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    Thorns
    Thorns
    Thorns
    Ebook242 pages4 hours

    Thorns

    By Robert Silverberg

    3/5

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    About this ebook

    The Science Fiction Grand Master’s Thorns “holds up chillingly well after all these decades. A dark pastiche upon Beauty and the Beast” (SF Reviews). 
     
    In a world where humanity has colonized the solar system and begun to explore more of the local galaxy, a vast audience follows real-life stories presented by wealthy media mogul Duncan Chalk. To satisfy his audience’s voyeuristic needs—and his own appetite for others’ pain—he pairs Minner Burris, an emotionally withdrawn space explorer who was captured and freakishly surgically altered by aliens, with Lona Kelvin, a suicidal seventeen-year-old girl who donated eggs for a fertility experiment that produced one hundred babies, none of whom she has been allowed to adopt or even see. Chalk promises to solve their personal problems in return for a joint performance tour.
     
    Though the love affair doesn’t last, Chalk keeps the couple on the hook by making new offers. While Minner and Lona struggle to cope with their newfound celebrity and Chalk’s broken promises, they will uncover the true nature of their manipulator—and risk everything to regain the humanity that has been stolen from them . . .
     
    An early exploration of media exploitation and a deep look at freak-show entertainment on a mass scale, this novel was one of the earliest of Silverberg’s mature masterworks.
     
    “Masterful . . . This is a sophisticated novel, beautifully written, intelligent and insightful, with wonderful dialogue and a satisfying conclusion.” —Fantasy Literature
     
    “Silverberg’s brooding, post-utopian, rumination has the makings of a great science fiction novel. . . . A worthwhile read which rambles along a dark path . . . Well done.” —Science Fiction Ruminations
     
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Media
    Release dateApr 1, 2014
    ISBN9781497632431
    Thorns
    Author

    Robert Silverberg

    Robert Silverberg’s first published story appeared in 1954 when he was a sophomore at Columbia University. Since then, he has won multiple Nebula, Hugo, and Locus awards. He has been nominated for both awards more times than any other writer. In 1999 he was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame, and in 2004 the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America gave him their Grand Master Award for career achievement. He remains one of the most imaginative and versatile writers in science fiction.

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    • 3/5
      Chalk is an entertainment mogul. Burris is a retired spaceman who was irreparably altered by alien surgeons. Lona is a teenager who had hundreds of her eggs removed. Scientists then fertilized the viable ones, all from the same sperm donor, and a dozen women and 88 artificial wombs brought her babies to term. She has never met them. This profoundly impacted her. Burris is profoundly impacted by the unending pain and the monster face that the alien surgeons left him with.
      Chalk decides to bring the two together, and publicize their romance, making revenue from it. But he is an emotional vampire and he grows fat on negative emotions, so Burris and Lona are in for bad times.
      Hardback edition
      P.65:
      "Hooded once more, he let himself be swept along a network of pneumatic tubes until he found himself gliding into an immense cavernous room studded with various levels of activity points. Just now there was little activity; the desks were empty, the screens were silent. A gentle glow of thermal luminescent fungi lit the place. Turning slowly, Burris panned his gaze across the room and up a series of Crystal rungs until he observed, seated thronewise near the ceiling on the far side, a vast individual.
      Chalk. Obviously.
      Burris stood absorbed in the sight, forgetting for a moment the million tiny pricking pains that were his constant companions. So big? So enfleshed? The man had devoured a legion of cattle to gain that bulk."

      P.67:
      " 'your rating must have been good. you were given a tough assignment. first landing on a world of intelligent beings – never a cinch. how many in your team?'
      'Three. we all went through surgery. Prolisse died first, then Malcondotto. Lucky for them.'
      'you dislike your present body?'
      'it has its advantages. The doctors say I'm likely to live 500 years. But it's painful, and it's also embarrassing. I was never cut out to be a monster.'
      'you're not as ugly as you may think you are,' chalk observed. 'oh, yes, children run screaming from you, that sort of thing. But children are conservatives. They loathe anything new. I find that face of yours quite attractive in its way. I dare say a lot of women would fling themselves at your feet.' "

      P.83:
      " '... It's a dry world. Pluvial belts about the poles, then mounting dryness approaching the equator. it rains about every billion years at the equator and somewhat more frequently in the temperate zones.'
      'Homesick?'
      'hardly. But I learned the beauty of thorns there.'
      'thorns? They stick you.'
      'That's part of their beauty.'
      'you sound like chalk now,' Aoudad muttered. 'pain is instructive, he says. Pain is gain. and thorns are beautiful. Give me a rose.'
      'rose bushes are thorny, too,' Burris remarked quietly.
      AOudad looked distressed. 'tulips, then. Tulips!'
      Burris said, 'The Thorn is merely a highly evolved form of leaf. an adaptation to a harsh environment. Cacti can't afford to transpire the way leafy plants do. So they adapt. I'm sorry you regard such an elegant adaptation as ugly.' "

      P.134-5:
      "the glass was translucent quartz. It was 3/5 filled with a richly viscous green liquid. moving idly back and forth was a tiny animal, teardrop shaped, whose Violet skin left a faint glow behind as it swam.
      'is that supposed to be there?'
      Burris laughed. 'I have a deneb martini, so-called. It's a preposterous name. specialty of the house.'
      'and in it?'
      'a tadpole, essentially. Amphibious life form from one of the aldebaran worlds.'
      'which you drink?'
      'yes. Live.'
      'live.' Lona shuddered. 'why? does it taste that good?'
      'it has no taste at all, as a matter of fact. It's pure decoration. sophistication come full circle, back to barbarism. One gulp, and down it goes.'
      'but it's alive? How can you kill it?'
      'Have you ever eaten an oyster, Lona?'
      'No. what's an oyster?'
      'a mollusk. once quite popular, served in its shell. Live. You sprinkle it with lemon juice – citric acid, you know – and it writhes. Then you eat it. it tastes of the sea. I'm sorry, Lona. That's how it is. Oysters don't know what's happening to them. They don't have hopes and fears and dreams. Neither does this creature here.'
      'but to kill -'
      'we kill to eat. A true morality of food would allow us to eat only synthetics.' Burris smiled kindly. 'I'm sorry. I wouldn't have ordered it if I'd known it would offend you. Shall I have them take it away?' "

    • 4/5
      This odd little 1960s SF novel has three main characters: Burris, a space traveler who was kidnapped and experimented on by aliens who made surgical "improvements" to his body that have left him grotesque-looking and frequently in pain. Lona, a seventeen-year-old girl who was the subject of a medical experiment in which a hundred egg cells were taken from her and used to create a hundred babies she's never seen. And Chalk, an obscenely wealthy man who psychically feeds off the physical and emotional pain of others, and who hatches a plan to get Burris and Lona together and then watch their relationship self-destruct, for the entertainment of the masses and his own personal gratification.

      My feelings about this one are extremely mixed. To begin with Silverberg is much more of a stylist than most SF authors, and in general I like his writing, but this one feels as if it's balancing precariously between "well written" and "pretentiously written." For me, it mostly comes down on the right side, but some of the euphemisms he uses in the sex scenes are pretty laughable.

      As for characterization... Burris is a well-drawn, complex character, and his relationship with Lona at times feels almost painfully realistic as it deteriorates. But Lona herself feels less like a real, human woman and more like a man's idea of a certain type of woman viewed from the outside, even thought parts of the story are told from her point of view. And while Burris' relationship to his new body and his personal pain are decently explored, Lona's reactions what was done to her are rather shallowly rendered and never examined too closely. It's like it's just sort of naturally taken for granted that, well, she's a woman and of course she's emotionally devastated by the thought that she can't nurture her own babies, and how much examination does that idea really need? Which thought makes me roll my eyes. A lot.

      Then there's the ending, which is thematically satisfying, I suppose, but feels implausible and tacked-on, in terms of plot logic.

      All of which sounds really, really negative, but the truth is, it was at least an interesting read, and it did hold my attention. It's also true, though, that this is definitely not the first Silverberg novel I would recommend.
    • 2/5
      This book was well written and quite interesting with a good, solid premise and believable, dynamic characters. So, why didn't I like it? First of all, I didn't really like any of those characters, no matter how well-developed and genuine they were. The premise, which is that an unbelievably fat, disgustingly rich emotional vampire pairs up two very damaged people so that he can get a thrill off it when their relationship implodes, made me mildly queasy. The world-building was excellent, probably the best part of the book, but each of the disparate scenes (a low-rent tenement, a high-class restaurant built on the outside of a dome, the South Pole resort, the Moon Carnival, the high-class hotel on Titan) seemed cold and sterile, despite being imaginatively described. All in all, not Silverberg's best.
    • 3/5
      Excellent beginning, up there with the poetry of the novella that makes up the first section of Nightwings, that falters when the two main characters actually meet. It's hard to care much about their relationship, but the concept of the novel -- bringing two damaged people together in order to enjoy their pain as they develop mutual hatred, is an excellent one and this is a must-read for Silverberg fans.
    • 2/5
      A disappointing book. A romance is set up between two people who have been badly scarred by their experiences. The man benefiting is an eater of emotions who feeds on human pain.

      The first character was surgically altered by aliens, but we never learn anything of real value about the aliens or why they did this to him.

      The second character was used as an egg donor for 100 babies, but we get little understanding of why she consented to this or why she was chosen for the experiment.

      The book seems to exist mainly to allow for a tour of the Moon and of Titan, but this doesn't really advance the plot. The whole novel would probably have worked better as a short story.

      Sex scenes are laughable - women climax immediately without any need for foreplay...

      I'd expected a more interesting story from a book in the Gollancz SF reprints series.

    Book preview

    Thorns - Robert Silverberg

    For Jim and Judy Blish

    CAMILLA: You, sir, should unmask.

    STRANGER: Indeed?

    CASSILDA: Indeed it's time. We have all laid aside disguise but you.

    STRANGER: I wear no mask.

    CAMILLA: (Terrified, aside to Cassilda.) No mask? No mask?

    The King in Yellow: Act 1—Scene 2.

    INTRODUCTION

    By

    Robert Silverberg

    It was January, 1966. I had just turned thirty-one, had been writing science-fiction professionally for more than a decade, and was in the process of coming into my maturity as a writer. I didn't know it then, of course, but I was on the verge of the most important creative period of my career, a decade in which novels would come pouring out of me at a rate of two or three a year and establish me as a significant figure in the field.

    My publisher then—one of several, but this was the one for which I felt the greatest affection—was Ballantine Books, and my editor there was Betty Ballantine, the warm and shrewd co-owner of the firm, who took the greatest personal interest in the doings of her writers. Betty had accepted my first book for her, To Open the Sky, in 1965, and, as it worked its way toward publication, I let her know that I had a new novel in the planning stage, a more than usually ambitious one for that era, when most of the science fiction

    being published was pretty conventional in style and structure.

    The book as I have it in mind now, I told her in a letter of January 26, is intended to grow from the interplay of three rather unusual characters, and most of the plot can only evolve in the actual writing, not beforehand. So I have to figure out some way to make the story intelligible to you in outline form without killing too much of the organic development that must spring from the chapter-by-chapter life of the book. Is a puzzle, but I'll see what I can do to solve it.

    I was planning to call the book Thorns, itself a pretty odd title for an s-f novel at the time, and I was signaling by that that I planned to write a prickly and unusual book quite different from anything I had done before. A couple of weeks later I had an outline ready—a sort of an outline, anyway—and I sent it to Betty on February 14, 1966, with this covering note:

    As I warned in my last letter, the outline doesn't communicate much of the action of the story, merely the main structure. I can't do a 'he-did and then she-did' kind of outline for this one; the events will have to grow out of the relationships between Burris, Lona, and Chalk, and much of the texture of the book will rely on background details that can't be sketched in advance. I hope you can gather enough of my intentions of the outline to go ahead with it. What I have in mind is a psychological s-f novel, somewhat adventurous in style and approach and characterization, and I think I can bring it off. It's worth trying, at any rate.

    Betty agreed, though she thought about it for a while. An offer for the book came on May 25; I accepted it eagerly; and through the summer months of 1966, a summer of record-breaking heat in New York City, where I lived then, I spent much of my time thinking about the book I had promised to write.

    The heat wasn't my only problem that summer. Even while planning Thorns, I was also involved in doing research for a huge non-fiction book that I was under contract for, a study of the prehistoric Mound Builder cultures of the central and southern United States, for which I traveled through several midwestern states. And I was sick, also. That June I had finished a long and trying book on the myth of El Dorado, and the stress of it, I think, overtaxed my system and sent my thyroid gland into overdrive. I lost close to twenty pounds within just a few weeks—and I was slender to begin with. I had not been ill since finishing with the standard childhood maladies, indeed was not even prone to minor upsets, and this was a startling development. I grew gaunt and haggard, and barely had the energy to work for a time, until, finally, my doctors discovered what was wrong and prescribed a medication that slowly set things to rights. By the time I attended the World Science Fiction Convention in Cleveland at the beginning of September, 1966, I had begun to regain my strength. And as soon as I returned from the convention trip I sat down to write Thorns.

    I was a fast writer in those days, but, spurred on by joy over my recovery and excited by the prospects of writing a novel that would make my colleagues sit up and take notice, I wrote Thorns more quickly even than was usual for me – practically in a white heat. The first sentence was waiting for me that first morning—Pain is instructive—and everything else followed as swiftly as I could move it from my overheated brain to my typewriter keys. I averaged something like twenty pages a day of manuscript, hardly ever pausing to revise.

    After little more than a week of virtually non-stop work I found myself at the halfway point of the book. (Science fiction novels were shorter in those days.) So I allowed myself a weekend's brief holiday and drove out to Milford, Pennsylvania, where many of the best writers of the field had gathered for the annual writers' workshop that Damon Knight had been holding for the past decade. I knew nearly all the writers there, and they knew me. I think they all respected my professionalism and my productivity, but some of them, I know, still held me to account for the vast quantity of fast-action adventure fiction that I had turned out for the lesser pulps in the 1950s. Their gentle and not-so-gentle comments hardly troubled me, though, for I knew that I was midway through a book that would change their opinion of my work, and I drifted through that weekend's party in a curiously exalted state, eager to get back to my typewriter. (During that weekend I glanced at an Italian science fiction magazine that Damon had just received, and found a harsh review of one of my earliest novels that had recently been reprinted in Italy. Badly done and wordy, the critic said—malcondotto e prolisse. Perhaps that was so. The harsh criticism didn't bother me at all. I knew that I had left that phase of my career behind me. The next day, when I went home to finish Thorns, Malcondotto and Prolisse joined the cast of characters.

    Another week or so of furiously swift work and the book was done, and off it went to Betty Ballantine, who responded quickly that on first reading she thought the book was fine, but added that she wanted to read it again, more slowly, with an eye toward possible revisions. I waited uneasily, and about ten days later, on November 15, she wrote to say "On re-reading Thorns I find there is very little, in fact, that I would like to see added. She did want the character of Duncan Chalk developed more explicitly right at the beginning, and offered me a suggestion for expanding the passage early in the first chapter beginning, In a large and indifferent universe, he had carved out a sizable private pocket." Betty provided a fifteen-line rewrite of that passage, which survives in the book, after further rewriting by me, as two longer paragraphs.

    Balllantine published Thorns in August, 1967. In those days the Science Fiction Writers of America was still a small enough organization so that publishers could send free copies of new books to the entire membership, and Ballantine distributed Thorns that way to my colleagues, along with a discreetly worded memo suggesting that the book might be a contender for the Nebula award.

    It was. Everybody seemed to read it right away, and just about everybody was startled to discover that the author of such space operas as Vengeance of the Space Armadas and One of Our Asteroids is Missing had had a novel like Thorns in him. They let me know, in fact, just how surprised they were: not entirely a flattering thing to hear, but I contented myself with gently pointing out that I had written those books, and the others like them, close to a decade earlier, written them very quickly so that a newly married young man could pay his rent, and that it was reasonable to think that I might have improved somewhat in the intervening time.

    At any rate, Thorns succeeded in obliterating, overnight, the image I had acquired of a purveyor of efficiently constructed hackwork. It did indeed find a place on the Nebula award ballot in 1968, the first of my novels to do so, but in those years the young Samuel R. Delany could do no wrong, and his book The Einstein Intersection captured the trophy; mine was the runner-up. When the

    time came for Hugo award nominations a little later that year, Thorns once again made the final ballot, contending once again against the Delany, but this time Roger Zelazny's extremely popular Lord of Light got the nod from the voters.

    Still, it was a considerable achievement for a book by the author of Vengeance of the Space Armadas to come so close to winning the Hugo and the Nebula, and thereafter I no longer had to worry about image problems: I was thenceforth known as the author of Thorns, and then of The Masks of Time and Up the Line and The Man in the Maze and all the other novels that streamed from my overheated typewriter in that fabulously fertile era. Looking through Thorns now, more than forty years after the fact, I see some things—self-conscious little literary references, subliminal quotes from this or that masterpiece of the past—that I wish were not there. But so be it: the book is the book of a young writer who is stretching his powers to their full extent for the first time, and if, now and then, his reach was a little greater than his grasp, that seems to me a pardonable failing. I'm proud of the book and of the ambitious younger me who wrote it, and I'm delighted to see it coming back around in this new century and in new publishing media that weren't even thought of in science-fiction when I wrote it.

    —Robert Silverberg

    April, 2011

    ONE

    THE SONG THE NEURONS SANG

    Pain is instructive, Duncan Chalk wheezed.

    On crystal rungs he ascended the east wall of his office. Far on high was the burnished desk, title inlaid communicator box from which he controlled his empire. It would have been nothing for Chalk to sail up the wall on the staff of a gravitron. Yet each morning he imposed this climb on himself.

    A variety of hangers-on accompanied him. Leontes d'Amore, of the mobile chimpanzee lips; Bart Aoudad; Tom Nikolaides, notable for shoulders. And others. Yet Chalk, learning the lesson of pain once more, was the focus of the group.

    Flesh rippled and billowed on him. Within that great bulk were the white underpinnings of bone, yearning for release. Six hundred pounds of meat comprised Duncan Chalk. The vast leathery heart pumped desperately, flooding the massive limbs with life. Chalk climbed. The route zigged and backswitched up forty feet of wall to the throne at the top. Along the way blotches of thermoluminescent fungus glowed eagerly, yellow asters tipped with red, sending forth pulsations of warmth and brightness.

    Outside it was winter. Thin strands of new snow coiled in the streets. The leaden sky was just beginning to respond to the morning ionization poured into it by the great pylons of day. Chalk grunted. Chalk climbed.

    Aoudad said, "The idiot will be here in eleven minutes, sir. He'll perform.'*

    Bores me now, Chalk said. I'll see him anyway.

    We could try torturing him, suggested the sly d'Amore in a feathery voice. Perhaps then his gift of numbers would shine more brightly.

    Chalk spat. Leontes d'Amore shrank back as though a Stream of acid had come at him. The climb continued. Pale fleshy hands reached out to grasp gleaming rods. Muscles snarled and throbbed beneath the slabs of fat. Chalk flowed up the wall, barely pausing to rest.

    The inner messages of pain dizzied and delighted him. Ordinarily he preferred to take his suffering the vicarious way, but this was morning, and the wall was his challenge. Up. Up. Toward the seat of power. He climbed, rung by rung by rung, heart protesting, intestines shifting position inside the sheath of meat, loins quivering, the very bones of him flexing and sagging with their burden.

    About him the bright-eyed jackals waited. What if he fell? It would take ten of them to lift him to the walkway again. What if the spasming heart ran away in wild fibrillation? What if his eyes glazed as they watched?

    Would they rejoice as his power bled away into the air?

    Would they know glee as his grip slipped and his iron grasp over their lives weakened?

    Of course. Of course. Chalk's thin lips curved in a cool smile. He had the lips of a slender man, the lips of a bedouin burned down to bone by the sun. Why were his lips not thick and liquid?

    The sixteenth rung loomed. Chalk seized it. Sweat boiled from his pores. He hovered a moment, painstakingly shifting his weight from the ball of the left foot to the heel of the right. There was no reward and less delight in being a foot of Duncan Chalk. For an instant nearly incalculable stresses were exerted across Chalk's right ankle. Then he eased forward, bringing his hand down across the last rung in a savage chopping motion, and his throne opened gladly to him.

    Chalk sank into the waiting seat and felt it minister to him. In the depths of the fabric the micropile hands stirred and squeezed, soothing him. Ghostly ropes of spongy wire slid into his clothes to sponge the perspiration from the valleys and mounds of his flesh. Hidden needles glided through epithelium, squirting beneficial fluids. The thunder of the overtaxed heart subsided to a steady murmur. Muscles that had been bunched and knotted with exertion went slack. Chalk smiled. The day had begun; all was well.

    Leontes d'Amore said, It amazes me, sir, how easily you make that climb.

    You think I'm too fat to move?

    Sir, I—

    The fascination of what's difficult, said Chalk. It spins the world on its bearings.

    I'll bring the idiot, d'Amore said.

    The idiot-savant, Chalk corrected him. I have no interest in idiots.

    Of course. The idiot-savant. Of course.

    D'Amore slipped away through an irising slot in the rear wall. Chalk leaned back, folding his arms over the seamless expanse of chest and belly. He looked out across the great gulf of the room. It was high and deep, an open space of large extent through which glowworms floated. Chalk had an old fondness for luminous organisms. Let there be light, be light, be light; if he had had the time, he might have arranged to glow himself.

    Far below on the floor of the room, where Chalk had been at the commencement of the daily climb, figures moved in busy patterns, doing Chalk's work. Beyond the walls of the room were other offices, honeycombing the octagonal building whose core this was. Chalk had built a superb organization. In a large and indifferent universe he had carved out a sizable private pocket, for the world still took its pleasure in gain. If the deliciously morbid thrills of mulling over details of mass murders, war casualties, air accidents, and the like were largely things of the past, Chalk was well able to provide stronger, more extreme, and more direct substitutes. He worked hard, even now, to bring pleasure to many, pain to a few, pleasure and pain at once to himself.

    He was uniquely designed by the accident of genes for his task: a pain-responsive, pain-fed eater of emotion, depending on his intake of raw anguish as others did on their intake of bread and meat. He was the ultimate representative of his audience's tastes and so was perfectly able to supply that vast audience's inner needs. But though his capacity had dwindled with the years, he still was not satiated. Now he picked his way through the emotional feasts he staged, a fresh gobbet here, a bloody pudding of senses there, saving his own appetite for the more grotesque permutations of cruelty, searching always for the new, and terribly old, sensations.

    Turning to Aoudad, he said, I don't think the idiot-savant will be worth much. Are you still watching over the starman Burris?

    Daily, sir. Aoudad was a crisp man with dead gray eyes and a trustworthy look. His

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