Tags
1970, 1970s, Bantam, Ditmar Award nominee, first contact, genetic engineering, Hugo Award nominee, Locus Award nominee, Nebula Award nominee, New Wave SF, Open Road Media, religion, Robert Silverberg, science fiction, slave uprising
Bantam #S6902 – 1971 – illo by David J. Blossom.
From nothing, and out of nothing, came Krug… Krug the powerful, Krug the wealthy. Simeon Krug the designer of androids—living simulacra that appear human except for the red skin and powerful strength given them when they were squeezed out of a genetic soup of industrial chemicals into the mold of a man. And it’s on the backs of his android servitors that Krug will build his great tower, a modern-day pyramid and wonder of the world—a tower of glass that will stretch over a thousand meters into the Arctic sky, a communications tower that will be one of the greatest achievements of any human. This tower Krug will use to communicate with a strange signal being broadcast from deep space, which a few scientists understand to be from another intelligent species. Here we are, Krug will announce from his tower. We are humans, we are worthy, we are not alone, come and speak unto us. Thus Krug has decreed. Thus shall it be.
Meanwhile. Krug’s close associates continue to parade through the tower as it continues to reach for the stars: lawyers, senators, diplomats, the astronomer interpreting the strange extraterrestrial signals, the androids… and Krug’s son Manuel, who stands out as the lone semi-disappointment to his stern father. Having lived all of his life in his father’s shadow, the billionaire playboy’s not content to just lounge around with his beautiful but frail wife, mind-swap in drunken “shunt”-room parties with his friends, and carry on an illicit affair with female android Alpha Lilith Meson. Manuel has always wanted to stand out and be his own man without actually doing so; Manuel likes to plan big, and has great drive and ambition, but his entanglement to Lilith reveals how easily manipulable he is. As Krug’s fascination with the tower grows, and his desire to make contact with the aliens becomes an unhealthy obsession, his relationship with Manuel and his associates becomes strained—all except his relationship with his androids, tirelessly working to build him his future.
Meanwhile. All androids live a hard life of constant servitude and yearn to be free, but while a token few advocate for political action, others spend every night praying to Krug the Creator for redemption. The religious cult that has sprung up to glamorize and canonize Krug—without his knowledge—hopes for an end to the plight of the androids, that they’re being tested by their dedication and hard work for Krug to see if they are worthy. Krug’s lieutenant and left hand Alpha Thor Watchman is one of the high-ranking officials of the new religion, unwilling or unable to see Krug’s failings, comparing their plight to that of the Jews under the Pharaoh, or black slaves in early America. Unfortunately for the androids, most humans see them not as life, not as equals, but as property, as things. Stability erodes as the tower becomes all-consuming in Krug’s mind; Thor assents to take more desperate measures, agreeing to let Lilith’s relationship with Manuel to get at Krug. But this may not get the androids where they expected to go on their route to freedom…
Bantam – 1980 – Lou Feck.
As you can see, there’s a lot of plot-threads here—Krug’s tower, his drive for first contact—and a lot of complex relationships between the characters. There’s a bunch of minor threads that I’m overlooking, too—the role instantaneous teleportation plays in creating a globalized world, for example. Or that one of Krug’s assistants was born in vitro, an origin differentiated from the androids because he is made of his parents’ genetic material and not of synthetic chemicals grown in a vat. The most important element is the androids. It’s a timely topic given that the book was published in 1970, but while I expected some connections to be made with the Civil Rights movement, they were few and oblique—it’s used as a similar but distinct metaphor. Instead, the main questions raised are about the androids—are these things that live, think, and talk simple constructs just because they were DNA strands spit out of a factory? The humans don’t think so, but that the androids are capable of organizing their own religion seems to show otherwise.
Tower of Glass is full of great ideas, but that doesn’t make it a great book—that isn’t to say it’s bad, as pretty much everything Silverberg wrote between ’67 and ’76 was worth reading. Much like its characters, the novel aims for the stars but comes up short, failing to reach the high points of Dying Inside or Downward to the Earth. The story moves fast and touches on interesting ideas, perhaps a few too many ideas for one novel as they end up feeling rushed or shallow. And I’ve become convinced that Silverberg was at his best when he wasn’t trying to write women or bad sex scenes; we spend a lot of this novel with Lilith, and she’s less a woman and more a stereotype of one. Silverberg’s writing is fast and strong as always; it’s more character-driven, and all the characters have their own distinctive identities and voices, particularly Krug, a kind of blue-collar brute who hides his self-aggrandizing behind a dream of dragging humanity into a galactic conversation with extraterrestrials.
Tower of Glass is an ambitious novel full of wonderful ideas, a subtle and insidious black comedy offering a critical view of human drive and ambition—a futuristic retelling of the tower of Babel. This one’s full of fascinating concepts, and its central concepts are fantastic—using the androids as a stand-in to observe racism, caste systems, ghettoization, and other elements of oppression, as well as their use of religious significance to define things that are not understood. All told it’s a good read and engaging story, even if its reach does exceed its grasp—its brevity and over-abundance of great concepts diffuses its focus. Fans of ’70s/New Wave SF, or of Silverberg in specific, should enjoy this one. And if you haven’t read any Robert Silverberg novels from this era, that’s something you need to fix posthaste.
Book Details
Title: Tower of Glass
Author: Robert Silverberg
First Published: 1970
What I Read: Open Road Media ebook, 2014
Price I Paid: $2 (Kindle #ebookdeal)
MSRP: oop hc / oop pb / $7.99 ebook
ISBN / ASIN: 0575070978 / B00J90BYWK
Nice review, Chris. If you had to recommend just one Silverberg book as a starter, which would it be?
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That’s a tough one 🙂
Dying Inside is probably his best, a human drama about a telepath whose power is slowly fading away and is now realizing he’s wasted his superhuman gift on trivial matters. Downward to the Earth is my favorite, kind of a postcolonial take on Heart of Darkness where a colonial overseer returns to the alien species he’d previously ruled over and sees them in a new light. And Hawksbill Station is great as well, where political prisoners of the future have been sent back to a prison camp in the permian era, and their camp faces upheaval following a suspicious new arrival.
Any of those three I’d highly recommend as a starting-off point, so if one sounds more interesting than the others, then go for it.
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I agree with this list. But, perhaps Downward to the Earth might be the place to start… It has all of Silverberg’s touches but isn’t as remorselessly dark and iconoclastic as Dying Inside. If you don’t enjoy it, still give Dying Inside a go. Silverberg is THAT good.
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Agreed; Downward is by far the most optimistic of the three—Dying Inside is very dark, and even Hawksbill ends on kind of a somber note—so if that’s important to you, definitely prioritize it. Then again, it is my favorite of his books so I am a bit biased. 🙂
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Many thanks for your responses Chris and Joachim. Am now feeling inspired to read Silverberg very soon.
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I really want to read more Silverberg – a lot of short stories but not many of his novels have passed through my hands. I do have STOCHASTIC MAN lying around though …
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I do not have that one but would very much like to find a copy, it sounds fascinating… kind of a science fiction take on the 1970s political thriller… so if you read it, I’d love to hear what you think!
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I think I really have to now 🙂
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I’ve only read nine of his novels,which isn’t very many,considering the sheer volume and quality of the stuff he produced.This is without counting the “Born With the Dead” collection,the novella from which it takes it’s name,being among his best works.I didn’t care so much for “A Time of Changes”,which is supposed to be among his best novels,and preferred the less acclaimed “The Masks of Time”,but “Nightwings”,”Downward to the Earth”,”Dying Inside” and “The Book of Skulls”,were excellent,and I should think were or at least among his greatest works.Perhaps this is the best one I should go for next,I don’t know.
The plight of the androids is strikingly similar to the situation of those in Philip K. Dick’s “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep”,except here they seem from how you described them in your review,to be viewed with more sympathy.In Dick’s novel,despite also escaping from human oppression,and Rick Decard’s revelation,they are cold and mechanical in mentality.In both novels however,there is the concept of an android religion,or mysticism in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep”,the equal of human Mercerism,headed by the android DJ Buster Friendly,which is fascinating,but in “A Tower of Glass”,it sounds central to their disposition.
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I liked A Time of Changes but wasn’t floored by it; I think the rest of his novels that you listed off are better, and are some of the best novels from the era… I have not read Born with the Dead yet but I do own it, and need to make time to read it.
It’s a similar situation to the one in Do Androids? in that it focuses on humanity’s creations rebelling against their makers… kind of the same theme that’s been brought up since Karel Čapek’s R.U.R. though. Silverberg’s novel is actually a lot closer to R.U.R. come to think of it, because his androids are also synthetic-organic creations and not just metal thinking machines. And while PKD used it to examine the meaning of what it is to be “real” or “human,” Silverberg used it as a vague and under-defined allegory for Civil Rights.
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I haven’t read R.U.R,but all three books then have organic robots.I think what you must mean by Silverberg’s and Capek’s androids not being just “metal thinking machines”,is that unlike them,Dick’s creations simply lack empathy.It’s interesting however,that he makes the point,that some humans in the novel,can also lack it,and Rick Decard actually feels more sorry for some of the androids.
“A Time of Changes” emerged in the post 1960s “new wave”,and was Bob Silverberg’s attempt I think,to take advantage of the experiments of the movement he’d been a part of,but was too self conscious and lacked a compact structure.
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