Book description
It is the year 2450. Humanity is scattered among the stars, which teem
with intelligent life, while the home world has been destroyed by an
inadvertent catastrophe two hundred years before. Thus all Earthmen are
exiles, and Earth itself is only a memory. Hydros is a world of great
complexity. It has almost no landmass, only a great globe-encompassing
ocean with occasional tiny islands. Its seas swarm with apparently
intelligent life-forms of a hundred kinds, and one - a bipedal humanoid
form - has created a kind of land for itself: floating islands, woven
from sea-borne materials, buffered by elaborate barricades against the
ceaseless tidal surges that circle the planet. To Hydros have come an
assortment of Earthmen. For them it's a world of no return: having no
form of outbound space transportation. This brilliantly inventive novel
tells their story, as they travel across the planet's endless ocean in
search of the mysterious area from which no human has ever returned -
the Face of the Waters. (First published 1991) 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.
