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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