To Open The Sky

As some of you who follow my reviews know, one of my projects lately has been re-reading the fantasy and science fiction books that I enjoyed as a child. That project led me back to the Majipoor Series and Robert Silverberg. Of all of those books, Silverberg is one of the few authors whose work really stood out for me as still being every bit as good as I remember. So lately I have been looking for second hand copies of Silverberg's other books to see if I liked them just as well. To Open the Sky is the first in that effort. I really enjoyed the book. It is a heady mix of religion, overpopulation, schism, transformation and hope. It took me surprisingly long to read the slim volume (203 pages, in my edition). My only quarrel at all with it was that it sometimes felt a little bit of interconnected short stories more than a novel. And that, dear reader, was exactly what it turned out to be. Wikipedia tells me that To Open the Sky was a fixup of stories originally published by Frederik Pohl in one of his magazines. Recommended.

I first read this book while on holiday in Spain around 1996. I'd long ago forgotten the title, but the names of the characters stuck in my mind. Well needless to say I've found the book once again and intend to buy it. I was only 17 when I read the book and it made great reading, how it will do this time I really don't knowm so I'm giving it 4 stars - it at least deserves that if I can remember the character names after so long. Well worth reading!

After Silverberg's first "retirement," he returned to science fiction with this book--constructed out of a series of novelettes published by Fred Pohl in _If_. It is colorful, almost gaudy science fiction; in a way, it seems to bridge Silverberg's pulp work of the '50s with his more thoughtful work of the later '60s and early '70s. As is the case with most science fiction, it appears dated in places. During the years 1964-65, when this book was written, some of the concerns with mysticism and trancendence embedded in the social unrest of the later '60s were already clearly in evidence. This early book shows his awareness and sympathy for those trends. While the themes of the book are very much of its time, the pure inventiveness points farther back, to works like Alfred Bester's _Tyger! Tyger!_ (aka, _The Stars My Destination_). The "Electromagnetic Litany: Stations of the Spectrum" is clever and funny and ingenious enough in its own right to sway me in the book's favor. The quality of the writing is competent, and sometimes a great deal better than that. Silverberg, for all his excellent novels (e.g., _Dying Inside_, _The Book of Skulls_, _Downward to the Earth_), often seems to me happier at the novelette to novella length. Thus a mosaic novel such as this one shows him at his best advantage. At the same time, despite its several excellences, the book is not devoid of a certain immaturity by later Silverberg standards. There are a few stock characters, as well as stock reactions and situations here. During the ten years after this book, Silverberg showed us how much better he could be. Still, all in all, I'm fond of this book. I *do* think it's good entertainment of a high order. I'd really like to give it 3.5 stars, because it isn't a masterwork; but it is diverting reading, even if one isn't a devoted reader of Silverberg.