Voyagers
Twelve Journeys through Space and Time
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
Every science-fiction story is a voyage of some kind—to a world of a far-off galaxy, to our own world of the distant future or the remote past, to some interior corner of the human soul. In VOYAGERS: Twelve Journeys through Space and Time, Science Fiction Grand Master Robert Silverberg collects twelve of his finest short stories and novellas, all of which carry readers to the next level of imagination and into a new universe of the mind. This new collection spans 60 years of work by the Hugo Award-winning Silverberg, traveling from one end of the universe to the other, from the dawn of time to its final hours. A journey through its pages reveals time-travelers from the future come back to witness a catastrophe of our own time, Spanish conquistadores looking for—and finding—the Fountain of Youth, a tourist in Mexico stepping into an alternative universe, and spacefarers among the stars making a surprising discovery. The range of these stories, the kinds of voyages they describe, just begins to demonstrate the scope of science fiction, and the lengths to which Silverberg's sparkling imagination can leap.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
SFWA Grand Master Silverberg brings together 12 tension-filled speculative stories from throughout his long career in this impressive collection. Silverberg's adventurous and melancholy tales are united in taking characters to vividly detailed settings, including a grisly ancient Egyptian embalming market in "Thebes of the Hundred Gates"; a "nightmare world" of "gaudy monsters" called Sidri Akrak in "Travelers"; and even the microscopic space between electrons in "Chip Runner." Exploring themes of death and identity, the stories range from the bittersweet to the truly tragic, yet the collection never feels grim. These timeless topics also mean that even the decades-old stories still resonate. Silverberg is not one to shy away from moral quandaries, as in "The Pleasure of Your Company," in which a fleeing refugee consults AI copies of family, friends, and even historical figures about whether it is "better to live in exile than to join the glorious company of martyrs" he left behind, and the self-reflective "Why?" in which a pair of planet-hoppers discuss the merits and pitfalls of travel itself. Readers will be won over by the immersive worldbuilding and clever plot twists of these thought-provoking stories.
