A review by goranlowie
Majipoor Chronicles, by Robert Silverberg
5.0
Loved the structure of this.
It's a collection of short stories set in the world of Majipoor that we came to love in the first book. Throughout the stories of various people, we explore the world and their people a bit more, in ways that we never could have by seeing the story just through Valentine's eyes. It was the right decision: most people's favorite part of these books is the world of Majipoor, and this goes hard on giving us more of that.
The stories are connected in that they are basically memories being "re-played"/"re-experienced" by a character from the first book. Some of these were re-contextualisations of stories or deeply rooted myths from the world, seen through the eyes of people who were actually there, which I really liked as a plot device, to showcase how what's written is often very different from what happened, missing a lot of the real nuance of the situation.
But besides those, there's also some lovely slice-of-life stories which serve to enrich this world. Some of these would've worked perfectly fine as a stand-alone, others heavily relied on prior knowledge from the first book.
So far, two bangers. Can't wait to continue this series. Why have I been sleeping on Silverberg for so long?
It's a collection of short stories set in the world of Majipoor that we came to love in the first book. Throughout the stories of various people, we explore the world and their people a bit more, in ways that we never could have by seeing the story just through Valentine's eyes. It was the right decision: most people's favorite part of these books is the world of Majipoor, and this goes hard on giving us more of that.
The stories are connected in that they are basically memories being "re-played"/"re-experienced" by a character from the first book. Some of these were re-contextualisations of stories or deeply rooted myths from the world, seen through the eyes of people who were actually there, which I really liked as a plot device, to showcase how what's written is often very different from what happened, missing a lot of the real nuance of the situation.
But besides those, there's also some lovely slice-of-life stories which serve to enrich this world. Some of these would've worked perfectly fine as a stand-alone, others heavily relied on prior knowledge from the first book.
So far, two bangers. Can't wait to continue this series. Why have I been sleeping on Silverberg for so long?