Subject: Silverberg: two alien odysseys (THE FACE OF THE WATERS and KINGDOMS OF THE WALL)

From: [email-masked] (Gareth Rees)
Date: Sun, 28 Aug 1994 23:22:06 GMT

The Face of the Waters by Robert Silverberg
		      A book review by Gareth Rees
		   Copyright (c) 1992 by Gareth Rees

     There is a long tradition in sf of the 'humans versus intractable
hostile alien world' plot, in which a small group of humans try
valiantly to survive and eke out a living in the face of repeated and
ferocious attacks from all manner of deadly, poisonous, malevolent and
sometimes downright improbable fauna and flora.  The heart of darkness
of the hostile jungle (or desert, or ocean) becomes an exteriorisation
of the shadow self, and thus you cannot destroy it without destroying
yourself; rather, you have to achieve an understanding and co-existence.
It is therefore appropriate and inevitable that the hero's odyssey
through the alien landscape becomes an journey of self-discovery.
"Hothouse" (Brian Aldiss), "The Ultimate Jungle" (Michael Coney) and "A
Splendid Chaos" (John Shirley) are good examples of the genre, and
"Deathworld" (Harry Harrison), "Midworld" and "Sentenced to Prism" (both
Alan Dean Foster) are bad examples.

     But enough pop psychology, what of the example at hand?

     In the future of "The Face of the Waters", Earth was destroyed when
the Sun went nova, but not before humans had a chance to settle a few
hundred habitable planets, some of them at the sufferance of alien
races, some in their own right.  Hydros, a water-world with no land to
speak of, is one of the former, populated with a veritable cornucopia of
sentient and (of course) highly deadly alien races.  The least hostile
are known as the Dwellers (or Gillies behind their backs), bipedal
amphibians who permit humans to settle on their raft-islands, but do not
permit the building of a space-port to let people get away.  Hydros is
thus a dead-end planet, first a penal colony, and then a destination for
misfits and fugitives.

     "The Face of the Waters" focuses on Val Lawler, doctor to the
island community of Sorve, until the Dwellers lose their patience and
throw all the humans off the island, and the owner of their fleet of
ships takes it into his head to go looking for the semi-mythical island
known as 'the Face of the Waters'.

     Silverberg lets us know early on what we're in for: in the first
ten pages, Lawler's ship is attacked by Drakkens (plesiosaur-like fish),
a giant creature covered with several hundred mouths, a shoal of
poisonous jellyfish and a creature something like an animated spider's
web (which kills the captain).  After that, The Face of the Waters
settles down to filling in the story with flashback and some fairly
pedestrian description of the voyage.  There are good passages of
Lawler's nostalgia for a lost Earth and his feeling of not having a
proper home on Hydros, and some tentative development of his character,
but the book doesn't come together until the last couple of pages, when
we get not only the expected (and largely foreshadowed) revelations
about the Face of the Waters and about Hydros, but an unexpected (and
rather good) epiphany of understanding experienced by the central
character, which convincingly ties up the themes of the book (and
exemplifies my remark above about the 'humans against hostile world'
tale being an odyssey of self-discovery).

     In summary: a slight tale (and a bit over-long), but none the less
enjoyable for it.

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	       Kingdoms of the Wall by Robert Silverberg
		      A book review by Gareth Rees
		   Copyright (c) 1993 by Gareth Rees

[Warning: SPOILER (last 2 paragraphs of review)  -moderator]

     A long time ago, Robert Silverberg wrote some excellent novels -
"To Live Forever", "A Time of Changes", "Dying Inside", "Thorns" -
novels with tight plots, sharp morals, evocative settings and
crisply-observed characters.  But mere artistic success was not good
enough for him - perhaps he had a family to feed or a mortgage to pay -
and he announced that there was no gain to be made from writing good
books that no-one would appreciate, and that in the future he would
write nothing but mass-market trash.

     Hence the bloated "Majipoor" and "New Springtime" trilogies; hence
the glossy space operas like "Star of Gypsies"; hence the humiliation of
playing ghost-writer to Asimov in "Nightfall" and "Child of Time";
hence, as we shall see, "Kingdoms of the Wall".  They are all slick,
readable, fast-moving, exotic, and Silverberg cannot, of course, prevent
the occasional spark of inspiration showing through, but they are
undeniably trash.

     But they're not exactly best-selling trash, are they?  How galling
it must be for Silverberg to have prostituted his not inconsiderable
talent in such a public manner, and yet see his books trampled into the
remaindered bookstalls by the likes of Terry Brooks, David Eddings,
Raymond Feist, Pies Anthony and by the merest literary burps of Isaac
Asimov.  And this is because Silverberg, for all his skill, doesn't know
how to write sf/fantasy trash properly.  His characters are generally
adult and often alien, not the familiar middle-class adolescents that
the readership like to empathise with; his characters are flawed, not
universally competent; he doesn't allow a bunch of familiar,
wise-cracking and loveable characters to accumulate across several books
and doesn't concern himself with the soap-opera exposition required to
maintain the relationship of the characters; the sex in his books tends
to be casual and matter-of-fact, not prudish and titillating; his
characters often face more complex situations than the simple good
versus evil polarisation that is all that the mass-market sf/fantasy
readership seems able to cope with.  So Silverberg falls somewhere in
the middle: too trashy for the literati; too literate for the
mass-market.

     And so to "Kingdoms of the Wall", which is a rehash of material we
are familiar with from "Lord Valentine's Castle" and "The Face of the
Waters".  Shape-changing aliens live at the foot of a gargantuan
mountain they call the Wall.  Every year, each city sends forty pilgrims
up the Wall to visit the gods at the top.  Most never return; the few
that do return insane.  Young Poilar Crookleg dreams that he will make
it to the summit and return, and does.

     It is as if Silverberg's imagination had failed him completely.
The subgenre in which a small party of heroes and heroines travel across
a trackless alien wilderness populated by myriad of hostile and deadly
creatures while searching for an epiphany of understanding about the
nature of the planet is a familiar one, and Silverberg offers us nothing
new here.  The nasties are half-hearted push-overs for Poilar and his
pilgrims.  There is not even the satisfaction of a surprising revelation
about what lies on top of the Wall.  This ending, in which Poilar
returns to his city to reveal to his people that there are no gods on
top of the Wall and that if they want to progress in the world they are
going to have to do it on their own, begs the question that the
Silverberg of twenty years ago would not have hesitated to ask, and
answer: how will his people react when Poilar tells them that the entire
basis of their religion is false?

%A Silverberg, Robert 
%T The Face of the Waters
%I Grafton
%C London UK
%D 1991

%A Silverberg, Robert 
%T Kingdoms of the Wall
%I HarperCollins
%C New York
%D 1992