Robert Silverberg
1971
Awards: Nebula
Nominations: Hugo
Rating: ★ – – – –
It seems as if Silverberg read The Lord of the Rings and said, “This book is great but what it needs is a lot of sloppy sex and more obvious drug references!”
This
book is written in a sword-and-sorcery fantasy style, with strange fell
beasts, semi-medieval customs and dress and archaic sentence
structures. Many of the names of people and places could be lifted
straight from Tolkien (Glin, Loimel, The Burnt Lowlands). Even the map
at the front of my 2009 edition uses the same font and brushwork as the
maps of Middle Earth.
Unfortunately, this book is most definitely not The Lord of the Rings.
The
story is about Kinnall Darival, the second son of one of the rulers of
Salla, one of the lands on a planet colonized by space-faring humans
centuries ago. The strongest legacy the original colonists left their
descendants is a puritanical Covenant, or code of conduct, that says
that the most wicked sin is to be a “selfbarer” – a person who shows any
kind of reverence to themselves or to their own private thoughts. The
words “I” and “me” are banished – you can only refer to yourself
obliquely as “one,” as in, “there is love in one for you.”
Kinnall
falls into bad company and learns about a drug that allows you to share
your inner self with anyone else taking the drug at the same time as
you. After taking the drug, Kinnall realizes that it is no sin to bare
one's self to other people, and in fact that it can lead to good things
like being able to overtly declare one's love for someone else, so he
sets out to give as many other people the drug as possible. Of course
the establishment doesn’t like this and he becomes a fugitive.
Among the many problems I had with this book, there were two major ones.
1.
This “I/me” thing. In the world of this book, saying “I” or “me” is
the ultimate obscenity, because it emphasizes the self-ness of the
speaker. Samuel Delany dealt with a similar concept in his (earlier)
book Babel-17.
For all that book’s faults, at least Delany took it to the next logical
step – he realized that if you are not going to allow a person to think
about themselves by not allowing them to say “me,” then you can’t allow
them to say “you” either. If you say “you,” then you clearly have a
sense of someone being other than yourself, and therefore by definition
you have a sense of yourself. Not to mention that you’re calling the
other person’s attention to the fact that they have a self apart from
yours. This is Semiotics 101. All the people in this book saying “one”
when referring to themselves and then saying “you” when referring to
others made the whole premise break down into silliness.
2. Seedy
hippie culture. In the preface to my edition, Silverberg says that this
book reflects what was going on in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s when he
wrote it, but that he hopes it still stands up today, and that the
themes revolving around the self-awareness drug aren’t taken too
literally to make people think it's solely a drug novel. I’m afraid,
however, that it definitely is a piece of its time and that it does not
wear well. Taking the drug is the
turning point for Kinnall; he immediately feels like his consciousness
has been opened and he becomes an eager distributor. In addition,
Silverberg finds some excuse for his main character to have sex about
every five pages. Kinnall is a big hairy sweaty guy with a premature
ejaculation problem, and the euphemisms that describe his lovemaking
activities are trite, cheesy, and gross. “The rod of my sex”? Come on.
He’d fit right on with Will Farrell and Rachel Dratch’s hot tub lovers.
This review originally appeared on Cheeze Blog.
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