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Raves For the Work of Robert Silverberg!

Raves For the Work of
ROBERT SILVERBERG!

“A surefire page-turner.”

—Chicago Sun-Times

“Dazzling.”

—Michael Chabon

“A master of his craft.”

—Los Angeles Times

“Perfect.”

—New York Times

“When Silverberg is at the top of his form, no one is better.”

—George R.R. Martin

“One of the great storytellers of the century.”

—Roger Zelazny

“Ferocious…brilliance comes burning through… Silverberg’s only hallmark is quality.”

—Jonathan Lethem

“Tight and thought-provoking.”

—Locus

“Robert Silverberg’s versatile, skeptical intelligence controls a lavish and splendid imagination.”

—Ursula K. LeGuin

“Grandly sweeping and imaginative…the sure hand of an old master.”

—Publishers Weekly

“A masterpiece when I first read it, and remains a master-piece to this day.”

—Greg Bear

“This is a superb novel about a common human sorrow [by] one of science fiction’s most distinguished writers.”

—Washington Post

“Silverberg is a master.”

—Los Angeles Review of Books

“A joy to read.”

—Booklist

“He has the facility of enveloping the reader in a mood, of capturing his attention until he has quite swept him along, as he says, ‘toward the culminating moment of insight.’ Silverberg performs magic with the medium.”

—St. Louis Post-Dispatch

“One of the finest writers.”

—Philadelphia Inquirer

“Enormously fun.”

—Strange Horizons

“Robert Silverberg is our best.”

—The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction

“Silverberg is a master writer in any genre—and now you’re going to find out why they call them ‘thrillers.’ ”

—John Shirley

He was a young man with good looks—but you had the impression that his looks were fading right before your eyes. The clothes that he was wearing were in the last stages of shabbiness, but they still bore signs that indicated they had been expensive at the outset.

Brady huddled over his drink and listened to the conversation of the young man and the girl, and felt lucky. They were talking about the very thing that had drawn him there that evening. In a way, that was natural enough, not really surprising. The affair was fresh in everyone’s mind.

“I warned Doris,” the drunk was saying, making dreamy circles in the water on the bar. “Not that it makes a damn bit of difference whether you live or die, not a single goddam bit of difference in this filthy kind of world we have to live in. They shovel you into the ground and that’s the end of you, and it don’t matter a damn who you were or what you did. But I warned her anyway. I warned her there’d be a rotten finish waiting for her.” The drunk paused. “You know what? She’s better off dead.”

“What the hell do you know about it?” the girl asked.

The drunk scowled. “I know it’s no good. Oh, it’s all right when you’ve had everything else and hit the skids. Then you’ve got nothing to live for anyway.”

“Like you, for instance,” the girl jeered.