Customer Reviews

To live again

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

 

 

...this is one of my favorite Silverberg novels. Five stars may seem rather high, but I have found pleasure in reading it many times, and what truer measure of value is there than repeated enjoyable readings?
It is considered to be a minor work in the Silverberg opus, however. If you are looking for pretense or snob-literature, this is not the book for you. If you are looking for the definitive statement of Silverberg-the-writer, then this is not that either (and there is no such book, Silverbob has had too varied and rich a career to be epitomized by any one work).
If, on the other hand, you want a strongly plotted story with some interesting characters and events, a world you can enjoy dipping into from time to time, then this book is great! The story has great drive and the motivations are well-justified and intense.
One note: Although I have never yet seen it mentioned (well, I haven't looked very hard), I suspect that this book is a "tribute novel" to Jack Vance's "To Live Forever" which contains many of the same devices and even very similar scenes in certain places (this is legitimate in SF, by the way; TLA is a very different work than TLF in essential ways). I wonder if anyone can confirm this for me? TLF was published, I believe, in the same year that Silverberg won the Hugo for Most Promising etc (1956).
Anyway, buy it, enjoy it, read it again later. I did.

To me, TLA is not just the average sci-fi story, it is set in the future (at least the future, as Silverberg saw it in the sixties), but that is merely a help to let the story unfold, as the transplanting of people's mind was not quite possible (yet?) The story primarily focuses on the Kaufmann family, and their greatest enemy Roditis, whom all want the mind of a deceased multinational, it is really about greed and power, about human nature, and it is very interesting at that.

To Live Again (1969) is a flawed work from a very fruitful period of Robert Silverberg's career. The ideas are original and well-conceived but a downright disgusting strain of misogyny and sexism permeates virtually every page. Bluntly put, I cannot recall a single instance where a female character does anything without the shape, size, and clothed or unclothed state of her breasts mentioned and dwelled on at length. Similarly, each female character attempts to seduce all the men in sight (including relatives). It's a shame really because our heroine Risa, over the course of the novel, develops and evolves from a headstrong child into an intelligent and self-sufficient women to be reckoned with.

The central scientific concept is a standard one: the ability to transplant the mind of a dead person into a living being. Silverberg expands this trope in a series of wonderful and original directions. A human with a transplant does not lose his own personality. Instead the host consults with the transplants and draws on their memories/personalities. Extremely powerful personalities have been known to overtake their host's mind if it is weak -- "going dybbuk."

The rich an0d wealthy procure multiple transplants for artistic reasons (for example, to appreciate sculpture), as savvy business moves (using the mind of your dead rival), or even to increase one's abilities in bed. The transplants often mature their hosts or drive them insane.

Brief Plot Summary

John Roditis and Mark Kaufmann are fierce business rivals who both desire to procure the mind of Paul Kaufmann, an extraordinarily powerful and savvy individual who has the potential to take over his host. The Scheffing Institute, who oversee the recording of the minds of wealthy/remarkable people when they are still alive to store their personas, refuses to allow Mark Kaufmann the persona since Paul was his uncle and appears to lean towards Roditis. A large portion of the work concerns the maneuvering of both men (and Mark's love Elena) in order to acquire the transplant.

The subplot, which has important ramifications for the central story, follows sixteen-year old Risa and her acquisition of her first transplant. Risa is a headstrong girl who runs around flaunting her body (argh, Silverberg, why?). After she acquires her transplant Tnady she slowly matures. From the memories of Tandy she uncovers that her transplant was murdered. Murders are extremely uncommon since the penalty is the termination of Scheffing process recordings and thus no future lives (albeit, incarnated in the mind of someone else).

Final Thoughts

Silverberg abandons one of his more interesting threads creations about half way through the novel -- a bastardized pseudo-Buddhism "religion" expanding rapidly from its California epicenter that incorporates the Scheffing process into its theology. Becoming a transplant in a host after death is a strange form of reincarnation. Sadly, it ends up more as a simplistic plot device by the end of the work.

To Live Again contains multiple well-conceived concepts and an interesting plot but its virulent strain of misogyny overshadows all the positives.