Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Unavailable
    Son of Man
    Unavailable
    Son of Man
    Unavailable
    Son of Man
    Ebook262 pages3 hours

    Son of Man

    By Robert Silverberg

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    The classic science fiction novel, now back in print Clay is a man from the 20th Century who is somehow caught up in a time-flux and transported into a distant future. The earth and the life on it have changed beyond recognition. Even the human race has evolved into many different forms, now coexisting on the planet. The seemingly omnipotent Skimmers, the tyrannosaur-like Eaters, the sedentary Awaiters, the squid-like Breathers, the Interceders, the Destroyers—all of these are "Sons of Man". Befriended and besexed by the Skimmers, Clay goes on a journey which takes him around the future earth and into the depths of his own soul. He is human, but what does that mean?
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPyr
    Release dateAug 5, 2010
    ISBN9781591028314
    Unavailable
    Son of Man
    Author

    Robert Silverberg

    <p>Robert Silverberg has won five Nebula Awards, four Hugo Awards, and the prestigious <em>Prix Apollo.</em> He is the author of more than one hundred science fiction and fantasy novels -- including the best-selling Lord Valentine trilogy and the classics <em>Dying Inside</em> and <em>A Time of Changes</em> -- and more than sixty nonfiction works. Among the sixty-plus anthologies he has edited are <em>Legends</em> and <em>Far Horizons,</em> which contain original short stories set in the most popular universe of Robert Jordan, Stephen King, Ursula K. Le Guin, Gregory Benford, Greg Bear, Orson Scott Card, and virtually every other bestselling fantasy and SF writer today. Mr. Silverberg's Majipoor Cycle, set on perhaps the grandest and greatest world ever imagined, is considered one of the jewels in the crown of speculative fiction.</p>

    Read more from Robert Silverberg

    Related to Son of Man

    Related ebooks

    Science Fiction For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Spell

      Apr 25, 2018

      Spell
      4 min read

    • Article

      New Nature Writer Of The Year 2021 Runner-up

      Sep 23, 2021

      Former local government worker Mike is a keen walker and wildlife enthusiast, based in North Yorkshire. Prize judge Stephen Moss praised his entry as: “A delightful recollection of a long-ago boyhood, written with imagination and a real sense of the

      3 min read

    • Article

      Stranger Places

      Aug 9, 2018

      It began like any normal pregame in the woods. Naked, alone, hungover, a sweaty sleeping bag in the back of a dusty pickup truck, miles from civilization. Predawn in a narrow Utah river bottom, canyon country, early July. A Thermos of lukewarm coffee

      18 min read

    • Article

      Art Of Beauty

      Sep 30, 2021

      Art Of Beauty
      12 min read

    • Article

      The Language Of A Hunt

      Sep 3, 2020

      The Language Of A Hunt
      20 min read

    • Article

      Any Given Day

      Mar 29, 2021

      Any Given Day
      11 min read

    • Article

      Novel

      Jul 1, 2020

      The first time he stared down a barrel it was his fingers cradling that clot of steel, and I do mean stare down, because he was sitting cross legged, the pistol was in his lap, he watched both his thumbs flutter around the stiff trigger. It was very

      1 min read

    • Article

      Rain Relief

      Mar 21, 2024

      Rain Relief
      2 min read

    • Article

      Ishion Hutchinson

      Jun 8, 2021

      Tremor in his hands. He turns obsoleteleaves edged with thunder since the opening scene.What he sees he reads under croton shade,out in the sun. Restless peninsula,dog-eared, melting off into the blue.The blue breaks white as hallucination,more hagga

      3 min read

    • Article

      Hook, Line And Sinker

      Oct 18, 2018

      Hook, Line And Sinker
      4 min read

    • Article

      Three Poems

      Sep 1, 2022

      1. Here there’s no rainy season.Sun scalds my forehead,yet the pool is empty. Beside it,a toppled table, its glass surface shattered.The asphalt is too hot for bare feet. 2. Far away: white hillocksand white dunes under a deepblue sky. Swirling winds

      5 min read

    • Article

      Two Poems

      Jul 1, 2020

      I look to the tree line & already the leavesare ripping themselves away from their mothers. It is only August but I am already rising earlyfor a crisp moon, smoking in the rare chill of a shaded patio. My breasts have begun pickling,the fat rounds pr

      2 min read

    • Article

      The Whale Who Will Come Soon

      Sep 8, 2021

      The beachfront narrows to an ocherous ribbon, belted by blue, above and below. After a while, a handful of shearwaters appear in the air above the Cat Balou. The birds flash around us; like knife-thrower tricks at a circus. Diving through the water,

      8 min read

    • Article

      Diaspora Sonnets

      Sep 1, 2022

      The old men drink their spritzers and gossipunder awnings. Red hued and blustery, like two roosters on the side of a road.Skyward they crane their necks and laugh, sometimes they wonder about kings and future kingsand how the muscles peer from their

      2 min read

    • Article

      Lay Of The Land

      Aug 27, 2021

      TARA K. SHEPERSKY YOU WOULDN’T know how to get down here without someone to point out the path. You wouldn’t know there was a public beach at all. From the road, signs are few. An eclectic scatter of homes, distorted wave-speak rumbling from thick ra

      17 min read

    • Article

      In The Thick Of It

      Feb 23, 2022

      In The Thick Of It
      3 min read

    • Article

      The Fenland redoubt

      Oct 5, 2022

      The Fenland redoubt
      4 min read

    • Article

      The Spaces In-between

      Jul 15, 2020

      We were just off South Cape when a voice came out of the long-wave radio and announced that Tasmania had closed its borders. Everyone stopped moving. Eyes like plates, jaws dropped to the floor. Coffee mugs suspended mid-flight. The whole catastrophe

      3 min read

    • Article

      Nick Laird

      Dec 15, 2017

      I was trying to write like an adult.I had children.I was at the end of something. As I waited at my table by the window for the coffee,I saw that the sirocco had depositeda scrim of dust on the sill overnight,and it was the dark red of powdered blood

      3 min read

    • Article

      A Book of Hours

      Nov 25, 2022

      A Book of Hours
      12 min read

    • Article

      The Pandemic Can’t Lock Down Nature

      Apr 9, 2020

      Needing to clear my head, I went down to the Penobscot River. There they were, swimming with the mergansers, following an early pulse of river herring to the mouth of Kenduskeag stream: two harbor seals, raising sleek round heads for a few long breat

      4 min read

    • Article

      The Storytellers

      Apr 28, 2023

      The Storytellers
      3 min read

    Reviews for Son of Man

    3.5/5

    51 ratings4 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 1/5
      I think I'm going to upset a number of fans here, but......What can I say? I have read several books by Silverburg and enjoyed them. But Son of God was just an awful book compared to any other I have read by him.The 'plot' follows a man called Clay (I assume a modern day reference to Prometheus) who has been catapulted into the future through a time flux. What follows is a very disjointed text that details how Clay meets a number of other 'Sons of Man', other humans further down the evolutionary scale. It sounds like it could be a very interesting novel. Unfortunately it is written in such a way that the short sentences just annoy, the descriptions go on and on, often until you are unsure (or care) what he is actually describing. I don't know whether Silverberg was experimenting with language when he wrote this book or experimenting with drugs.... but either way, it didn't work. As least not in my case.I suppose the main aspect of the book I disliked was how nothing was ever really explained. It was just a case of jumping from one creature to another. No depth was ever really given to the storyline. Things just happened.... well.... because they can. It was almost as if Silverberg had thought of several brilliant characters without a story to place them in and just decided to cram them all in together.On a positive note though some of the descriptions were very vivid, if only there was a plot to back them up.If this is your first book by the author please check out his other books (Tower of Glass) or you will be missing out on some great SF. If this had been my first book by him then I doubt I would have ever picked up anything by him again, and that would have been a great pity.I am sure I am missing something with this novel, but I can guarantee I will never revisit it to try and find it.
    • 2/5
      Silverberg must have ingested a combination of LSD and Ecstasy prior to writing this book. Clay, our 20th century human narrator, is captured by the "time flux" (never explained) and deposited in the far, far future (how far? don't know) where he meanders around having intercourse (both philosophical and sexual) with future versions of humanity on a future version of earth. This could have been interesting except for the stream of consciousness writing style and the utter and complete lack of plot. I tried to read this once before and just couldn't get through it. This time I ended up pretty much skim-reading the second half, just to see if possibly it might get better as well as to ensure I never have to try to read it again. There are some interesting philosophical gems, but I just couldn't get into it. Maybe someone with more experience with mood-altering chemicals might find it a bit more to their liking. A quote from page 96 seems to sum up: "Though he transcends these difficulties, he is perturbed by a fundamental uncertainty of purpose that conflicts not only with his awareness of the nonexistance of purpose, but with his awareness of the nonexistance of conflict." That's this book in a nutshell. No conflict, no purpose.
    • 4/5
      Totally post human, man!
    • 4/5
      My reactions to reading this novel in 1993. Spoilers follow.I liked this strange, weird, surrealistic fantasy. I liked the fact that the motives behind so many of the denizens of this far future, particularly the Skimmers and Destroyers (with their enigmatic project of spreading both ice and fire), were mysterious, unexplained like so many of the mysteries here. I liked Clay, an enigmatic figure that we learn little about personally – he’s a stand in for our version of humanity – other than that he’s has the usual sexual fantasies and appetites, and his shock at finding nothing of our age surviving though the “humans” he meets vaguely remember hearing something about the moon being around once. I liked how so many scenes could be delusions or reality, visions or descriptions -- things like Clay’s body dissolving in a multi-chromatic, acidic river or the Earth being leveled to a smooth sphere, and the intriguing aspect of Clay being turned into a woman and having sex with male-form Skimmers (though Clay feels oddly violated). I liked the Eaters hanging out in a subterranean city incomprehensibly described by a robot – the words are familiar mostly but the sentences make no sense. I liked the Awaiters who sit in the ground like trees and spin nihilistic, acausual philosophies that seem beautiful to Clay when he’s in Awaiter form but pointless otherwise. I liked the trek through the various Zones of Discomfort. It’s another example of Silverberg’s theme of loneliness and alienation. I liked Silverberg’s style. It’s usually simple as far as word choice. He repeats the same sentence three times in many places, but the sentences often are complex compounds intermingled with simple sentences. It’s quite effective, hard to describe. I like the many references to Clay’s sexuality – how he feels the need to masturbate sometimes or how his genitals feel (usually in a suffering context). I liked the religious allusion of the title, and the end seems to be implying that Clay takes the pain of these sons of man. It’s curious that Clay readily accepts that humanity is defined by psychological and spiritual traits and not appearance. The burdens of the sons of man are taken by Clay after he is purified, sort of – at least the Skimmers say he’s learned much about himself, by a trek through the areas of discomfort (oddly, intriguingly, somehow appropriately long established for "the instruction of mankind”). In the end, he dies. The book says he sleeps, but I take that as a metaphor since it is clearly stated many times he needs no food or sleep in in this world. This is after he crawls from the Well of First Things which I took not only to be a literalization of man’s evolution past and future, but an allusion to Satan’s pit for Clay clearly acknowledges his vileness, that he is disturbing to the Skimmers. Yet, he says they must realize that “I am you”, imperfect but the potential form of the book's many sons. I don’t think this religious imagery and allusions works though. It seems tacked on at the end as if Silverberg realized he had to put some dramatic end to what is a series of intriguing, surrealistic vignettes. I’m not convinced Silverberg meant from the start to do anything more than a refreshingly strange tale. He has said elsewhere it’s the spirit of 1968 incarnated. ( I’ve also heard this book compared to David Lindsay’s Son of Arcturus, but I’ve never read that.) Still, I liked it probably the best of any far future story I’ve read including Brian Aldiss’ Hothouse.