Lord Prestimion

Robert Silverberg has been one of SF's most prolific and popular writers since the mid-1950s. His science-fantasy stories set on the huge, exotic world Majipoor began with Lord Valentine's Castle (1980), which the SF Encyclopedia calls "polished but rather languid". In Lord Prestimion the hero Prestimion takes the throne as Coronal, co- ruler of Majipoor, a millennium before Lord Valentine's reign. His crowning follows the long, ruinous civil war to overthrow a usurping Coronal, a war now literally forgotten: Prestimion's sorcerers have imposed amnesia on Majipoor in hope of preventing any further uprising. Such a memory- wipe reeks of wrongness and has seemingly caused the plague of insanity currently spreading. Meanwhile, one very bad man who was a leading rebel and warmonger recovers his memories and escapes to make new mischief.... After various colourful, almost dream-like travelogues, the situation is saved--a little too easily?--by telepathic gadgetry. (The device in question and several crossover characters appeared in the 1982 story- cycle Majipoor Chronicles.) Smoothly written, but somewhat short on real suspense...even in the swashbuckling comic sequence when Prestimion's Regent fights and kills at least 21 would-be assassins during one morning's office paperwork. It's a man's life in the Majipoor civil service. --David Langford

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