The Majipoor Chronicles

The vast populous world of Majipoor with its strange political hierarchies and myriad alien races is one of the more impressive creations of planetary romance; Robert Silverberg brings to its exoticism his sensitive and evocative prose and his sense of story as an end in itself. The Majippor Chronicles is a collection of linked shorts, in which the boy Hissune, a minor character in Lord Valentine's Castle, rummages in archives of recorded memories and acquires an education in the ways of this particular world. A self-willed woman becomes a recluse and befriends a crippled lizard-man; a great navigator discovers the price of crossing a great ocean; a murderer is pursued by dreams and his own demons; a defrauded young woman discovers the rich ironies possible in a complicated civilisation; two brothers receive an ambiguous prophecy that we know will come true. Individually, these are powerful moody stories, full of memorable people whom we come to know intensely even in a few pages, but together they help amplify our sense of the vast reach of Majipoor in history and geography--and the education of Hissune becomes more than a framing narrative, it becomes another tale of Majipoor in its own right. --Roz Kaveney

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The zenith of a master writer's most beautiful creation - Rated
"The Majipoor Chronciles" is perhaps the most mesmerising of the tales of Majipoor, easily Robert Siverberg's most beautiful and entrancing creation. It covers the milestones of the building of Majipoori civilisation, from the first settlement of the contient Zimroel and the remarkable sharing of the world between human and alien settlers in "Thesme and the Ghayrog" to the establishment of the vast world's unique judical structure in "The Desert of Stolen Dreams" (which is explored in greater detail in the Second Majipoor Trilogy, the Prestimion Chroniciles). These short stories, all or most of which have the scope to become novels in their own right, give the reader a true sense of the world that is Majipoor, while revealing Silverberg's mastery of his craft, both as a storyteller, and as an author. Unlike many other epics such as Niven's Ringworld books or Asimov's foundation trilogy, the Majipoor Chronicles does not simply reveal breathtaking scope and fantastic ideas, but communicate what must surely be the wish of all writers, whether or not they work in the SFF field - humanity. Majipoor succeeds where works such as those I have mentioned above fail in their conveyence of the human (and I use this in the original sense of the word to mean creatures with souls) emotion and depth of their characters. Compassion pervades these stories, as perhaps the only link between all the characters over millennia and vast distances of story is that all have soul-shaking experiences within these pages. Two stories are of human-non human sexual relationships and the lessons of love with different and yet not so different partners. The future coronal Dekkeret must learn the value and the futility of guilt in burning Suvrael, while a vital sea-captain's soul breaks under the weight of it in "The Fifth Year of the Voyage". And a man (along of course with Hissune, the boy with a great destiny for whom all these lessons are taken from the Register of Souls) learns the limiatations of heroism and the price of waging war from the semi-legendary Lord Stiamot. These stories and others provide Hissune with the education he will need for the great task that awaits him (in "Valentine Pontifex"), but they also provide the reader with lessons of equal value that cannot fail to be carried into the reader's own life - the lessons of joy, the lessons - and the limits - of responsibility, the lessons of regret, and of pain, and of freedom of the soul. And such as Siverberg's skill that the reader is barely aware of these lessons - there is never a hint of moralsing or sermonising. The tales of "The Majipoor Chronicles" bear a startling similarity to the dreams of the people of Majipoor - they have a purpose, and something to teach, and power and wisdom to impart, to those who are willing to open their minds. They are carried into one's waking, one's "real" life -and perhaps beyond.