Written By Robert Silverberg
Robert Silverberg's Trips offers a rather strange and perhaps skewed look at his writing. Covering two years at the beginning of the 70s, when the New Wave was still aiming for relevancy and the "old guard" was trying to find its place in the brave new world created by the New Wave authors, Silverberg found himself writing against his own style, often, as he explains in his introductions, producing efforts which didn't quite feel right to him. However, while some of the stories in Trips don't stand up to the test of time, many of them do. "Born with the Dead," which went on to win a Nebula Award for Silverberg, is perhaps the most successful of the stories included, but others, such as the titular "Trips" or "The Dybbuk of Mazel Tov IV" stand the test of time. These stories show that no matter how much Silverberg was feeling that times were changing around him, he could still tell a good story.
Silverberg portrays the period as a time of rampant narrative experimentation, and his stories do demonstrate the sort of thing that was happening. "Breckenridge and the Continuum," for instance, is a less than successful trying to be too many things and almost consciously trying to set itself apart from the other stories in Silverberg's canon.
Generally, Silverberg's concerns about his writing are less in evidence within the text of his stories, and only come to light in the introductions which in some ways give a better indication of the times than the stories themselves. In these pieces, Silverberg talks about personal issues he was having and relates them to the way the world was changing in the early 70s. They provide a context for the stories which can stand on their own, but which are stronger for having a background against which to read them.
While the introductions add quite a bit to the collection, the strength is in the stories, nearly all of which, even when Silverberg is at his most experimental, manage to stand up to the passage of nearly four decades. The few stories that show their age, like the anthropological tale "Schwartz Between the Galaxies," can be seen as indicative of the period in which they were written. They remind the reader that all authors can have weak outings, perhaps especially when trying to shoehorn themselves into a newer style of writing than they are used to.
For the most part, Trips is a good introduction to Silverberg's writing. There are a few very strong pieces and a few which haven't aged well, most of the stories demonstrate Silverberg's creative quality and show a journeyman's ability to both entertain and make the reader think about the situation he has proposed.
Written By Peter F. Hamilton
After the events portrayed in The Dreaming Void, the Void has suddenly grown even faster than before. At the same time, members of the Living Dream have started a mass migration, hoping to lead them to a new home in the Void. The government of the human Commonwealth and others who see the Void as a danger are out to stop them, and prevent the Void from swallowing our universe from within.
That part of the story fits pretty comfortably into the standard part two of a trilogy scenario. Like The Dreaming Void, The Temporal Void alternates between action and intrigue in our universe and the story of Edeard, also known as the Waterwalker, in the Void. It's in Edeard's story that the details of life in the Void, what it means for the humans who already live there, its relationship to our universe, and the exact nature of the threat it poses to our universe begin to emerge. If the emphasis in The Dreaming Void was how the existence of the Void was affecting life in our universe, by the end of The Temporal Void the focus has turned to the Void, where the story of Edeard's life has slowly but surely become the key to determining how the Void works, and why.
Readers and fans of Peter F. Hamilton will find everything they have come to expect from his work present in The Temporal Void. There are the high-tech civilizations, this is, after all, a space-opera, and the individuals they empower. There are insider schemes and outsiders desperately trying to figure out what's going on. There is also the author's seeming fascination with life after death, all of it wrapped up in a story that places as much emphasis on characters as it does gadgets and galaxy-threatening, life-changing events.
There are also a few weaknesses evident. As Edeard's story becomes more central to the plot, less time is spent on other characters, and there are times when it almost seems a sub-plot or two has disappeared from the story. And life in the Commonwealth, for all its high-tech marvels, often comes across as living in one big intergalactic suburb. Those faults, though, hardly get in the way of what continues to be a gripping story, with the fates of two universes at stake, and characters whose lives are completely caught up in what is the central mystery of the universe they inhabit. Peter F. Hamilton is not a writer who is out to re-invent the field or tell his story in a way that has never been done before, but he is a writer more than capable of taking the basic elements of wide-ranging, galaxy-spanning space opera, and using them to tell stories that work both as adventure tales and portrayals of an interesting and diverse set of characters. Now all that's left is to find out how the story ends.