Sailing to Byzantium – Robert Silverberg
This story has also been published as a stand-alone, but it is quite short, so I'm only counting this as half a book!
In the fiftieth century, there are only five cities. Staffed by "temporaries" and constantly destroyed and re-built by robots, the cities exist only for the pleasure of the citizens, who live in a seemingly endless round of leisure and pleasure – Alexandria, Asgard, Timbuctoo – history and mythology blend together in these vacation-resort-like creations. Somewhat lost in this land is Charles Phillips – a man who believes he was torn from his life in 1984 and who found himself in this far-future fantasyland. He finds himself strangely vague and uncurious about the details of his past, but now he has fallen in love with the beautiful Gioia, a citizen of the future who seems like yet unlike all the others...
Interesting ideas, but the story doesn't let the reader know how things resolve... which I always find slightly frustrating.


Seven American Nights – Gene Wolfe
Another story with an unexplained, "what do YOU think the truth was?" kind of ending... maybe that's why the editors put these two together.
In the future, the family of a young Iranian man is searching for him. A journal is discovered, which shows that he traveled to the dangerous land of America as a tourist. Through the pages of the journal, we discover his impressions of a week in the former Washington D.C. – now a wild no-man's land of ruins, mutants and the remnants of a civilization. The young man, Nadan, upon his arrival, quickly falls into the pursuit of the degenerate pleasures of this land, playing Russian Roulette with a possibly dangerous hallucinogen (which renders him a rather unreliable narrator), and quickly developing an obsession with a pretty entertainer whom, he hopes, may be a prostitute. ( )

From a time when Silverberg was fascinated with the translation of the old world into more modern settings. Much like Zelazny's fascination with mythology/religion, the result is mixed. This is one of the finer efforts. Here's the original (from which you may recognize other lines, used in other places).
(Wm Butler Yeats)

That is no country for old men. The young
In one another's arms, birds in the trees
—Those dying generations—at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.

An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.

O sages standing in God's holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.

Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.

These two works were well paired. Both Wolfe and Silverberg can be magic with words, and the world Wolfe paints is even stranger (especially to eyes in this, the 21st century). ( )

Gene Wolfe's "Seven American Nights -- This story started out with promise but eventually ended with no resolution. Gene Wolfe leaves us with tantalizing bits of story involving mutation, obsessive love, secrets beneath Mount Rushmore, and the unreliability of perception and its shaping by desire. In the end, Wolfe leaves us with a largely unresolved mystery that sputters to a murky anticlimax. Initially, I thought I was in for a treat along the lines of Norman Spinrad's "The Lost Continent", a future sf story from the standpoint of a blighted United States. This story had some of that charm and power but only dimly.

Robert Silverberg's "Sailing to Byzantium" -- Like his "Born With the Dead" this is another of Silverberg's technical exercises in translating a classical work of literature, here W. B. Yeats' "Sailing to Byzantium". Like "Born With the Dead", this story has an erie, fantastical, airy feel about which contrasts weirdly with Silverberg's lush descriptions (which show his expertise in archaeology -- he wrote several non-fiction books on the subject). Like "Born with the Dead", one never has the sf wonders explained. We only see the idle, immortal travelers not the planners (who seem oblivious to their mythological and anachronistic mistakes) though they may be the robots we see. We also never find out how the research for the building of the five cities is done, but it is an imaginative, baroque concept disturbingly accented by strange, seemingly shallow future jetsetters who flit from city to city. Once again, Silverberg does a good job showing the emotional effect of immortality. The reasoning Charlie Phillips uses to say his robot self is as human as any human is well-stated but nothing special. ( )

This is a "Tor double," featuring two novellas by two different writers, published back-to-front and upside-down relative to each other, I guess so that they each get to have a "front" cover. I can see why these two pieces were chosen to share a volume; they make a very well-matched pair.

"Sailing to Byzantium" by Robert Silverberg depicts a lonely 20th century man in a distant future whose inhabitants create and destroy replicas of past cities, through which they constantly travel. If there's meant to be a particular point to it, I'm afraid it's a bit too subtle for me. But it's well-written, with the protagonist's slightly melancholy alienation coming through well, and the setting is fascinating and original. There's something about the idea of the characters' perpetual, strangely incurious, utterly artificial tourism that I find interestingly awful.

And "Seven American Nights," by Gene Wolfe features an Iranian tourist -- if that's truly what he is -- visiting a decaying, genetically poisoned future America and becoming obsessed with an actress in what remains of Washington DC. It's a strange story, full of ambiguities and almost completely lacking in resolutions. It's hard to know quite what to make of it, but it's oddly compelling somehow. ( )