As I said in my previous post, I suspended reading for some weeks once the coronavirus lockdown began, in mid-March; things were too unsettled and uncertain to allow for the indulgence of sitting down and turning inward into a book. It was much more important to pay attention to everything going on in the outside world. And so instead I replayed most of the Myst games, over five or six weeks. As I finished those, or stalled on a couple of them, I returned to books. At the end of April, I began reading again: the first Asimov robot novel, then this rather incidental Silverberg novel, and since then a few more. Since I still have a backlog of 1950s \u201cclassic era\u201d science fiction novels that I read a year ago to base future Black Gate columns on, I\u2019ve decided to relax my purview for reading and especially reread the great SF novels from all decades since the 1950s. But more about those later.<\/p>\n
There are reasons to occasionally read more ordinary novels from past decades, as I did with Robert Silverberg\u2019s COLLISION COURSE (review at Black Gate here: https:\/\/www.blackgate.com\/2020\/04\/09\/a-fascinating-ordinary-1950s-sf-novel-robert-silverbergs-collision-course\/<\/a>). I\u2019m a long-time Silverberg fan, especially for his mature work that I discovered in the early 1970s, yet my justification for reading his very early novels from the 1950s and 1960s is to identify the \u201cstandard SF furniture\u201d of the time \u2013 the assumptions about space, and aliens, and ESP, and so on, that informed 1950s SF and which have lingered in popular culture via the franchises Star Trek<\/em> and Star Wars<\/em>, yet which have been overcome, derided, dismissed, by advancing scientific understanding, and abandoned or superseded by better ideas in the best SF of subsequent decades.<\/p>\n For this post, instead of copying in my complete summary notes (which sometimes I write as I read, sitting by the computer, and so which are extremely detailed), I will summarize more concisely, as a courtesy to any readers I might have.<\/p>\n So. Robert Silverberg\u2019s THE 13TH<\/sup> IMMORTAL was, as he explained in the introduction to the 2004 Cosmos paperback edition, the first novel he wrote after winning a Hugo Award for \u201cMost Promising New Author\u201d in 1956. After winning that award, he pitched a novel to Donald A. Wollheim, publisher of Ace Books, which in that decade published \u201cAce Doubles,\u201d in which two books were published, back to back, with a front cover on each side. He sold it, wrote it, and that\u2019s how this novel first appeared.<\/p>\n Setting<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n The setting is some hundreds of years in the future, after a nuclear war. The entire world has been divided up into Twelve Empires, each ruled by an immortal Duke. Mutant animals, and humans, inhabit the landscape.<\/p>\n Plot<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n Comments<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" As I said in my previous post, I suspended reading for some weeks once the coronavirus lockdown began, in mid-March; things were too unsettled and uncertain to allow for the indulgence of sitting down and turning inward into a book. … Continue reading \n
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