Minner Burris: un maduro astronauta convertido por los cirujanos en un ser que ya no es completamente humano. Lona Kevin: cobaya de un experimento genético, la madre vírgen de un centenar de hijos a los que nunca llegará a ver. Duncan Chalk: un vampiro psíquico que alimenta a través de su imperio del espectáculo a millones de mirnes, al tiempo que se alimenta a sí mismo con el dolor y la desesperación de los demás. Tres personajes, un amor, un odio, un ansia. Y por encima de todo, una maravillosa historia de amor en los límites de lo concebible.

Chalk is an entertainment mogul. Burris is a retired spaceman who was irreparably altered by alien surgeons. Lona is a teenager who had hundreds of her eggs removed. Scientists then fertilized the viable ones, all from the same sperm donor, and a dozen women and 88 artificial wombs brought her babies to term. She has never met them. This profoundly impacted her. Burris is profoundly impacted by the unending pain and the monster face that the alien surgeons left him with.
Chalk decides to bring the two together, and publicize their romance, making revenue from it. But he is an emotional vampire and he grows fat on negative emotions, so Burris and Lona are in for bad times.
Hardback edition
P.65:
"Hooded once more, he let himself be swept along a network of pneumatic tubes until he found himself gliding into an immense cavernous room studded with various levels of activity points. Just now there was little activity; the desks were empty, the screens were silent. A gentle glow of thermal luminescent fungi lit the place. Turning slowly, Burris panned his gaze across the room and up a series of Crystal rungs until he observed, seated thronewise near the ceiling on the far side, a vast individual.
Chalk. Obviously.
Burris stood absorbed in the sight, forgetting for a moment the million tiny pricking pains that were his constant companions. So big? So enfleshed? The man had devoured a legion of cattle to gain that bulk."

P.67:
" 'your rating must have been good. you were given a tough assignment. first landing on a world of intelligent beings – never a cinch. how many in your team?'
'Three. we all went through surgery. Prolisse died first, then Malcondotto. Lucky for them.'
'you dislike your present body?'
'it has its advantages. The doctors say I'm likely to live 500 years. But it's painful, and it's also embarrassing. I was never cut out to be a monster.'
'you're not as ugly as you may think you are,' chalk observed. 'oh, yes, children run screaming from you, that sort of thing. But children are conservatives. They loathe anything new. I find that face of yours quite attractive in its way. I dare say a lot of women would fling themselves at your feet.' "

P.83:
" '... It's a dry world. Pluvial belts about the poles, then mounting dryness approaching the equator. it rains about every billion years at the equator and somewhat more frequently in the temperate zones.'
'Homesick?'
'hardly. But I learned the beauty of thorns there.'
'thorns? They stick you.'
'That's part of their beauty.'
'you sound like chalk now,' Aoudad muttered. 'pain is instructive, he says. Pain is gain. and thorns are beautiful. Give me a rose.'
'rose bushes are thorny, too,' Burris remarked quietly.
AOudad looked distressed. 'tulips, then. Tulips!'
Burris said, 'The Thorn is merely a highly evolved form of leaf. an adaptation to a harsh environment. Cacti can't afford to transpire the way leafy plants do. So they adapt. I'm sorry you regard such an elegant adaptation as ugly.' "

P.134-5:
"the glass was translucent quartz. It was 3/5 filled with a richly viscous green liquid. moving idly back and forth was a tiny animal, teardrop shaped, whose Violet skin left a faint glow behind as it swam.
'is that supposed to be there?'
Burris laughed. 'I have a deneb martini, so-called. It's a preposterous name. specialty of the house.'
'and in it?'
'a tadpole, essentially. Amphibious life form from one of the aldebaran worlds.'
'which you drink?'
'yes. Live.'
'live.' Lona shuddered. 'why? does it taste that good?'
'it has no taste at all, as a matter of fact. It's pure decoration. sophistication come full circle, back to barbarism. One gulp, and down it goes.'
'but it's alive? How can you kill it?'
'Have you ever eaten an oyster, Lona?'
'No. what's an oyster?'
'a mollusk. once quite popular, served in its shell. Live. You sprinkle it with lemon juice – citric acid, you know – and it writhes. Then you eat it. it tastes of the sea. I'm sorry, Lona. That's how it is. Oysters don't know what's happening to them. They don't have hopes and fears and dreams. Neither does this creature here.'
'but to kill -'
'we kill to eat. A true morality of food would allow us to eat only synthetics.' Burris smiled kindly. 'I'm sorry. I wouldn't have ordered it if I'd known it would offend you. Shall I have them take it away?' "

( )

As mentioned by Oliver Sacks, a futuristic view of media control over individual lives, including a deformed human mutilated by aliens and a young woman regretting her decision to donate 100 ovaries for artificial insemination. I enjoyed the imaginings of spray-on clothes, planetary travel, and the vertigo-inducing restaurant. Also, a happy ending! ( )

https://nwhyte.livejournal.com/2912770.html

It's a short but pretty powerful book. The central characters are a media mogul who is also a psychic vampire who draws sustenance from other people's pain, and the two people who he brings together purely for entertainment, an astronaut who has been horribly mutilated by aliens and a young woman who has been at the centre of a media storm after allowing a hundred of her eggs to be fertilised for donor pregnancies. The notion that a senior media figure is obscenely benefiting from causing people pain remains horribly valid today; now that it's possible, egg donation seems much less scandalous than Silverberg anticipated, as far as I can tell. (And while we don't yet have aliens mutilating astronoauts, we have plenty of unwilling celebrities who have been horribly injured in public.)

I've seen this described as Silverberg's first good novel, and while I'm not familiar enough with his early work to pass judgement, it is pretty good (even if deservingly beaten by Lord of Light for the Hugo). The set-up is all too plausibly done in the context of the story's future technology, and the payoff delivered in due course after some grim sidetracks. Well worth getting hold of. ( )

This odd little 1960s SF novel has three main characters: Burris, a space traveler who was kidnapped and experimented on by aliens who made surgical "improvements" to his body that have left him grotesque-looking and frequently in pain. Lona, a seventeen-year-old girl who was the subject of a medical experiment in which a hundred egg cells were taken from her and used to create a hundred babies she's never seen. And Chalk, an obscenely wealthy man who psychically feeds off the physical and emotional pain of others, and who hatches a plan to get Burris and Lona together and then watch their relationship self-destruct, for the entertainment of the masses and his own personal gratification.

My feelings about this one are extremely mixed. To begin with Silverberg is much more of a stylist than most SF authors, and in general I like his writing, but this one feels as if it's balancing precariously between "well written" and "pretentiously written." For me, it mostly comes down on the right side, but some of the euphemisms he uses in the sex scenes are pretty laughable.

As for characterization... Burris is a well-drawn, complex character, and his relationship with Lona at times feels almost painfully realistic as it deteriorates. But Lona herself feels less like a real, human woman and more like a man's idea of a certain type of woman viewed from the outside, even thought parts of the story are told from her point of view. And while Burris' relationship to his new body and his personal pain are decently explored, Lona's reactions what was done to her are rather shallowly rendered and never examined too closely. It's like it's just sort of naturally taken for granted that, well, she's a woman and of course she's emotionally devastated by the thought that she can't nurture her own babies, and how much examination does that idea really need? Which thought makes me roll my eyes. A lot.

Then there's the ending, which is thematically satisfying, I suppose, but feels implausible and tacked-on, in terms of plot logic.

All of which sounds really, really negative, but the truth is, it was at least an interesting read, and it did hold my attention. It's also true, though, that this is definitely not the first Silverberg novel I would recommend. ( )