Recent reads
Son of Man, by Robert Silverberg. I actually only skimmed this one after the first few pages, in which the hero, without any obvious explanation, suddenly wakes up in some kind of future world inhabited by utopian, pansexual, polymorphously shapeshifting descendants of humanity and begins exploring all its weird possibilities. It's far off the mark of SilverBob's best work, in my judgement. But then again I've never been a fan of most of the trippy so-called "New Wave" of science fiction that came out in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In throwing off the the rational rules of hard SF as well as the restrictions of realistic or historically-inspired fiction, it seems to me that it leaves the reader with no objective reference point from which to understand the story. At its best, it could be invigoratingly experimental, but at its worst, much of the "New Wave" simply collapsed into purely subjective authorial self-indulgence.
Sailing to Byzantium, another story by Silverberg which addresses a similar theme, strikes me as a far superior work. Perhaps this is because the far-future humanoids in that story, by re-creating historical settings for their decadence, also give the reader a more congenial frame of reference.
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You are disparaging my favorite book. Son of Man is a book that requires careful reading. In fact, I didn't "get it" until I reread the book. There is no lack of an objective reference point. A 20th century man is warped into the distant future where he is challenged by alternate forms of being and relationship while traversing realms of elemental immersion. It asks the question, "What does it mean to be human?" and "How would a human adapt to fundamental changes in the nature of reality?"
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