Book description
What if there were an Afterworld? Not Heaven or Hell in the
conventional sense, but a place where everyone who has ever lived
reawakens when they die, to live again and die again and live again,
seemingly forever. This is the premise of Robert Silverberg's
brilliantly inventive new fantasy novel. The central character is the
legendary warrior-king Gilgamesh, who has been in the Afterworld longer
than almost anyone else save the Hairy Men from before the Flood, and
who in recent centuries (insofar as you can count time) has seen it
change beyond recognition, as the newly dead from industrial times
import their machinery, their weaponry and their attitudes. Gilgamesh's
adventures in the course of the novel take him to the Afterworld realms
of other quasi-mythical figures like Prester John and Simon Magus, bring
him into contact with such figures from more recent history as Walter
Ralegh and Pablo Ruiz (known to some as Picasso), and eventually send
him in search of a gateway which is rumoured to exist somewhere in the
land of the dead - a gateway which leads back to the land of the living.
Robert Silverberg (1935 - ). Robert Silverberg was born in Brooklyn, New
York, in 1935, and is one of the most prolific authors of all time,
writing not just SF & Fantasy, but extensive non-fiction and a large
number of pseudonymously published erotica novels. In his first years as
a professional writer, his output regularly exceeded a million words per
year. He has won and been nominated for the Hugo and Nebula awards
dozens of times as both writer and editor, and in 2004 received the SFWA
Grand Master Award. Among his many acclaimed and bestselling novels are
A Time of Changes, The Book of Skulls, Dying Inside and Lord Valentine's
Castle. Robert Silverberg lives on the West Coast of the United States
with his wife, author, editor and art critic, Karen Haber.
