The King of Dreams by Robert Silverberg

I've never heard of Robert Silverberg before, but I'd picked this book up a while ago from a charity shop. It came as some surprise to find out he's a very prolific author (see the quasi-official site), having written since the 1950s. I will admit I was slightly put off by this, since much of his early work appears (and I've not read any of it, so only appears) to be trashy erotic fiction. This is perhaps an unworthy preconception, and I will state from the start that this book is not a bad book.

I'm not quite sure what this book is about though. I mean, the plot is fairly simple: there's a big baddie over in one of the continents of Majipoor, and the king of the world has got to go and deal with them, except he's just about to be replaced by a new king and everything is a bit confusing. This side of the plot is fairly standard fantasy fare, and to be honest it never really gets going; it's only in the last third of the book that anything really happens.

This raises the inevitable question: what's the first bit of the book about? Well, I think it's about the world of Majipoor. So before I criticise it too much, I'll say this: it's a standalone book, and it does a good job of introducing characters that I believe are present in other books without me feeling lost and it does a good job of explaining the roles of people in the world, etc. This book is not hard to understand for a reader new to the world.

But... there's something missing there. I found this book really hard to get into, partly because of the slow pace of the story, but mostly because I always got the feeling I'd like it more if I'd read other books from this world. I felt like I was watching a film, but I'd arrived half way through: I could understand the plot, but I'd missed the fundamentals. All sorts of little niggling things reinforced this, such as an offhand comment that the air in the Coronal's castle is artificially supplied with oxygen, because otherwise it'd be too thin to breath, being very high up.

This gets me on to another source of annoyance; the world seems inconsistent. We're talking about a world with 13,000 years of history. It becomes obvious as the book unfolds that the world is a space colony, and there's fair amounts of technology floating around (such as, appropriately, "floaters" used for transport). So why on earth are people still using swords? Why do people find it difficult to travel to the other side of the world? This sort of disregard for integrity follows into the plot too; they spend ages talking about how they can stop an invasion, and then when the invasion crops up, they suddenly can't be bothered to defend even the one obvious port.

One other thing that I really didn't like was solution the main character, Dekkeret, comes up with as to how to solve the problem presented by his enemies. It's a horrible solution, and leaves me with a real sense of unpleasentness about the future of the world. Yet I can't help but think the author actually thinks that this solution is good thing, that it would genuinely make his world a better place. I heartily disagree, and I wonder if this is a sign of a personality clash between the author and I which leads to a poorer opinion of the book.

I should stop thinking too deeply here. Suffice to say, there's a lot of annoyances I found about this book, things that made it harder to read than it should have been. I'm left not really caring very much about the story, it was entertaining, but life moves on. But... I think I would read more of Robert Silverberg's work, particularly in this world, if I find it. And I suspect as well that someone who has read the other books might like this one. As I said at the start, this is not a bad book, it's just not really a good book either. So... I'm tempted to give it a 5, but I'll give it a 6 because I think I'd read other books in the series.

6/10