Robert Silverberg's Majipoor novels, with comparisons to Jack Vance

Robert Silverberg's Majipoor

(For a quick introduction to Silverberg's Majipoor, see Welcome to Majipoor. For the Wikipedia article on these works, go here.)

I confess -- I originally posted this in my own domain, which no longer exists, several years ago, and discovered that someone had archived it, so I'm re-publishing it as part of this blog. It has been lightly edited, and the links are still good.

In his Lord Valentine’s Castle, (New York: Bantam Books, 1981) Robert Silverberg, (a five-time Nebula award winner, but not for this book) has created a fascinating world. Silverberg has written about that world again, in Majipoor Chronicles, (New York: Bantam, 1989) in Valentine Pontifex (New York: Bantam, 1989), in Sorcerers of Majipoor, (New York: HarperPrism, 1996) in Lord Prestimion (New York: HarperCollins, 1999), in The King of Dreams (New York: HarperCollins, 2001, in "The Seventh Seal," (in Legends: Short Novels by the Masters of Modern Fantasy, edited by Silverberg--New York: Tor, 1998) and possibly in some other works.

Warning: if you are wondering about whether to read these books, but are the kind of person who doesn't want to know about what happens until you have finished a book, you should not read this web page further. I recommend the books to you. I have found them worth reading, and reading again.

Majipoor’s geography and government

The planet is very large, probably as large, or larger, than Jupiter or Saturn. (As a reviewer points out, Silverberg claims that it is the largest inhabited planet in fantastic literature, but isn't as large as Larry Niven's Ringworld. The Ringworld is supposed to be a manufactured object.) However, because of a lack of heavy elements, gravity is not oppressive. Most of it is covered by water, but the land areas combined are larger than those of any other inhabited planet. There are four main land areas, Alhanroel, Zimroel, Suvrael, and the Isle of Sleep. There is also one large archipelago. Castle Mount, on Alhanroel, is very tall--so tall, thirty miles high--that there are weather machines near its top, producing a breathable atmosphere for the inhabitants of its cities, and its Castle. Other features, including the oceans and rivers are also, as it were, larger than life. So are some of the manufactured objects, especially the Labyrinth, a vast underground city several miles deep, and the Castle, with thousands of rooms, on Castle Mount.

The Piurivars, an indigenous race, who used to be found on all continents, are almost all confined to a large reservation in Zimroel in Castle. (Some of Silverberg's other writing about Majipoor goes back long before Castle, including before the Piurivars were moved to the reservation.) This species is also known as metamorphs, or shape-shifters, because they have the ability to alter their appearance, even their structure, to mimic other species.

There are four powers of the government throughout most of the books. (There are stories going back before all four were established, and a fifth power is established at the end.) These are the Pontifex, who issues decrees relating to commerce from the Labyrinth, in Alhanroel; the Coronal, who is the ceremonial head of government, carrying out the decrees of the Pontifex, from the Castle, also in Alhanroel; the Lady, sending out, with her subordinates, dreams of peace and goodness from the Isle, and the King of Dreams, sending out dreams to punish criminals from Suvrael. The Coronal becomes Pontifex on the death of an old Pontifex. The new Pontifex chooses a Coronal, usually from a small group of those trained to lead, but does not choose his own relatives. The Coronal’s mother becomes the Lady. The King of Dreams is a hereditary office, passed down within the Barjazid family.

One interesting aspect of the governmental institutions that Silverberg created is that Coronals don't like their jobs very much. They must sign countless documents, and attend countless ceremonies, and listen to countless speeches by various minor functionaries. They are expected to make Grand Processionals every few years, which takes them around Majipoor for as much as five years at a time. They look forward with real horror to moving to the Labyrinth, where they will live as Pontifex when they succeed to that office, coming above ground but rarely.

Culture
Majipoor is so large that its human rulers invited non-humans to come and help colonize it, thousands of years before the time of Castle, the first book written. As a result, there are several species who have lived on Majipoor for a long time. The Skandars are tall and covered with fur, and have four arms. The Su-Suheris have two heads. The Ghayrogs lay eggs. Hjorts and Vroons and Liimen are obviously non-human. These species are all living in harmony, and share a single culture, more or less, and a common language. They travel and work together, and live in the same cities, and have the same government.

There is an indigenous species, the Piriuvar, or metamorphs, who are not part of the common culture, although a few of them do live among the other species, and communication is possible.

The first book describes how Valentine, the Coronal, has been deprived of his memory, and his rulership, but becomes aware of his loss, and, with a group of associates, including humans, Skandars, a Hjort, a Vroon, and even an alien being, (a tourist on Majipoor) regains his memory and his position. During this story, Silverberg often gives us just names of great cities, without any description, or with a very modest description. In no case, except for a city inhabited mostly by Ghayrogs, does he describe one of these cities as having a different culture. The cultural differences in the mostly Ghayrog city, Dulorn, are because Ghayrogs don’t sleep, except at one season of the year, not because they wish to be separate, or others from them.

One theme, spread throughout the Majipoor books, is how the Piurivars were originally mistreated, and how they finally come to accept a role as part of the common culture.

The second book in the series, Chronicles, is a group of stories. Silverberg uses a fictional device. It has been possible for citizens of Majipoor to store their memories and experiences in such a way that they can be re-lived. The book relates these experiences, which are re-lived by Hissune, one of the main characters in the first three books, and are part of his training to take Valentine’s place as Coronal.

In the very first of these episodes, “Thesme and the Ghayrog,” Silverberg takes us back to a time long before Valentine and Hissune, when non-human species are new on Majipoor. Thesme has decided to live in isolation in the forest. She finds an injured Ghayrog, and helps him recover. She eventually has sexual experiences with him. Finally, she tires of this, and returns to living with her family and human acquaintances, but the episode closes with the understanding that humans, Ghayrogs, and other species are going to work together in harmony to tame Majipoor.

Silverberg's use of Culture Compared with Jack Vance's Work
In case anyone wonders, Silverberg has read Vance, and, in fact, he says: "Vance was an influence so far as the design of the planet was concerned -- I borrowed his Big Planet concept, though I designed my own." (Interview with Jim Freund, Ellen Datlow, and Mike McCoy, September 7, 1997.) Actually, I didn't know this when I decided to start this comparison. I just knew that Majipoor was way too homogenous to be a Vance creation.

The most thorough treatment of Vance's propensity to invent culture is "People are Plastic: Jack Vance and the Dilemma of Cultural Relativism," by Tom Shippey, in Jack Vance: Critical Appreciations and a Bibliography, Edited by A. E. Cunningham (Boston Spa and London: The British Library, 2000, pp. 67 - 84) Shippey's first paragraph says, in part:

. . . Vance’s work should not be treated as merely whimsical or decorative, but should be seen as centrally preoccupied with one of the most acute moral dilemmas and major intellectual developments of our age: a dilemma and a development furthermore which tend to be avoided or left unfocused, to our detriment, in literature of the mainstream. The intellectual development is that of social or cultural anthropology, . . . and the dilemma it generates is, to put it bluntly, whether any sense of absolute value, or of ‘human nature’, can survive a thoroughgoing acceptance of the cultural relativism recommended so forcefully by so many anthropologists.

Silverberg's creation has a culture, and there are local variations, but nothing like those of Vance. Every city, almost every neighborhood, seems to call upon Vance's creative powers, as he invents new types of clothing, food, occupations, amusements, language, religion and courtship for so many of these. Or, perhaps, it's the other way around. Vance adds neighborhoods and cities so he can have places for his permutations of culture to inhabit. Majipoor does have a few isolated pockets where there is a separate language, or a separate religion, (even, in Prestimion, an area where several intelligent alien species live) but they are in the minority on the planet, and Silverberg does not dwell on them.

Silverberg uses some of his creative powers in describing variety in the landscape, (or sometimes in the seascape) and in the animals and plants that inhabit it. Besides the several diverse species of intelligent beings that have come to Majipoor, there is an abundant variety of supposedly non-intelligent life there. The most spectacular of these are the sea-dragons, immense beasts that migrate in herds, in paths that take them years, around the planet. They can swim, and have wing-like appendages, but cannot fly. In Castle, Valentine and his companions travel with the dragon-hunters to reach the Isle of Sleep. On the way, a giant sea-dragon attacks their ship, and some of his companions are lost. Valentine, himself, with his giant human female bodyguard, is swallowed by the dragon. The bodyguard finally cuts a tunnel in the side of the dragon, and they escape. In Pontifex, we, and the central culture, find that the sea-dragons are highly intelligent, and have the power to send their thoughts to other intelligent beings at a great distance, but the central culture lived in ignorance of that for thousands of years.

Scattered throughout the books are descriptions of strange landscapes, soil, geological formations of many types. Also, I have not counted, but there must be names, and, in some cases, descriptions, of at least a hundred different species of plants, and as many animals. In both Pontifex and Prestimion, some animals have been produced (by genetic engineering?) for evil purposes. Except for these, the culture of Majipoor lives in general harmony with the land, the sea, and their non-intelligent inhabitants. The variety of natural features, living and non-living, has probably not been matched in any other works of fantastic literature.

It is true that, having established a nearly homogenous culture on the largest inhabited planet in the first three books about Majipoor, Silverberg departs somewhat from that in later writings. The Mountains of Majipoor (New York: Bantam: 1996) presents a story that takes place several hundreds of years after Valentine has departed the scene. Harpirias, a young noble, is sent to a newly-discovered group of humans that have been geographically isolated for thousands of years. They speak a different language, have a different religion, etc. However, Harpirias is able to learn the language, and to understand them. If Vance had written about the same situation, there would surely have been some incomprehensibility between the two cultures. (Mountains also presents the Piurivars as not having been completely homogenized yet.)

Sorcerers of Majipoor (New York: Harper Prism, 1998 -- excerpt from novel here) takes place long before Valentine's time. In it, Silverberg describes how many religious cults, each bizarrely different, have arisen. However, these are all manifestations of the same thing:

In a thousand cities, furious mages came forth, saying, "This is the way of salvation, these are the spells that will restore the world," and the people, doleful and frightened and hungry for salvation, said, "Yes, yes, show us the way." In each city the observances were different, and yet in essence everything was the same everywhere: processions and wild dances, shrieking flutes, roaring trumpets. (p. 33)

Revenge

Since this is fantastic fiction, there is plenty of opportunity for bizarre crime. The first book begins shortly after one such has been committed. Valentine, the Coronal, has had his body taken over by another, who now masquerades as Coronal. Some of his consciousness, but not all—not enough even to remember that he was Coronal—has been placed in a different body. The story of the first book is the story of Valentine’s quest, which is, at first, undertaken very reluctantly, to overthrow the false Coronal and restore harmony to the realm.

At the end, Valentine and his followers discover that one of the Barjazid family members has had his mind placed in what had been Valentine’s body.  The force behind this awful act, however, was a group of metamorphs (Piurivars), who have masqueraded as humans, one of them even assuming the form of the King of Dreams, the usurper’s father. When the plot is unmasked, and Valentine is back in his rightful place, one of his friends proposes vengeance upon the Piurivars. Valentine does not agree: “But I think also we must reach toward those people, and heal them of their anger if we can, or Majipoor will be thrown into endless war.” (Castle, p. 444) He also did not seek vengeance on the human who was the tool of the Piurivars: "Lord Valentine . . . had gently and lovingly sought even to win the soul of his enemy the usurper Dominin Barjazid, in the last moments of the war of restoration." Pontifex, p. 49.

There are three stories in the Chronicles that also demonstrate that vengeance is not central to Silverberg’s characters. In one, a merchant has been sold shoddy goods. While he is meeting with the man who sold them to him, he impulsively pushes him out the window of the hotel room into the river, to his death. The river is so boisterous that the body will not be found. Things go along well enough for a while, but eventually the King of Dreams starts sending terrible dreams to the murderer. He flees, taking on new identity, again and again, each time escaping for a while. Finally, he becomes a pilgrim in the Isle, where pilgrimage from level to level, toward the center, usually takes many years. After some years there, he sees a man who looks like the merchant he murdered. He converses with the man, who turns out to be the son of the dead man. The son says that he does not want to punish the murderer. He has already been punished, and all that the son wants is to find out what happened to his father.

Another story concerns the establishment of the King of Dreams. Dekkeret, a noble from the Castle, has business in Suvrael, which is mostly an oppressive desert wasteland, and hires a Barjazid as a guide into the interior. While on the journey, he is beset by terrible dreams, and almost dies while sleepwalking during one. He discovers that the guide has been sending them, using an apparatus he wears on his head to project dreams from his own brain. Barjazid asks if the noble will punish him. The noble says that he will not. Instead, he wants Barjazid to come to Castle Mount, to show the apparatus to the Coronal and others. This Barjazid’s son, Dinitak Barjazid, will become the first King of Dreams.

In a third story, a shopkeeper is visited by two rascals, who tell her that she has inherited one of the great homes in a city far away. For a significant sum, they will process her claim to the estate. She pays them, and goes to claim her inheritance, finding that she has no such claim, and that the rascals have been saying the same thing to many others. Through a long series of circumstances, the girl does become mistress of this same great home. One day she sees the rascals. She has them arrested, because they have defrauded many, but asks that their punishment be slight, because her circumstances are so much better, because of what happened to her as a result of the swindle.

A fourth story details an episode in the conquest of the Piurivars by Stiamot, the Coronal. In Prestimion, which takes place much later, we read that Stiamot, many years later, tried to travel to ask forgiveness of the Danipiur, the leader of the Piurivars, but died before he was able to finish that journey.

Silverberg said (in the interview cited above, with Freund, Datlow, and McCoy) that "I knew that Lord Valentine's Castle needed a sequel to deal with the problem of the disgruntled Shapeshifters." He said the same thing in other interviews.

There is another interesting aspect of revenge in Pontifex. The Piurivars have a long memory. They remember sacrificing two sea-dragons in their holiest place, on land, long before humans came to Majipoor. They believe that they have so defiled the place, and themselves, that they abandon it. However, the greatest of the sea-dragons tells (through telepathy) Faraataa, Piurivar leader who thinks he is leading his people to atone for this sin:

The gods gave themselves willingly, that day in Velalisier. It was their sacrifice, which you misunderstand. You have invented a myth of a Defilement, but it is the wrong myth. . . . The water-king Niznorn and the water-king Domsitor gave themselves as sacrifices that day long ago, just as the water-kings give themselves yet to our hunters as they round the curve of Zimroel. (p. 362--this idea, of a willingness to be sacrificed by intelligent beings, is reinforced in "Seventh Shrine.")

Silverberg's characters don't always feel that they need revenge. The sea-dragons go further--they willingly offer themselves as victims.

Religion, with comparison to Jack Vance

Although he doesn't spell out its theology, clearly Majipoor, and, presumably, Silverberg, consider that religion is important, and often, although not always, beneficial. Not so with Vance, who never presents religion as anything but empty, and usually dangerous, ritual. Vance's priests, or the equivalent, are usually greedy and hypocritical.

The Lady of the Isle, although a living human person, is, in a sense, worshipped by the inhabitants of Majipoor. They address prayers to her. There is, however, another sort of deity for Majipoor, understood as above all, and, somehow, influencing and controlling events.

Here is a dialog near the end of Castle (p. 375):

Deliamber said . . . "It may be that the present troubles of the realm are the beginning of the retribution for the suppression of the Metamorphs."
Valentine stared at him. "What do you mean by that?"
"Only that we have gone a long way, here on Majipoor, without paying any sort of price for the original sin of the conquerors. The account accumulates interest, you know. . . . perhaps the past is starting to send us its reckoning at last."
"But Valentine had nothing to do with the oppression of the Metamorphs," Carabella protested. . . .
Deliamber shrugged. "Such things are never fairly distributed. What makes you think that only the guilty are punished?"
"The Divine--"
"Why do you think the Divine is fair? In the long run, all wrongs are righted, every minus is balanced with a plus, the columns are totaled and the totals are found correct. But that's in the long run. We must live in the short run, and matters are often unjust there. The compensating forces of the universe make all the accounts come out even, but they grind down the good as well as the wicked in the process."
"More than that," said Valentine suddenly. "It may be that I was chosen to be an instrument of Deliamber's compensating forces, and it was necessary for me to suffer in order to be effective."

Pontifex, in a sentence, is about the long run--righting all wrongs. It is a story of sin, sacrifice, and redemption. The book begins by describing how the life of Majipoor is falling apart, with the agents being, in part, the metamorphs, and ends with the establishment of these Piurivars as equal and participating members of the society of Majipoor. Throughout the book, there is frequent mention of higher powers:

"We have no choice in that: it is the will of the Divine. Is that not so?" (p. 24. The speaker is Aximaan Threysz, an ancient and respected Ghayrog matriarch and farmer.)
"Noor groaned. 'The Divine spare me!'" (p. 27. Noor is an government agricultural agent.)

"By the Divine, if you could know how I long to see the sun again!" (Valentine speaking, p. 47)
"But is he acceptable to the Divine, my friends?" (A human, claiming that Valentine should not be Coronal, pp. 129-130)

Actually, the humans who came to Majipoor long ago are not the only beings who have sinned. Their sin was not "original sin," or not the original one on the planet. The Piurivars sinned, at least in their own eyes, by sacrificing two sea-dragons, before humans ever came to the planet. Here is a dream of a Piurivar:
"In the beginning was the Defilement, when a madness came over us and we sinned against our brothers of the sea," he cries. "And when we awakened and beheld what we had done, for that sin we destroy our great city and go forth across the land. But even that was not sufficient, and enemies from afar were sent down upon us, and took from us all that we had, and drove us into the wilderness, which was our penance, for we had sinned against our brothers of the sea. And our ways were lost and our suffering was great and the face of the Most High was averted from us, until the time of the end of the penance came, and we found the strength to drive our oppressors from us and reclaim that which we had lost through our ancient sin. . . ." (Pontifex, p. 118)

Throughout the Majipoor books, it is clear that there is a higher power. The land-dwelling inhabitants speak of The Divine. The sea-dragons speak of "That Which Is." (All words capitalized in the original.)

(An aside here: in my view, Silverberg has a genius for naming characters, or at least for inventing names. Not all fantastic writers have been so good. Tolkien was, but he was drawing on the languages that he had created to produce those names. Silverberg, so far as I know, did not create any languages for Majipoor, but there is music in some of the names above these lines: Deliamber, Carabella, Aximaan Threysz.)

An on-line chat, apparently held in 1999, and apparently no longer available on-line, includes the following:

R Silverberg: Advocating any doctrine seems to me a violation of the reader-writer relationship.

OrsonScottCard: Obviously I'm not a fan of the genre.

RSilverberg: Exploring, yes. Peddling, no,

RSilverberg: Christianity is at least as worth exploring as atomic theory.

RSilverberg: In fiction, I mean.

. . .

RSilverberg: I was once asked to provide a quote for a Christian novel by Roger Elwood. He was astounded when I pointed out I wasn't Christian.

RSilverberg: And that Zeus was about as real to me as Jehovah.

I believe Silverberg has set out to explore Christianity in the Majipoor writings. It isn't the only thing he explores, and I doubt if he would say it's the main one, but it's part of the exploration. What has he explored? At least four themes closely related to Christianity. As I have said, one of these is revenge, or, rather, forgiveness and love instead of revenge. He has also explored sacrifice, in several ways. Valentine goes to the Piurivars, knowing that he may be killed, in Pontifex, because he is willing to be sacrificed for the good of Majipoor as a whole. Dekkeret's lovely cousin dies, killed by a madman who is trying to kill Prestimion, in Prestimion. Her death brings Dekkeret, who will eventually become Coronal, to Prestimion's attention. The Water-Kings, or seadragons, allow the Piurivars to kill them in a sacrificial ritual. Several warriors die gladly so that their leaders may live. A third is sin, and its consequences. Although there is forgiveness, evil leads to destruction, desolation, and death. Tying all these together is the theme of redemption. Valentine, and, later, Prestimion and Dekkeret, realize that Majipoor needs redemption--some act of love to free them from the consequences of wrong.

Sorcerers of Majipoor: revenge and religion

Sorcerers of Majipoor is set long before the time of Valentine. The plot is this: sorcerers have become prominent in the land. Most people consult them. The wealthy hire them to tell the future, and find things, and even, sometimes, to perform magic. The Pontifex is dying. Coronal Confalume (remembered for the throne he had built, in the marvelous Castle, the throne that Valentine ascended) will become Pontifex. He has chosen Prestimion to be the next Coronal. Although a Coronal's son has never succeeded a Coronal to the throne, Confalume's daughter, Thismet, and her sorcerer, persuade Thismet's twin brother, Korsibar, that he is the man most fit to succeed. (He is not--he is selfish, vain, and shallow, and has not paid much attention to the details of government.) The sorcerer casts a spell of confusion on everyone but Korsibar when the Pontifex dies, and Korsibar seizes the crown and proclaims himself Coronal. Confalume, the new Pontifex, still confused, does not dispute this rash act. Prestimion decides that he cannot accept Korsibar, and that no one should, so rebels. Many follow him, including, apparently, his distant cousin, Dantirya Sambail, the Procurator, the most powerful man on Zimroel, the second-largest continent of Majipoor. Eventually, there is war. Dantirya Sambail betrays Prestimion, and suggests to Korsibar that Prestimion be lured into the valley below a great dam, then have the dam breached. Prestimion escapes, but most of his army, and thousands of innocent farmers, do not. Prestimion, never a believer in sorcery, flees to the city where the most powerful sorcerers live, and decides to try again to remove Korsibar by force. He raises another army, this time with sorcerers in it. Thismet decides that she has no place in Korsibar's Castle. Her sorcerer has left her for her brother, the false Coronal. Her brother does not give her any power, and ignores her. She leaves Castle Mount, and travels to join Prestimion, and becomes his consort. Battle is joined again. Thousands perish, including Korsibar and Thismet, both slain by her former sorcerer, who betrays Korsibar. Prestimion, still not been a devotee of sorcery, reluctantly decides that the only thing that will heal Majipoor is to have the two most powerful sorcerers perform one last sorcery--they make everyone in the whole world, including themselves, forget that Korsibar ever existed, that wars were ever fought, that the dam was breached. Only Prestimion and two of his friends, Septach Melyn and Gilaurys, will remember. The three of them believe that these terrible events, and their effects, are over.

A word about sorcery--in the two previous Valentine books, there is a little sorcery. Two of the races, Vroon and Su-Suheris, have what might be called extra-sensory powers. Autifon Deliamber, who is with Valentine almost from the beginning of his restoration, is a Vroon. Deliamber is able to find ways for Valentine and his companions to travel, by projecting himself, or his senses, ahead to find safety. There is little else in the Valentine books that indicates that sorcery had any prominence. In Sorcerers, it seems that sorcery has recently come to prominence, in part because of the recent arrival of the two races that are most likely to practice it. (Others, including humans, also do.) Apparently it loses its appeal, and its influence, during the reign of Prestimion, or some time after that.

Religion, in Sorcerers, is fractured. There is still some acknowledgement of the Divine. However, it is clear that sorcery has become not only a wide-spread practice, but belief in it has become a religion, or many religions:

So there was no contending against the tide of magic and fear. In a thousand cities furious mages came forth, saying, "This is the way of salvation, these are the spells that will restore the world," and the people, doleful and frightened and hungry for salvation, said, "Yes, yes, show us the way." In each city the observations were different, and yet in essence everything was the same everywhere, processions and wild dances, shrieking flutes, roaring trumpets. Omens and prodigies. Sorcerers, p. 33.

Clearly Silverberg understands, as some authors of fantastic fiction do not, (No less than Tolkien, a faithful Roman Catholic, has been accused of this) that religion plays an important part, often positive, sometimes not, in the lives of people, and this should be reflected even in fantastic worlds. Here are two examples, spoken by Prestimion, from page 264:

"Item two, Korsibar's done something foul and dark and blasphemous by crowning himself like that. Such deeds are inevitably repaid on high. . . ."

"It's well known I have no use for sorcerers and such-like flummery. To that extent I'm a skeptic; but that doesn't mean I'm godless, Dantirya Sambail. There are forces in the universe that punish evil: this I do believe. The world will suffer if Korsibar's left to go unopposed. My own private ambitions aside, I feel he must be taken down, for the good of all."

Near the close of Sorcerers, Prestimion, like Valentine,  rejects violence. He has Dantirya Sambail in his power:

Nothing unhappy had befallen him that Dantirya Sambail had not had a hand in, somewhere. Prestimion felt himself grow hot with fury. Strike at him, he thought, and you are striking at all your misfortunes in a single thrust. . . .
"Go ahead," the Procurator said, "Shove it home, cousin!"

"What a pleasure that would be," said Prestimion. "But no. No, cousin, no." Not like this; not the slaughter of a prisoner, even this one. He could not. He would not. All his wrath had turned away. There had been enough killing for now. (pp. 598-9, emphasis in original)

Prestimion has him put into prison. He also puts a Vroon wizard, who changed sides more than once during the conflict, into the charge of a man named Barjazid, and tells him to take the wizard to Suvrael, the desert continent. The wizard has been working on devices to contact the mind at a distance.

Lord Prestimion: revenge and religion continued
An aside, before I consider the main plot and themes of this work. In Chronicles, Hissune accesses a memory left behind by Dekkeret, which has this statement in the second paragraph. "It was as an act of penance that Dekkeret had undertaken a voyage to the burning wastes of barren Suvrael." (p. 100) Prestimion gives more of the background of this story. Prestimion sees Dekkeret, a commoner, and believes that he has qualities of greatness. He elevates him to the Castle, to training for leadership. Part of that is a trip to Zimroel. After many days as a bureaucrat, Dekkeret goes on a hunting trip. The guides are not friendly, and don't respect Dekkeret and his companion, a noble from the Castle. The quarry animal appears. He goes after it, and kills it, running past his guide as he engages the animal. It develops that the beast has injured the guide, and, when Dekkeret returns to the scene, she is dead. Others do not blame Dekkeret. Indeed, the woman probably would have died in any case, but Dekkeret asks for assignment to Suvrael as penance.

Lord Prestimion continues Sorcerers. Several things which seemed settled aren't really settled. Varaile, a young commoner, with a wealthy widower for a father, is in charge of her household. A servant leaps to her death out of a window, killing two tourists in the street. Others are affected, also. There is a madness that strikes randomly. Not everyone is affected, but too many are. People have horrible headaches, or stop functioning for a few minutes, or go mad, and attack others, or jump off boats. As nearly as anyone can understand, they are in despair. Prestimion, now Coronal, thinks that these troubles are because so many of the citizenry are trying to deal with the changes that came about as a result of the enormous sorcery he ordered, which was designed to put all memories of Korsibar, and the war, out of people's minds. They don't seem able to remember how their friends, relatives, or acquaintances died, or they have forgotten that they existed. They have made up stories about how and why missing people are missing. Confalume, still Pontifex, does not remember that he had any children. He cannot remember Thismet and Korsibar. Prestimion fears that there is a price to pray for the suppression of all this truth.

Besides his two friends, who know what has happened, Prestimion tells Dantirya Sambail enough of what happened to explain why the latter is imprisoned, because Prestimion doesn't feel that he can keep the second most powerful man on the planet in jail for no apparent reason. Dantirya Sambail does not beg forgiveness, and escapes. Prestimion tells a few others, also. He has told his Su-Suheris mage, Maundigand-Klimd (who, by the way, claims, and acts as if, his sorcery is a science, not magic). Prestimion tells his mother, who has become Lady of the Isle, one of the powers of Majipoor, and Variale, who has become his wife, while on a visit to the Isle. In his despair, he tells them: "I thought I was healing the world. Instead, I was destroying it. I opened the gateway for this madness that consumes it now, the full dimensions of which have only become apparent to me today." (p. 394) A little later, Variale remarks that Prestimion must hate Dantirya Sambail, who seems to be at large, and raising an army to rebel. Prestimion realizes that he does hate him.

The King of Dreams

King concludes the second trilogy. Dantirya Sambail's poison-taster, Mandralisca, is a consummately evil man. He establishes a kingdom of his own in Zimroel, with five of Sambail's nephews as fronts for his leadership. A Barjazid, kept by Dinitak from coming to the Castle, goes to Mandralisca, with the secret of thought-projecting helmets that can be used to attack enemies in another continent. Mandralisca uses a helmet to send horrible dreams to members of Prestimion's family. Prestimion's brother is driven to take his own life by Mandralisca's visitation. Prestimion, now Pontifex, believes that the government must go to war against Mandralisca and his followers. However, Dekkeret, now Coronal, hopes that there is some method short of outright war. He, like Valentine, wants to win by projecting goodness. Dinitak Barjazid, now Dekkeret's best friend and confidante, also has the secret of the thought-projecting helmets. He acts to protect Dekkeret from evil thought projection, and Mandralisca is overthrown, without a war. Just before his final overthrow, one of Mandralisca's most trusted lieutenants, Thastain, an innocent farm boy placed into events he has not understood, understands how evil Mandralisca is, and gives his life to protect Dekkeret. Septach Melyn, Prestimion's old friend, as a representative of the Pontifex, kills Mandralisca, but dies himself.

During the time leading up to Dekkeret's expedition to Zimroel to overthrow Mandralisca, he receives powerful messages, apparently from the Divine, that he must do something to change the way things are done on Majipoor. At the end, he decides that what he must do is to set up Dinitak Barjazid as the first King of Dreams, who will punish evil-doers all over the planet.

Mr. Silverberg, himself, found the previous incarnation of this document, and e-mailed me about what I had said about religion and his work. See here.

Thanks for reading! Read Silverberg, if you wish.

Songs of the Dying Earth - Stories in Honor of Jack Vance

Jack Vance is still alive. However, he is said to be blind, or nearly so, and has not had any of his fantastic fiction published since 2004. But his career was long. His first publication was in 1950. That story was set in what Vance called the dying earth -- an imaginary planet, many years into the future, inhabited by people. But what people? Wizards, charlatans, rascals, villains. And some almost human creatures, such as Twk-men, so small that they ride dragonflies. The sun is visibly fading, and those who know how can travel to other dimensions and other planets. One of Vance's inventions is the idea that wizards can't remember more than about three spells at a time. And the names of those spells? Here is quintessential Vance - The Spell of Forlorn Encystment, The Excellent Prismatic Spray - which, respectively, encase the person affected in a small sphere under the earth, far under the earth, and zap the person affected with deadly rods. These are just two of the spells. There are many more.

Vance wrote other fiction, in fact most of his work was not set in the dying earth.

Some of that other fiction uses imaginative spells, too -- such as the Spell of Total Enlightenment.

Vance's imagination has captivated many readers, and authors. His voice is unique. The book which has the same title as this blog post is a collection of stories in Vance's honor. Authors include Elizabeth Moon, Neil Gaiman, George R. R. Martin, Dan Simmons, and over a dozen other luminaries. All pay homage to Vance, and describe his influence on their own work. They also attempt, in some way, to use some aspect of the dying earth, such as Vance's characters, his geography, his non-human creatures, his spells, and, to some extent, even his language, or a combination of these. They mostly succeed, but they aren't Vance.

Here is a quotation from Tales of the Dying Earth, by Vance:

Deep in thought, Mazirian the Magician walked his garden. Trees fruited with many intoxications overhung his path, and flowers bowed obsequiously as he passed. An inch above the ground, dull as agates, the eyes of mandrakes followed the tread of his black-slippered feet. Such was Mazirian's garden -- three terraces growing with strange and wonderful vegetables. Certain plants swam with changing iridescences; others held up blooms pulsing like sea-anemones, purple, green, lilac, pink, yellow. Here grew trees like feather parasols, trees with transparent trunks threaded with red and yellow veins, trees with foliage like metal foil, each leaf a different metal -- copper, silver, blue tantalum, bronze, green iridium. Here blooms like bubbles tugged gently upward from glazed green leaves, there a shrub bore a thousand pipe-shaped blossoms, each whistling softly to make music of the ancient Earth, of the ruby-red sunlight, water seeping through black soil, the languid winds. (Page 17).

And these few sentences, interesting as they are, don't by any means exhaust, or even illustrate, all aspects of Vance's unique style. What sardonic conversations! What vocabulary! And, of course, what descriptions.

The book is worth reading, but Vance is more so. (There are dangers, I am sure, in reading Vance. Some have called him anti-Christian. He is probably not exactly that, just a neopagan who seems to hold all sorts of religion, including many such that he made up, in contempt.)

Thanks for reading.

Lurulu, by Jack Vance

I have read what Jack Vance has said is his final work of fiction (he has been a published author since about 1950, mostly fantastic literature). That book is Lurulu, which was published in 2004 by Tor. (See here for a review, which includes a summary of the plot.)

I have previously posted on Vance, including some discussion of his religious beliefs. It is dangerous to assume that a character is speaking for an author, but here's a quotation from the book, which indicates that he doesn't take religion, of any kind, very seriously:
Wingo was greatly interested in comparative metaphysics. He paid more than casual attention to the sects, superstitions, religions, and transcendental philosophies which he encountered as the Glicca travelled from world to world and, whenever he wandered strange places, gave careful attention to local spiritual doctrines -- a practice which incurred Schwatzendale's disapproval.
"You are wasting your time! There are a hundred thousand of these creeds; they all talk the same nonsense, and all want your money. Why bother? Religious cant is the greatest nonsense of all!"
"There is much in what you say," Wingo admitted. "Still, is it not possible, that by some odd chance one of these hundred thousand doctrines is correct and precisely defines the Cosmic Way? If we passed it by, we might never encounter Truth again!"
"In theory, yes," grumbled Schwatzendale. "But in practice, your chances are next to nil." (p. 23. Wingo and Schwatzendale are two of the four man crew of the Glicca. The other two are Captain Maloof and Myron Tany, the bookkeeper, who are the main characters.)

Most of Vance's books feature a young man, finding himself. Myron plays that role here. Women don't play a major role in Vance's fiction, and that is true of Lurulu. There is plenty of eating, with menus described, and plenty of dialog, often featuring unusual words taken from Vance's splendid vocabulary. It's a typical Vance novel.

So what is lurulu? As far as I can tell, this is a word made up by Vance for this book. Lurulu, as I understand it, is happiness, or very close to it. The characters occasionally discuss it, but don't define it. While I was reading the book, I was reminded of sehnsucht, a term from C. S. Lewis. Vance, however, wrote about a state that could never really be achieved -- near the end, the four characters find themselves in luxury, but decide, after a short time in that state, that they prefer to be traveling around space as a freighter crew. Lewis believed that humans were subject to a longing that couldn't be satisfied outside of a relationship with God.

Vance was still entertaining in 2004, but, as usual, lacked depth. He never wrote about interesting scientific possibilities in his science fiction. His characters were usually not very deep. His novels were mostly novels of setting, dashing through many different types of societies, with bizarre customs and behavior. The books are worth reading, but generally not emotionally or intellectually gripping.

Thanks for reading!

Fantastic literature as a preferred medium for presenting Christian truth?

In a previous post, I considered aspects of Christianity in fantastic literature. I said that I did not think that fantastic literature was any more suitable than any other kind of literature for presenting fiction with a Christian world-view. However, in this post, I muse on the possibility that some Christian truths may be better presented in fantastic literature than in any other kind of fiction, and ask you, the reader, to respond, with other examples.

I believe that fantastic literature is an excellent place to portray an unfallen planet, inhabited by one or more unfallen rational, sentient species. C. S. Lewis did this superbly, in my opinion, in his Out of the Silent Planet (Malacandra had three such species). James Blish also considered this, from a different standpoint, in his A Case of Conscience.

Lilith, by George MacDonald, considers submission in ways that I am not sure would be possible in more realistic fiction.

Susan Palwick considers the matter of seeing Christ in other people in her The Necessary Beggar. The fantastic nature of the story makes this possible in a unique way -- the ghost of an alien speaks to a fundamentalist preacher and his faith is renewed.

I have discussed the question of vengeance in the works of Jack Vance, not because Vance writes from a Christian world-view -- he doesn't -- but because Vance uses fantasy to portray vengeance in many different ways.

Are there Christian truths that would lend themselves especially to portrayal in fantastic fiction? Are there authors who have used fantastic fiction especially well to consider some Christian truth? Let me know what you think, please.

Thanks for reading.

The limits of human imagination

In my last post from George MacDonald's Diary of an Old Soul, this passage was included:

3. And in the perfect time, O perfect God,
When we are in our home, our natal home,
When joy shall carry every sacred load,
And from its life and peace no heart shall roam,
What if thou make us able to make like thee--
To light with moons, to clothe with greenery,
To hang gold sunsets o'er a rose and purple sea!

What if, indeed, we are able to create like God? Is that possible? Wow. Not in this life, I'd say, or not very much.

One of the places where you might expect to find signs of God-like creativity is in fantastic literature. (There are other places, of course) But I can't think of many examples of real creativity there. C. S. Lewis did produce seroni, hrossa, and pfiffltriggi on Malacandra. But he probably didn't do a much better job than anyone else has in creating a really original, yet credible, sentient species. The hrossa were sort of seals with human intelligence, which isn't a huge extrapolation, or a tremendous feat of creativity. (Other authors have been even less creative, of course!) A few authors have actually thought about sunsets. Jack Vance used the different colors that might be found on other planets, with more than one sun, in one of his novels. In Lilith, MacDonald wrote: "When I came to myself, the creature was hovering over my head, radiating the whole chord of light, with multitudinous gradations and some kinds of colour I had never before seen." (1895, public domain, chapter x) Probably other authors have imagined other colors, too.

There are other examples, some very old, like Baba Yaga's hut on chicken legs, or fire-breathing flying reptiles with great intelligence (aka dragons) and some very new, like the title of The Speed of Dark. All of them, I think, are better than any that I have thought of. My imagination is so limited. But so is that of the best of us, compared to God.

What's the best example of human creativity in fantastic literature?

Is Jack Vance Anti-Christian?

Jack Vance has been an important writer of fantastic fiction for about sixty years. Two of his books, The Dragon Masters and The Last Castle, won Hugo Awards. (He also wrote some other fiction, including some mystery novels.) The most important characteristics of his works are his careful use of an amazing variety of words, his ability to invent and describe new societies (often a dozen or more such in a single book), and the sardonic dialog that his characters engage in. A group of Vance enthusiasts has produced the Vance Integral Edition, a volunteer work, which is a unified printing of all of his writings (so far -- he is still alive), carefully edited.

Here's a sample of Vance, from his The Green Pearl:

“Hmm! It seems an exaggerated response. A sip or two of mead, a taste of honey-cake: where is the harm in this?”
“None whatever!” declared the ex-priest. “I must admit that the issues possibly went a trifle deeper, and I may even found a new brotherhood, devoid of those stringencies which too often make religion a bore. I am restrained only because I do not wish to be branded a heretic. Are you yourself a Christian?”
The young man made a negative sign. “The concepts of religion baffle me.”
“This inscrutability is perhaps not unintentional,” said the ex-priest. “It gives endless employment to dialecticians who otherwise might become public charges or, at very worst, swindlers and tricksters. May I ask whom I have the pleasure of addressing?”

The Green Pearl is the second of a trilogy, set in an imaginary group of islands, near Europe, in the Middle Ages. The sample, in addition to mentioning Christianity, and religion in general, gives a small sample of Vance's use of dialog. He uses it a lot, and his characters are almost all sardonic, and given to using rare words. I have posted previously on Vance, and, in that post, give another short sample of his writing, in this case, without dialog.

In his works set on other worlds, and in the future, Vance is also known for throwing out lots of imaginary cultures. In some books, he seems to put a new one in every valley, radically different from the one in the previous valley. In addition to bizarre clothing, food, and other customs, they often practice bizarre religions, and the religions are never spoken of respectfully. But, it is true that the clothes, the food, and the other customs usually aren't, either. It is as if each culture observed by his protagonists were in some sort of cultural zoo, observed through the bars, with the observer thinking that all of them are strange.

I have a web page summarizing much (not all) of Vance's writing, and emphasizing the different forms of vengeance often taken by his characters.

This page has an index of writings, associated with the Vance Integral Edition project, addressing the religious aspects of Vance's work, in particular whether or not he has been anti-Christian. Perhaps the most important of these is a long article by Paul Rhoads, entitled, as this blog post, "Is Jack Vance Anti-Christian?" Rhoads has an encyclopedic grasp of Vance's writing, which begins on page 15 of a .pdf document. Rhoads concludes that Vance is a neopagan, not a virulent anti-Christian (although some have said so), and that that aspect of his belief has been mostly incidental to his work. He points out that many authors, some undeniably Christian, have used hypocrital, or otherwise deeply flawed characters who claimed (fictionally) to be Christian, just as Vance has. I believe that Rhoads is correct on these points.

A taste for Vance is an acquired taste, but the man had talent, and has acquired a following.

Thanks for reading.

*  *  *  *  *  *

On June 3, 2012, I modified the next-to-last paragraph. The most significant change was adding the title of the article by Paul Rhoads, which should have been included.

Colors: Black

Black is the most common color word in English. According to Wordcount, it is the 356th most common word, between "care" and "book," which is the 357th most common word.

There are only 18 verses in the Bible that have this word, considerably less than for some of the color words in previous posts. These include references to the sky when stormy, or when God is angry, to human and horse hair, and to human skin when exposed to the sun.

Easton's Bible Dictionary: "Colour"

The subject of colours holds an important place in the Scriptures. . . .

Black, applied to the hair ( Lev 13:31; Sgs 5:11), the complexion ( Sgs 1:5), and to horses ( Zec 6:2,6). The word rendered "brown" in Gen 30:32 ( R.V., "black") means properly "scorched", i.e., the colour produced by the influence of the sun's rays. "Black" in Job 30:30 means dirty, blackened by sorrow and disease. The word is applied to a mourner's robes ( Jer 8:21; 14:2), to a clouded sky ( 1Ki 18:45), to night ( Mic 3:6; Jer 4:28), and to a brook rendered turbid by melted snow ( Job 6:16). It is used as symbolical of evil in Zec 6:2, 6 and Rev 6:5. It was the emblem of mourning, affliction, calamity ( Jer 14:2; Lam 4:8; 5:10).

A couple of items on color that I haven't gotten in in previous posts:
The Astronomy Picture of the Day for Feb 27, 2005, is a spectrum of the sun, spread out more than we are used to seing.

More on color and fantastic literature:
Jack Vance is one of the great writers of fantastic fiction. He has won two Hugo awards, and has written for over four decades. He is distinguished by his baroque use of words, and by his imagination. Some of his magical realms have colors that human eyes don't normally see. (Of course Vance can't describe them!) One of his novels, Alastor: Marune, is set on a planet with four suns, orange, blue, red and green. Vance wrote that the citizens' moods and behavior changed, depending on which combination of suns were in the sky. A Vance fan, Eric Halsey, has created a free downloadable software program that shows the 16 color combinations of these four suns. (Warning: file is several megabytes in size. The link is to a page that describes the program. It has a link to download it.) (The previous parenthesis, and the sentence preceding it, were modified on Jan 10, 2007, because of a comment by tap (see below). I thank him.)

My post on Indigo mentioned Whitelaw as a word about as common as Indigo (which isn't very common). Turns out Whitelaw is the name of a town in the UK.

Back to black
Black isn't exactly a color, even though there are black crayons, and black paint. Black is the absence of other colors. If all light is absorbed, the result is black. A black hole is a dense space object that has gravity so strong that the resulting bending of space prevents light from escaping. We can't see a black hole with a telescope, because no light comes from it.

No humans, or any other objects we can see, are pure black. They may be dark, but if they were black, we couldn't see them, because they wouldn't reflect any light. Fantastic writer Gene Wolfe invented a fabric, fuligin, used in his Torturer series, that could not be seen. (Note added Jan 9, 2007: Wolfe says that he didn't invent any words in his Torturer series, more commonly known as the Book of the New Sun.)

Black is often used to symbolize death, despair, or sin. I am posting this on the anniversary of a black day for the disciples. Black has quite a few unhappy connotations. (Think Black Death, for example.) In Tolkien's Ring books, the bad characters often were black, or wore black. (Black breath was a sickness produced by the ringwraiths, and Mordor was referred to as the black land. Sauron was the dark lord.) It is unfortunate that some of these negative connotations have been associated with dark-skinned people.

Sin is sometimes described as black, needing the crimson blood of Christ to cleanse, and make us white.

This, so far as I know, ends my series on colors, which began February 14th of 2005, with a post on red. Thanks to anyone who has read this one, or any or all of the others!

Modifications, noted above, were made to this post on January 9th and 10th, 2007. No other changes have been made to the original post, hence I have kept the original date.

Jack Vance

Jack Vance is one of the great craftsmen of fantastic literature in English. (He also seems to have a strong following in translation, especially in French.) He has been writing for a long time, from The Dying Earth, 1950, to the present. Some of his work is clearly fantasy, some is science fiction. I am defining the latter as fiction which extrapolates the present (usually into the future) more or less realistically. The former is less linked to the real world as we know it, and often involves magic of some sort.

Vance's craft consists in his fertile imagination, and in his baroque use of words. He isn't great on character development, and many of his plots are weak, but his settings are amazing. He tosses out whole new societies often, sometimes almost in every paragraph. Religions, mating customs, food, pastimes, music and language are some of the colors he gives his strange cultures.

I have created some pages, on the theme of vengeance in Vance's works (his imagination has been fertile on that theme) and with some links to other pages on Vance. Vance has used both science-aided vengeance, and fantastic vengeance (spells, and the like) in his works. Vengeance is found as a major component of most of his fiction. I have also created a page on the work of Patricia A. McKillip, a current major writer of fantasy, who has presented characters who have had serious wrongs done to them, but pulled back from taking vengeance, in several of her books.

See Romans 12:18-20.

Here's an example of Vance's baroque style, as well as of his imagination working on a remarkable type of vengeance--a spell making someone omniscient (!):

Stung by the derision of Widdefut, Sartzanek retaliated with the Spell of Total Enlightenment, so that Widdefut suddenly knew everything which might be known: the history of each atom of the universe, the devolvements of eight kinds of time, the possible phases of each succeeding instant; all the flavors, sounds, sights of the world, as well as percepts relative to nine other more unusual senses. Widdefut became palsied and paralyzed and could not so much as feed himself. He stood trembling in confusion until he dessicated to a wisp and blew away on the wind. -Jack Vance, Lyonesse, (New York: Berkley, 1983) p. 112.

Warning--there are plot spoilers on my pages on these authors. For me, who has read both these authors over and over, and probably will do so again, knowing a few plot details doesn't matter. For others, it might.