Son of Man | |||||||||
Robert Silverberg | |||||||||
Pyr, 215 pages | |||||||||
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A review by Matthew Hughes
Or at least that's one variant out of several translations of what Heraclitus is supposed to have said way back at the
turn of the fifth century BCE. We can't be completely sure of this pithy observation's provenance because it has come
down to us only through a quotation cited by Plato a couple of centuries later. For all we know, the thought may be
original to Plato himself, who then hung it on old Heraclitus to give the wisdom more oomph, just as Sam Goldwyn is
credited with all kinds of observations on life within the movie biz that he may never have uttered.
But I digress, though intentionally. I had Heraclitus's possible apocryphal observation in mind as I opened Pyr's reissue
of Robert Silverberg's 1971 New Wave tour de force, Son of Man for the first time in more than thirty-five
years. My memory is growing capricious (and that's the kindest word I can summon), now that I'm serving out the last few
months of six decades, I could recall only that I had read the book and that I had liked it, as I liked everything of
Silverberg's prodigious output that I had read up until 1973.
So, recognizing that I'm not the fellow I was when I first stepped into this particular river at twenty-four, how was
the water, thirty-five years on? Not to my taste, I have to say. But, by golly, it flows and flows.
Son of Man is the story of Clay, a man of our time who is inexplicably thrust far, far, far into Earth's
future, to an era when not only is our civilization forgotten, but our whole species is no longer even a memory. Humankind
has moved on, several times, creating new species.
Clay travels across a dreamlike landscape in company with a handful of the Skimmers who are one variant of the
latter-day "sons of men," a term that would have to be rewritten to something like "offspring of persons"
in our post-feminist era. He meets other iterations of the human meme, like a pink sphere inside a shining cube of a
cage and the regressed and grotty Goat-men; he becomes other kinds of human: he is himself a Skimmer for a while,
as a female as well as a male; he becomes a squid-like Breather and then spends a timeless period as an Awaiter, a
sapient carrot stuck in the earth, and more.
Always he moves on, joining with the peripatetic Skimmers in performing a series of rites that are both profound and
mysterious (in the rite sense of the word), like "The Lifting of the Sea" and "The Shaping of the Sky." And constantly
he swims in a river of sex, because after "change," the second great theme of this book is fucking. Lots and lots
and lots of it, in variations that would have left Hugh Hefner washed up on the tideline, gasping for
breath. Clay is constantly exploring new ways of connecting, anatomically, intellectually and spiritually, with his
companions, his environment and himself. The descriptions are graphic -- though not pornographic -- and reminded
me that the New Wave was when science fiction discovered (and embraced, sometimes sweatily), one of the great sciences
it had until then carefully neglected.
All of this is told in a deliberately "literary" style: present tense, dense paragraphs of description and sensation,
long lists of words, as in this passage, after Clay has been dissolved into a river of what seemed to me a 60s
presentiment of nanobots:
You could say that Son of Man is an artifact of its period, a remarkable, heady, head-trippy plunge into
a new way of writing sf, and into a new way of thinking, especially thinking about things that, until that moment,
sf had not much considered. But does that make it stale and musty, like that old braided coat hanging in the back
of your closet, the one you used to wear to the be ins on those long-ago Saturdays in the park?
No, it doesn't. Because Silverberg was throwing himself headlong into the timeless questions -- what are we? where
do we come from? where are we going? -- that have been worrying us since long before Heraclitus and which will
continue to be on our evolving minds as we blunder on into the future, making it (and ourselves) up as we go along.
So if you're looking for truly literary sf, or for something you can finally throw in the face of that artsy-fartsy
co-worker who disdains the genre as no more than rocket ships and space squids, Son of Man could be
just what you need.
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