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Tales of Majipoor de Robert Silverberg
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Tales of Majipoor (edição: 2013)

de Robert Silverberg (Autor)

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914295,186 (4)4
Hailed as "one of the most fully realized worlds of modern science fiction,"(Booklist) Majipoor is a planet unlike any other, with countless untold stories. Now, available for the first time in one volume, science fiction grand master Robert Silverberg presents seven tales that chronicle thousands of years of Majipoor's history, from the arrival of the settlers of Old Earth, to the expansion of vast cities, to the extraordinary life of Lord Valentine. Within these stories lie the secrets of Majipoor, a wondrous world of incredible imagination...… (mais)
Membro:1967mustangman
Título:Tales of Majipoor
Autores:Robert Silverberg (Autor)
Informação:Subterranean (2013), Edition: Signed, Limited Edition, 376 pages
Coleções:Sua biblioteca
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Tales of Majipoor de Robert Silverberg

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I very much enjoyed these sensitive, human, humane stories. Majipoor is a remarkably well-imagined world, and Silverberg does a good job of peopling it with credible folks with daily lives beyond great wars and intrigue. In this collection, we're shown a poet held captive and forced to write, archaeologists grappling with academic pressures or with indigenous ill-will, and a man looking into the disappearance of his brother-in-law; these make for earthy, fun, and satisfying reads. For readers familiar with Silverberg's Majipoor novels, these stories color the whole and elaborate some hidden details. ( )
  MLShaw | May 11, 2023 |
Tales of Majipoor - Silverberg
Audio performance by Stefan Rudnicki
4 stars

Years ago my paperback copy of Lord Valentine’s Castle fell apart with rereading. It is a quest story with diverse characters on a giant planet. In that first book, the character interactions were most important to me. But the planet, Majipoor, was almost as fascinating. This collection of short stories returns to Majipoor at various times in its long history. Silverberg creates some interesting new characters for most of these stories, but I’m unlikely to remember much about them given the shortened format. (One story does use characters from the original book. That was a satisfying continuation.) The stories are very heavy with environmental descriptions. I don’t usually pay close attention to the setting of a story. I probably don’t visualize fictional places in great detail. I can imagine Majipoor. Silverberg paints his planet well. ( )
  msjudy | Apr 19, 2022 |
Majipoor is a huge planet where humans, aliens and natives live together, not always happily, and is the creation of Robert Silverberg and the setting for several of his novels,. The original inhabitants are the Piurivars, shape-shifters who seemed content to share the world when humans arrived. Over time, other aliens have come, the tentacled Vroons, reptilian Ghayrogs and the large four-armed Skandars. For centuries, Majipoor has had joint rule by a Pontifex, remote in his subterranean labyrinth and a Coronal who takes a more active part in government. When the Pontifex dies, the Coronal ascends to that rank and chooses his successor. Majipoor has a long, complex history and is a great fine for tales of fantasy. Here are some.

The End Of The Line’ is not only a great song by the Travelling Wilburys but a fine story by Robert Silverberg. Stiamot, a trusted official in the court of Coronal Lord Strelkimar, has been sent to Domgrave, the biggest town on the continent of Alhanroel, which the Coronal has decided to include on his grand processional tour of the land. Stiamot’s job is to prepare the way. As in mediaeval times on Earth, the locals have to play host to the visiting lord. Stiamot has lately been concerned with reshaping policy towards the shape-shifting Piurivars and the aboriginal species of Majipoor who have been largely supplanted by Earthmen and co-exist uneasily. Complications ensue when he tries to make contact with them. A very good opening story with a neat twist.

‘The Book Of Changes’ is about Aithin Furvain, a minor noble, set for life with a decent stipend and who has a gift for lightweight poetry but in mid-life starts to wonder if he should have done more with his talent. Sure, he can knock off a clever rhyme at the drop of a hat and astound his friends but they are all trivial. This is somewhat autobiographical as young Silverberg could knock off two short stories a day to fill magazines in the 1950s and earn his keep but later wanted to get more meaningful. It’s character driven as the plot is merely a frame for the thinking. As a story, it’s not exciting but as a meditation on art, it’s interesting.

In ‘The Tomb Of The Pontifex Dvorn’, Simmilgord, a nice learned young man who has always been enthralled by that historic ruler of Majipoor gets to study his pet subject up close. Clever for a farmer’s son, he obtains a professorship at a minor university and assumes that will be the extent of his achievement but is suddenly offered a post at the tomb of his hero. The politics of academia feature large here, as the big shot bureaucrat steals all glory. Again, it’s an interesting look at different characters in a certain situation.

‘The Sorcerer’s Apprentice’ is a callow youth madly in love with the sorcerer, a lean woman who gives him the blues by ignoring his attempts at romance or even punishing him for them. Good characters again and quite amusing as unrequited love always is, as long as it’s not you.

Ghambivole Zwoll, many-tentacled person of the Vroonish race, is a sorcerer in Bombifale, a town where trade has slumped lately after what was a golden age. In ‘Dark Times At The Midnight Market’, things improve for him when a fairly important male noble comes in and wants a love potion in order to snare a very important lady. A neat plot and a clever ending make this very like the work of that glib old Silverberg who turned out two stories day in the 1950s. I rather liked him.

‘The Way They Wove the Spells In Sippulgar’ is too long for the content but still a pleasure to read. Silverberg’s prose is always a pleasure and usually a master class in writing as well. Here a businessman investigating the presumed death of his brother-in-law travels a long way to do so, for he loves his wife. A practical soul, he doesn’t believe in demons and so forth but that seems to be what’s afoot. It was okay but the dramatic irony of the subject not knowing what is clear to the reader perhaps goes on too long.

‘The Seventh Shrine’ made me feel like a wedding guest at Cana. Silverberg was saving the best ‘til last. A renowned archaeologist has been murdered while investigating the ruins of Velalisier, the ancient sacred city of the shape-shifter native to Majipoor. Pontifex Valentine, bored as usual with life in the Labyrinth, decides to take his entourage and investigate personally. This is a detective story with many insights into the history of Majipoor and the mysterious Piurivars. At eighty pages, it’s virtually a novelette, which is Silverberg’s favourite length for a fantasy story. Like his idol, Conrad, he does them well.

Tales set in Majipoor might have been a more accurate description of this book. Some of the stories might have been set in any fantasy world and some of them could have been done in ours. Problems with aboriginal peoples, the writer wondering about his worth, the historian and archaeologist being bullied by bureaucrats, to name three, are all themes capable of mainstream treatment. But fantasy is where Silverberg has set his stall and Majipoor already exists with a rich background, so he put the stories there. Why not? They are certainly not diminished thereby and the setting gives him scope for more invention of landscapes, flora, fauna and history to decorate the plot. He’s good at that stuff. He’s good at everything authorial and this is a fine, entertaining collection and a good introduction to Majipoor. It will give the reader a chance to size up that large world before embarking on one of the large novels set there. I haven’t read them myself but I was impressed enough with the characters in the last story to consider getting Lord Valentine’s Castle and maybe the others, too.

Eamonn Murphy
This review first appeared at https://www.sfcrowsnest.info/ ( )
  bigfootmurf | Aug 11, 2019 |
“They came from Old Earth.” When a Prologue begins with portentous words like these you might automatically assume you’re reading a science fiction title. Especially when you’re told the colonists have migrated to Majipoor, a giant planet with low gravitational pull, three large continents to inhabit and expand into, an indigenous population to interact with and aliens from other worlds to transplant onto.

And yet, science doesn’t feature too much in these short stories, though fiction of another genre does. Of the seven tales, three are specifically about magic, one implies magic with the ‘sending’ of vivid and detailed dreams and another includes what can only be called magical talismans to call up images of past events. We are indubitably in the realm of fantasy now, albeit fantasy on another planet instead of a supernatural Otherworld, and with intelligent alien life forms instead of elves and fairies.

Then what are we to make of the faintly philosophical themes that Silverberg touches on, themes such as the ethics of restoring historical artefacts, or claiming ‘divine inspiration’ as your own creation, or the nature of sacrilege and how that conflicts with scientific truth?

From which you will gather that Tales of Majipoor, no less than many another novel, declines to be constrained within any one genre, be it hard SF, pure fantasy or literary fiction. Instead, the material of Silverberg’s patchwork cloth is of itself, like those tints resulting from overlapping circles of different primary colours. Brought together from other collections of stories and ranging from 1998 to 2011, these seven tales cover the vast chronological range of Majipoor’s human history, from the first emperor, the Coronal Dvorn, to the latest Pontifex, Valentine, reigning around fourteen millennia after the first settlement of the new world.

“The End of the Line” – ironically the first in the collection though one of the last to be written – concerns a certain counsellor Stiamot who finds himself unexpectedly catapulted to greatness when conflict with the indigenous peoples, with whom he was hoping rapprochement was possible, becomes unavoidable. In touching on these Shapeshifters or Metamorphs “The End of the Line” also links with the last of the stories, which as well as being the seventh is also chronologically the latest of these Majipoor tales (despite being the earliest to be written): “The Seventh Shrine” features Valentine, the first and best of the characters with which Silverberg has populated his world (first appearing in Lord Valentine’s Castle back in 1980), who is faced with the dilemma of deciding whether excavating a shrine of the Piuivar (the name Shapeshifters give themselves) counts as desecration.

“The Seventh Shrine” also links thematically with the third tale, “The Tomb of the Pontifex Dvorn”. This also has an archaeological theme, as the tomb is reputed to be the grave of the first ever Pontifex. The issues here are the uses to which pure scientific research, its processes of verification and investigation, are put. The narrator is a pragmatic historian, his colleague an idealistic archaeologist who has misgivings about restoring or reconstructing an ancient complex so that it becomes a shrine that functions inevitably as a kind of theme park. When a site like this has historic significance, how does the scientist bear responsibility for it, and to whom is he or she answerable?

As mentioned previously, three of the selected pieces are more obviously in the fantasy camp. “The Sorceror’s Apprentice” accepts that magic is real and spells work. This slight tale describes the pitfalls of what is appropriate in a master/student relationship, touching on what would in therapy terms be called transference but is in effect pure lust. “Dark Times at the Midnight Market” is even more of a comedy, with a narrative about a dealer in spells and potions where the metaphorical biter finds himself bit. “The Way They Wove the Spells in Sippulgar” has a narrator who is more of a sceptic where magic is concerned: in seeking for a missing, presumed dead, relative he has to confront the question of whether demons are real, and whether the power of a charismatic figure is illusory or not.

The final tale to be discussed, “The Book of Changes”, is one of the novella-length pieces included here. This is a fantasy about poetic inspiration: is a poet responsible for all the creative ideas that flow from them or is there such a thing as ‘divine’ inspiration? Or, if not divine, then how does it seem that this poet’s inspiration seems to come from an unknown Lord Valentine? And even more mind-boggling to us, the reader, could it be that this inspiration hails from millennia in the future? Perhaps this concept has its origins in Silverberg’s own experience: when he was at a creative standstill, suddenly there came an “old familiar voice in my head whispering things to me … I went into my office and scribbled this on the back of an envelope…” ‘This’ was to be the genesis of Lord Valentine’s Castle, a fiction about an imaginary Byzantine ruler on a distant planet many eons in the future. This, surely, must also be the template for the protagonist in “The Book of Changes” when he embarks on an epic poem covering the whole span of human life on Majipoor, past, present and future.

The publishers suggest that Tales of Majipoor can be a suitable starting point for new readers as well as a sop for seasoned fans like me. There might be enough to tempt the palate of newbie Majipoorians, though I wonder if the mix of genres might confuse more than console. As you might expect, the overall range of styles might have individually suited the periodicals each tale first appeared in, but at least the order they have been arranged in here does a good job of easing a new audience in. Short story collections are also notoriously uneven, and this is no exception. The picaresque tales are fine enough, but I prefer the more serious novellas which enlarge one’s knowledge and understanding of the history and societal mores of this future world. That’s probably because it appeals to the geek in me, while other tastes may be more or less indulgent. It’s still a collection that I’ve been looking forward to reading, whether or not they are the ‘final’ tales of Majipoor as the publishers claim.

http://wp.me/s2oNj1-majipoor ( )
3 vote ed.pendragon | Apr 14, 2013 |
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Hailed as "one of the most fully realized worlds of modern science fiction,"(Booklist) Majipoor is a planet unlike any other, with countless untold stories. Now, available for the first time in one volume, science fiction grand master Robert Silverberg presents seven tales that chronicle thousands of years of Majipoor's history, from the arrival of the settlers of Old Earth, to the expansion of vast cities, to the extraordinary life of Lord Valentine. Within these stories lie the secrets of Majipoor, a wondrous world of incredible imagination...

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