LORD VALENTINE'S CASTLE
By
On the vast and beautiful world of Majipoor, where many intelligent races live peacefully together in a rosy post-industrial harmony founded on obedience to the inner truths revealed in dreams, an amnesiac wanderer takes up with a troupe of traveling jugglers. Disturbing dreams shortly make known his real identity: he is Lord Valentine the Coronal or supreme ruler of Majipoor, cast by sinister arts into a strange body while an impostor governs from his great castle. The true Lord Valentine and his friends (a brotherhood of four-armed jugglers and their human partners, a tentacled sorcerer, a good-natured giantess) make their way across half the planet to confront the false Coronal. Silverberg, usually a glibly competent narrator in any mode he undertakes, seems to run out of energy long before these unremarkable proceedings lumber to their mealy-mouthed conclusion. In terms of sf underpinnings, Majipoor is an inexcusably flimsy construct; and a large cast of promising characters is left rattling around the lengthy and plodding narrative in such a meagerly developed state as to resembled blighted peas in a pod. Disappointing.