 First edition | |
| Author | Robert Silverberg |
|---|---|
| Cover artist | Robert Foster |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Science fiction |
| Publisher | Ballantine |
Publication date | August 1967 |
| Media type | Print (Hardcover and Paperback) |
| Pages | 222 |
| OCLC | 2190667 |
Thorns is a science fiction novel by American author Robert Silverberg, published as a paperback original in 1967, and a Nebula [1] and Hugo [2] Awards nominee.
Humanity has colonized the solar system and moved outward to begin exploring the far reaches of the galaxy. An interplanetary audience follows real-life stories of triumph and tragedy presented to them by Duncan Chalk, a media mogul with apparently limitless resources. Chalk, unknown to all around him, is a kind of psychic vampire who draws sustenance from the emotions of others, particularly those of pain and trauma. Though he enjoys playing his inner circle of assistants against each other as a sort of daily snack, Chalk's true nourishment comes from the dramas he orchestrates for his audience.
Chalk's latest drama involves the pairing of Minner Burris, a space explorer who was captured and surgically altered by aliens on the planet Manipool, and Lona Kelvin, a 17-year-old girl who donated eggs for a fertility experiment that produced a hundred babies. Burris, whose freakish appearance draws attention whenever he ventures out in public, has withdrawn into seclusion and bitterness. Kelvin, whose brief fame as the virgin mother of an army of children has begun to fade, has twice attempted suicide because she has not been allowed to adopt or even see any of her offspring. Chalk promises Burris a full round of surgery and treatment to restore his human appearance, and offers Kelvin a chance to adopt one of her babies, if the two agree to come together for an all-expenses paid tour of the solar system.
At first the two wounded subjects enjoy each other's company and even become lovers. Kelvin's empathy and compassion are stirred by Burris's plight, and Burris enjoys playing masculine protector and guide to the naive teenager. The affection soon curdles into irritation, hostility and even hatred—all of which provide a psychic feast for Chalk. The two finally break off after a particularly vicious fight, which Chalk uses as a pretext to void the agreement. He does, however, try to keep them on the hook by dangling new offers: for example, he asks Kelvin to befriend David Melangio, a childlike man whose feats of memory and calculation are his only means of meeting a world that has already subjected him to overwhelming traumas. Kelvin erupts in rage and is carried off by Chalk's assistants.
Burris, meanwhile, has a sexual fling with Elise, the widow of an astronaut who accompanied Burris on the Manipool landing, and who died from the surgical alterations performed by the aliens. Elise is both aroused and repulsed by Burris' body, and the sadomasochistic nature of her attraction eventually alienates Burris. His withdrawal causes her to commit suicide in a particularly grisly fashion. Burris, deeply shaken, returns to Earth. He has realized that Chalk's promise was empty, and that such help may no longer even be possible—the changes wrought by the Manipool aliens appear irreversible. What's more, the surgery that turned him into a monster has also "improved" his body in unexpected ways that Burris has come to appreciate.
With the inadvertent help of Melangio, who during a typically bland chat lets slip some information that gives them clues into Chalk's true nature, Kelvin and Burris confront the media baron in his office. They expose the full, unfiltered core of their mutual pain to Chalk, who is overwhelmed and finally killed by the intensity of the emotional flood. As the novel ends, Burris has convinced Kelvin to join him in a trip back to Manipool, where they will confront the aliens and, presumably, undergo alterations that take them beyond humanity.
The line "Pain is instructive" opens and closes the story. It is first delivered by Chalk, and provides ominous foreshadowing; it is later uttered by Burris, who has accepted his condition and come to see the pain it causes as a means toward growth.
This theme is illustrated throughout the story in various ways. David Melangio, whose inner defenses have completely isolated him from memories of his terribly unhappy childhood, cannot face his pain and therefore will never become a fully realized adult. Burris appreciates cacti and thorny succulents, and when Kelvin complains about thorns on a cactus, Burris praises the thorn as an elegant evolutionary adaptation to a hostile environment.
The science behind Lona's fertility experiment was quite novel for the late 60s, but has since become commonplace, and is one of the few dated elements in the novel. By contrast, the idea of mass media serving as theater, and being used as a tool to manipulate and exploit vulnerable people, has only become more timely with the rise of reality shows and the like on television.
"The title describes the book: prickly, rough in texture, a sharp book," Silverberg writes in his memoir Other Spaces, Other Times. "I worked quickly, often managing twenty pages or more, yet making no concessions to conventions of standard science fiction." (p 116) His ambitions for the book were vindicated when Thorns was published in August 1967:
"All of Ballantine's science fiction titles were then automatically being distributed free to members of the two-year-old Science Fiction Writers of America, and so all my colleagues had copies in hand at the time of that year's sf convention. Many of them had read it, and -- as I hoped -- it shook their image of my work. At least a dozen of my friends told me, with the frankness of true friendship, that the book had amazed them: not that they thought me incapable of writing it, but rather that I would be willing to take the trouble. It seemed such a radical break from my formularized science fiction of the 1950s that they thought of it as the work of some entirely new Robert Silverberg." (p 117)
Algis Budrys wrote of his surprise that "Silverberg is now writing deeply detailed, highly educated, beautifully figured books like Thorns" despite still producing 10,000 words a day. [3] Brian Stableford, writing in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction , [4] called Thorns "a stylized novel of alienation and psychic vampirism," [5] saying that together with Hawksbill Station it marked "a new phase of RS' career, in which he brought the full range of his artistic abilities to bear on writing sf." [5] After an initial burst of competent but callow science fiction work, and a brief layover in which he researched and wrote demanding nonfiction books, Silverberg returned to the genre with a remarkable series of novels written to higher standards of characterization, themes and literary quality.
Thorns has several thematic parallels with Silverberg's contemporaneous novel The Man in the Maze. In both novels, the hero has been unwillingly altered by aliens (physically in Thorns, psychically in The Man in the Maze) and become an embittered outcast; the protagonists expose the full core of their inner torment in order to achieve victory over a seemingly invincible opponent; both stories conclude with the protagonists choosing to embrace an untenable, even inhuman way of life.
While working on Thorns, Silverberg came across an Italian science fiction magazine that criticized one of his early novels as badly done and wordy -- malcondotto e prolisse in the original Italian. Silverberg promptly named Minner Burris' fellow astronauts Malcondotto and Prolisse. (Other Spaces, Other Times, p 116)
Oliver Sacks name-checks Thorns in "The Twins", an essay included in his 1985 collection The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat . The twins of the title are a pair of autistic savants who enjoyed brief fame on television for performing feats of memory and calculation, though they themselves were incapable of living without close institutional care. Sacks compares their speech and behavior with that of David Melangio and speculates that Silverberg was familiar with them when he wrote Thorns. Silverberg makes no mention of them in his memoir.
Thorns has some interesting thematic parallels with The Man in the Maze, published two years later. Both novels center on an embittered man altered by contact with an alien race, and who is coaxed out of hiding by a morally ambiguous character with a hidden agenda. The threat in each novel is nullified when the protagonist exposes the unfiltered core of his being to a telepathic receptor.
Many of Silverberg's best-known stories explore the darker aspects of telepathy and psychic powers. In Thorns, Duncan Chalk's telepathic abilities have turned him into an emotional vampire leeching off the pain of others. In the novels Dying Inside and The Second Trip, telepathy blights lives and turns characters into self-hating voyeurs. Silverberg's celebrated short story "Flies" centers on a spacefarer who commits terrible acts against former loved ones so that their anguish may be studied by distant aliens. In another famous story, "Passengers," disembodied aliens enter the minds of unwilling human hosts and distort their behavior, bringing civilization to the brink of collapse.
Laurence van Cott Niven is an American science fiction writer. His 1970 novel Ringworld won the Hugo, Locus, Ditmar, and Nebula awards. With Jerry Pournelle he wrote The Mote in God's Eye (1974) and Lucifer's Hammer (1977). The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America gave him the 2015 Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master Award.
The New Wave was a science fiction (SF) style of the 1960s and 1970s, characterized by a great degree of experimentation with the form and content of stories, greater imitation of the styles of non-science fiction literature, and an emphasis on the psychological and social sciences as opposed to the physical sciences. New Wave authors often considered themselves as part of the modernist tradition of fiction, and the New Wave was conceived as a deliberate change from the traditions of the science fiction characteristic of pulp magazines, which many of the writers involved considered irrelevant or unambitious.
Galaxy Science Fiction was an American digest-size science fiction magazine, published in Boston from 1950 to 1980. It was founded by a French-Italian company, World Editions, which was looking to break into the American market. World Editions hired as editor H. L. Gold, who rapidly made Galaxy the leading science fiction magazine of its time, focusing on stories about social issues rather than technology.
Algirdas Jonas "Algis" Budrys was a Lithuanian-American science fiction author, editor, and critic. He was also known under the pen names Frank Mason, Alger Rome, John A. Sentry, William Scarff, and Paul Janvier. He is known for the influential 1960 novel Rogue Moon.
Robert Silverberg is an American author and editor, best known for writing science fiction. He is a multiple winner of both Hugo and Nebula Awards, a member of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame, and a Grand Master of SF. He has attended every Hugo Award ceremony since the inaugural event in 1953.
The Rest of the Robots is a collection of eight short stories and two full-length novels by American writer Isaac Asimov, published in 1964. The stories, centred on positronic robots, are all part of the Robot series, most of which take place in the Foundation universe. Another collection of short stories about robots, I, Robot, was re-published in the previous year, which is why Asimov chose to title the collection as The Rest of the Robots. None of the short stories in this collection were in I, Robot, however all of them were later included in The Complete Robot, and both novels about Elijah Baley were also published separately.
Gordon Randall Phillip David Garrett was an American science fiction and fantasy author. He was a contributor to Astounding and other science fiction magazines of the 1950s and 1960s. He instructed Robert Silverberg in the techniques of selling large quantities of action-adventure science fiction, and collaborated with him on two novels about men from Earth disrupting a peaceful agrarian civilization on an alien planet.
Hawksbill Station is a science fiction novel by American writer Robert Silverberg. The novel is an expanded version of a short story first published in Galaxy Science Fiction in August 1967. The novel was published in 1968 and was released in the United Kingdom under the title The Anvil of Time.
The Man in the Maze is a science fiction novel by American writer Robert Silverberg, originally serialized in the magazine, Worlds of If April in May 1968, and published in bookstores the following year. It tells the tale of a man rendered incapable of interacting normally with other human beings by his uncontrollable psychic abilities. The novel is inspired by Sophocles' play Philoctetes, with the roles of Odysseus, Neoptolemus and Philoctetes played by Boardman, Rawlins, and Muller, respectively.
The Golden Age of Science Fiction, often identified in the United States as the years 1938–1946, was a period in which a number of foundational works of science fiction literature appeared. In the history of science fiction, the Golden Age follows the "pulp era" of the 1920s and 1930s, and precedes New Wave science fiction of the 1960s and 1970s. The 1950s are, in this scheme, a transitional period. Robert Silverberg, who came of age in the 1950s, saw that decade as the true Golden Age. According to historian Adam Roberts, "the phrase Golden Age valorises a particular sort of writing: 'Hard SF', linear narratives, heroes solving problems or countering threats in a space-opera or technological-adventure idiom."
Thomas L. Sherred was an American science fiction writer.
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Infinity Science Fiction was an American science fiction magazine, edited by Larry T. Shaw, and published by Royal Publications. The first issue, which appeared in November 1955, included Arthur C. Clarke's "The Star", a story about a planet destroyed by a nova that turns out to have been the Star of Bethlehem; it won the Hugo Award for that year. Shaw obtained stories from some of the leading writers of the day, including Brian Aldiss, Isaac Asimov, and Robert Sheckley, but the material was of variable quality. In 1958 Irwin Stein, the owner of Royal Publications, decided to shut down Infinity; the last issue was dated November 1958.
A fix-up is a novel created from several short fiction stories that may or may not have been initially related or previously published. The stories may be edited for consistency, and sometimes new connecting material, such as a frame story or other interstitial narration, is written for the new work. The term was coined by the science fiction writer A. E. van Vogt, who published several fix-ups of his own, including The Voyage of the Space Beagle, but the practice exists outside of science fiction. The use of the term in science fiction criticism was popularised by the first (1979) edition of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, edited by Peter Nicholls, which credited van Vogt with the creation of the term. The name “fix-up” comes from the changes that the author needs to make in the original texts, to make them fit together as though they were a novel. Foreshadowing of events from the later stories may be jammed into an early chapter of the fix-up, and character development may be interleaved throughout the book. Contradictions and inconsistencies between episodes are usually worked out.
There have been many attempts at defining science fiction. This is a list of definitions that have been offered by authors, editors, critics and fans over the years since science fiction became a genre. Definitions of related terms such as "science fantasy", "speculative fiction", and "fabulation" are included where they are intended as definitions of aspects of science fiction or because they illuminate related definitions—see e.g. Robert Scholes's definitions of "fabulation" and "structural fabulation" below. Some definitions of sub-types of science fiction are included, too; for example see David Ketterer's definition of "philosophically-oriented science fiction". In addition, some definitions are included that define, for example, a science fiction story, rather than science fiction itself, since these also illuminate an underlying definition of science fiction.
Fantastic Universe was a U.S. science fiction magazine which began publishing in the 1950s. It ran for 69 issues, from June 1953 to March 1960, under two different publishers. It was part of the explosion of science fiction magazine publishing in the 1950s in the United States, and was moderately successful, outlasting almost all of its competitors. The main editors were Leo Margulies (1954–1956) and Hans Stefan Santesson (1956–1960); under Santesson's tenure the quality declined somewhat, and the magazine became known for printing much UFO-related material. A collection of stories from the magazine, edited by Santesson, appeared in 1960 from Prentice-Hall, titled The Fantastic Universe Omnibus.
The Masks of Time is a science fiction novel by American author Robert Silverberg, first published in 1968. It was a nominee for the Nebula Award in 1968.
Masters of the Maze is a science fiction novel by American writer Avram Davidson, originally published in 1965 by Pyramid Books with a cover by John Schoenherr. The first UK edition, the only hardcover to date, was issued by White Lion in 1974. An American paperback reprint followed from Manor Books in 1976. Ebook editions appeared in 2012, from both Prologue Books and SF Gateway.
"E for Effort" is a science fiction novelette by American writer T. L. Sherred, first published in 1947, about the consequences of a time viewer, a machine that projects images of the past. It has been reprinted many times, including in The Science Fiction Hall of Fame.
Brightness Falls from the Air is a 1985 science fiction novel by American writer James Tiptree Jr., set in the same fictional universe as the stories in her 1986 collection The Starry Rift.
