. Not by any means the greatest, but not one to scorn. Silverberg is my favorite author, and this book was great art.

Well, I picked this up because I was grabbing books at a library sale - you know, the last day special, everything you can fit in a box for $2. So I knew I was getting what others weren't interested in. But my hopes were at a decent place because, you know, it is Silverberg writing here.

And it wasn't too bad - but it definitely wasn't that great. I think it was primarily anticlimactic at the end. He had an interesting pace throughout, and I definitely was ripping and roaring through it, wondering what was going to happen next. The characters were vivid and intriguing. (SPOILER ALERT!) But, and I've noted it in other reviews, this climaxing end of a "super-evolution" - or something of that nature - of mankind, is pretty lame to me. Yeah, it did have some poetic overtones, but I was just dissatisfied in the end.

Another interesting point I'll note is that if anyone has read Silverberg's "Star of Gypsies", you might recognize 'Planet B' in this book. Just by the ending of this book, you can tell that these two stories can't occupy the same timeline (of the same universe) - though there might be argument for different timeline, same universe, if one cares to make it. I think Silverberg just came up with an incredible idea for a planet in this book and ended up exploring the concept a little more in another.

So, overall, would I recommend it? Not really - unless it's one of the last books in your "to read" pile and you don't feel like heading out to the store (or online) to buy more...as it was in my case. I don't regret reading it, Silverberg is an incredible writer and you can still learn from and enjoy him on his off days, but there are much better books out there for you to spend your time reading than this.

I *was* enjoying this book. Nothing competely orignal here, but old ideas were put together in interesting ways. I felt that the book was building up to something, then it decided to take a different course. Not a surprise ending in any way, just something that leaves you asking "but what about everything else?"

Fifty brilliant men and women set off on an interstellar expedition to find a new home for humanity and end up discovering - themselves. That hokey summary aside, though, this is a solid novel from sci-fi grandmaster Robert Silverberg, featuring good characterizations, a believable star voyage, and some unusual planetary discoveries. This book borrows heavily from Robert Heinlein's fine juvenile Time for the Stars, which also features one half of a pair of identical twins who communicate telepathically in order to keep their star-going vessel in contact with earth. Like Heinlein's book, there's a strong element of the psychological mixed in with occasional landings on unknown planets, and extensive descriptions of the ship and its sociopolitical structure, although it should be admitted that Heinlein covers this territory far more thoroughly and convincingly. Where this book differs from Heinlein's is in the characters, who are much more grown up, and whose strengths and weaknesses are discussed more frankly than in Heinlein's book, which is told in the first person by a not-so-insightful teenaged boy. Unfortunately, for a book that is so strongly character-based, the year-captain, the explorer Huw, and Noelle, the blind telepath, don't seem all that overpoweringly realistic. Their behavior strikes one as too consistently rational, predictable, and altruistic. Quite a bit of this book focuses on irrelevancies like playing Go, the year-captain's longing to relinquish his authority, and the burgeoning romances between the main characters. The conclusion is pretty standard fare to most sci-fi readers, and has been done much more effectively by other writers. Overall, the thing most missing from this novel is originality, something that is usually Silverberg's strength. He took the situation from one novel and his conclusion from another, and tried to go into a little more depth psychologically than is common, but he doesn't seem to have much really new to offer. There's virtually no slam/bang action in this story; it's a story about relationships, so young women who are into sc-fi will probably enjoy this more than their male counterparts. This doesn't mean the novel isn't an engrossing entertainment, but it's certainly not Silverberg's best.

This book unfortunately is typical of how RS writes these later years. Takes old short stories and blowsm up into full scale novels, even though there may be only one idea to the plot. To much laziness from a very gifted author. Sad.