F/SF

I fancied reading something old school, saw this mentioned somewhere and it sounded intriguing, and it was very cheap. I wish I’d never bothered. A man contemporary to the time of writing wake sup in the far future, and has various encounters – most of which are sexual, although, to be fair, there is a lot of genderfluidity – with denizens of that age and earlier. The Time Machine this is not. In parts, it reads like a writing exercise, Silverberg using his thesaurus with a vengeance, albeit not abusing it as Fanthorpe did; but, all the same, it’s still a novel desperately in search of a story. I can’t decide if the book reads like a novel written to fulfil a contract or a book written as an experiment in style and content. The fact it fails so dismally on the latter suggests the former, but then it was published in 1971, so perhaps it was intended as a literary experiment. Still, no matter how you look at it, Son of Man is an historical document that’s best forgotten. Much as I admire SF Gateway for making older works of science fiction available, there are some that are perhaps better not re-issued, and this would be one of them. ( )

I think I'm going to upset a number of fans here, but......

What can I say? I have read several books by Silverburg and enjoyed them. But Son of God was just an awful book compared to any other I have read by him.

The 'plot' follows a man called Clay (I assume a modern day reference to Prometheus) who has been catapulted into the future through a time flux. What follows is a very disjointed text that details how Clay meets a number of other 'Sons of Man', other humans further down the evolutionary scale. It sounds like it could be a very interesting novel. Unfortunately it is written in such a way that the short sentences just annoy, the descriptions go on and on, often until you are unsure (or care) what he is actually describing.

I don't know whether Silverberg was experimenting with language when he wrote this book or experimenting with drugs.... but either way, it didn't work. As least not in my case.

I suppose the main aspect of the book I disliked was how nothing was ever really explained. It was just a case of jumping from one creature to another. No depth was ever really given to the storyline. Things just happened.... well.... because they can. It was almost as if Silverberg had thought of several brilliant characters without a story to place them in and just decided to cram them all in together.

On a positive note though some of the descriptions were very vivid, if only there was a plot to back them up.

If this is your first book by the author please check out his other books (Tower of Glass) or you will be missing out on some great SF. If this had been my first book by him then I doubt I would have ever picked up anything by him again, and that would have been a great pity.

I am sure I am missing something with this novel, but I can guarantee I will never revisit it to try and find it. ( )

My reactions to reading this novel in 1993. Spoilers follow.

I liked this strange, weird, surrealistic fantasy.

I liked the fact that the motives behind so many of the denizens of this far future, particularly the Skimmers and Destroyers (with their enigmatic project of spreading both ice and fire), were mysterious, unexplained like so many of the mysteries here.

I liked Clay, an enigmatic figure that we learn little about personally – he’s a stand in for our version of humanity – other than that he’s has the usual sexual fantasies and appetites, and his shock at finding nothing of our age surviving though the “humans” he meets vaguely remember hearing something about the moon being around once.

I liked how so many scenes could be delusions or reality, visions or descriptions -- things like Clay’s body dissolving in a multi-chromatic, acidic river or the Earth being leveled to a smooth sphere, and the intriguing aspect of Clay being turned into a woman and having sex with male-form Skimmers (though Clay feels oddly violated).

I liked the Eaters hanging out in a subterranean city incomprehensibly described by a robot – the words are familiar mostly but the sentences make no sense.

I liked the Awaiters who sit in the ground like trees and spin nihilistic, acausual philosophies that seem beautiful to Clay when he’s in Awaiter form but pointless otherwise.

I liked the trek through the various Zones of Discomfort. It’s another example of Silverberg’s theme of loneliness and alienation.

I liked Silverberg’s style. It’s usually simple as far as word choice. He repeats the same sentence three times in many places, but the sentences often are complex compounds intermingled with simple sentences. It’s quite effective, hard to describe.

I like the many references to Clay’s sexuality – how he feels the need to masturbate sometimes or how his genitals feel (usually in a suffering context).

I liked the religious allusion of the title, and the end seems to be implying that Clay takes the pain of these sons of man. It’s curious that Clay readily accepts that humanity is defined by psychological and spiritual traits and not appearance. The burdens of the sons of man are taken by Clay after he is purified, sort of – at least the Skimmers say he’s learned much about himself, by a trek through the areas of discomfort (oddly, intriguingly, somehow appropriately long established for "the instruction of mankind”). In the end, he dies. The book says he sleeps, but I take that as a metaphor since it is clearly stated many times he needs no food or sleep in in this world. This is after he crawls from the Well of First Things which I took not only to be a literalization of man’s evolution past and future, but an allusion to Satan’s pit for Clay clearly acknowledges his vileness, that he is disturbing to the Skimmers. Yet, he says they must realize that “I am you”, imperfect but the potential form of the book's many sons.

I don’t think this religious imagery and allusions works though. It seems tacked on at the end as if Silverberg realized he had to put some dramatic end to what is a series of intriguing, surrealistic vignettes. I’m not convinced Silverberg meant from the start to do anything more than a refreshingly strange tale. He has said elsewhere it’s the spirit of 1968 incarnated. ( I’ve also heard this book compared to David Lindsay’s Son of Arcturus, but I’ve never read that.) Still, I liked it probably the best of any far future story I’ve read including Brian Aldiss’ Hothouse. ( )

Totally post human, man! ( )