Lord Valentine's Castle
1995 · book
Valentine, a wanderer who knows nothing except his name, finds himself on the fringes of a great city, and joins a troupe of jugglers and acrobats; gradually, he remembers that he is the Coronal Valentine, executive ruler of the vast world of Majipoor, and all its peoples, human and otherwise... Lord Valentine's Castlewas the first of Robert Silverberg's novels about Majipoor, in which he has for two decades explored the question of responsibility and authority; much SF and fantasy plays with constructed dreams of feudalism, but Silverberg asks the important questions of how a ruler can be a good person, and how can the person who rules all be free themselves. Lord Valentine's Castleis a blend of SF worldbuilding and poetic fantasy. Silverberg has created a world long settled by spacefaring powers, aliens and humans alike, whose technological prowess is losing its edge. Hightech devices like antigravity floaters and weather control devices are an accepted part of Majipoor life, but ordinary people tend to regard them as magical. The pattern of life is far more medieval for most: Bioengineered mounts plow fields and pull carriages while minstrels scratch out a living by following the time-honored custom of moving from town to town, hoping for friendly crowds. Valentine's journey is a long one, a tour through a series of magnificent environments. Fields of predatory plants give way to impossibly wide rivers, chalk-cliffed islands and unforgiving deserts. The prose is unrelentin