Subject: POSTREVIEW: "Majipoor Chronicles" - Robert Silverberg.

From: [email-masked] (Alex McLintock)
Date: 02 May 2000 16:37:08 -0400

Majipoor Chronicles, by Robert Silverberg.
	Review Copyright 2000 Alex McLintock  

this review will be republished on www.DiverseBooks.com

The Majipoor Chronicles is being re-published by Voyager Books in the UK
on 2 May 2000.

This is a reissue of an old collection of stories. This confused me quite
a bit since the cover didn't tell me that. The setting: Majipoor, A lost
colony from Earth. Humans have taken over the planet and have forced the
indiginous aliens off the best land and into the desert. Why they did that
I don't know because there is so much land that they can give it away to
other alien races to farm. Also Majipoor is quite a peaceful planet since
almost everyone finds the idea of killing abhorent. They also dislike
change and progress which kind of puts a downer on any really interesting
hard sf. Thankfully they have the odd thing left over from either the
previous inhabitants of Majipoor, or from old Earth.

The little technology they have on Majipoor is particlarly good at sending
out dreams and related tasks (like recording memories). These are stored
in an official library. It is this library which forms the premise of the
short story collection. Hissune is a young scholar in the civil service
under Lord Valentine.

Hissune forges documents to get into the Library and illegally
"experiences" these memory recordings of people throughout Majipoor's long
history. It is but a framework to hold these stories together but it works
quite well.

I have avoided Silverberg's fantasy up till now but since this is "lost
colony" fiction I can be safely describe it as science fiction instead of
fantasy.  I don't mean "Lost Colony" in the Anne MacCaffrey "Pern"
sense with "bio-engineered" fire-breathing dragons!  The only two things I
have trouble believing in is that human beings could live together without
killing each other, and also that there is no desire for technological
progress through the thousands of years that these stories are set over.

Each story is fundamentally about individual inhabitants of Majipoor going
through some life changing experience which all happen to be on the same
planet.  The characters are interesting though cannot be developed to the
same extent as a novel would take them.

The stories were interesting though, without one dull or uninteresting one
between them. I have another Majipoor book "Lord Valentine's Castle" on
the unread shelf. I shall now read it sooner rather than later.

%A Robert Silverberg
%T Majipoor Chronicles
%G 0-00-648379-8
%I Harper Collins, Voyager Books
%C London
%O paperback, UKP 5.99

Alex McLintock
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