Lord Valentine's Castle

Valentine, a wanderer who knows nothing except his name, finds himself on the fringes of a great city, and joins a troupe of jugglers and acrobats; gradually, he remembers that he is the Coronal Valentine, executive ruler of the vast world of Majipoor, and all its peoples, human and otherwise... Lord Valentine's Castle was the first of Robert Silverberg's novels about Majipoor, in which he has for two decades explored the question of responsibility and authority; much SF and fantasy plays with constructed dreams of feudalism, but Silverberg asks the important questions of how a ruler can be a good person, and how can the person who rules all be free themselves.Lord Valentine's Castle is a blend of SF worldbuilding and poetic fantasy. Silverberg has created a world long settled by spacefaring powers, aliens and humans alike, whose technological prowess is losing its edge. Hightech devices like antigravity floaters and weather control devices are an accepted part of Majipoor life, but ordinary people tend to regard them as magical. The pattern of life is far more medieval for most: Bioengineered mounts plow fields and pull carriages while minstrels scratch out a living by following the time-honored custom of moving from town to town, hoping for friendly crowds. Valentine's journey is a long one, a tour through a series of magnificent environments. Fields of predatory plants give way to impossibly wide rivers, chalk-cliffed islands and unforgiving deserts. The prose is unrelentingly dreamlike—no accident given that on Majipoor, dreams rule the minds of great and humble alike. Caught in a nightmare that reaches beyond his sleeping hours to control his real-world choices, Valentine too is enshrouded in layers of mystery. Though he recovers his memories and purpose, he never quite comes into focus. Instead he's washed toward a confrontation at Castle Mount like a leaf rides a current. Despite its ethereal beauty, Majipoor is no utopia. Humans sit firmly atop its political food chain, while the Metamorphs are at its base, dispossessed of ancestral lands, serving as scapegoats for social ills. Using this situation, Silverberg casts light on a variety of pertinent social concerns. Lord Valentine's world is a peaceful place whose citizens enjoy a significant degree of freedom. Even so, racism, imperialism and class haven't been vanquished. This compassionate and clear-eyed portrait of a reasonably decent society that could, with inspired leadership, pursue a higher ideal of justice is what makes Lord Valentine's Castle a novel worth revisiting.Originally serialized in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction in four parts: November 1979, December 1979, January 1980 and February 1980.