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    Tower of Glass
    Tower of Glass
    Tower of Glass
    Ebook293 pages4 hours

    Tower of Glass

    By Robert Silverberg

    3.5/5

    ()

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    About this ebook

    From the Hugo and Nebula Award–winning author: “High adventure, considerable tension, and—most important—social consciousness” (Harlan Ellison).

    Simeon Krug is the king of the universe. A self-made man, he is the Bill Gates of the era, having built a megacommercial empire on the backs of his products: androids, genetically engineered human slaves. Having amassed incredible wealth, his next major goal is to communicate with aliens living in an uninhabitable world, sending a mysterious signal. This requires building a mile high tower in the arctic tundra.

    The androids want civil equality with humans, but are divided on the best means to the goal—political agitation or religious devotion to Krug, their creator. And Krug’s son, Manuel, is reluctant to step into his role as heir to his father’s empire.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Media
    Release dateApr 1, 2014
    ISBN9781497632493
    Tower of Glass
    Author

    Robert Silverberg

    Robert Silverberg (b. 1935) sold his first science fiction stories to the lower-grade pulps in the mid-fifties, moved swiftly to the three prestigious magazines (Astounding, Galaxy and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction) and as his style deepened and themes expanded in through the next reached the first rank of science fiction writers. He is regarded as the greatest living writer of science fiction, an SFWA Grandmaster, ex-President (in the 1960’s) of that organization, winner of five Nebulas, four Hugos and many other domestic and foreign awards. Among his famous novels are Dying Inside, The Book of Skulls, Downward to the Earth, A Time of Changes; his novella Born with the Dead (1974) is perhaps the finest work of that length published within the genre. Shifting to a predominating fantasy in the late 1970’s (Lord Valentine’s Castle and the attendant Majipoor Series), Silverberg continued to write science fiction and won a Nebula in 1986 for the novella Sailing to Byzantium, and Hugos for the novelettes Gilgamesh in the Outback and Enter a Soldier: Later, Enter Another. He was editor of the long-running original anthology series New Dimensions and of important reprint anthologies such as The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Alpha, and The Arbor House Treasury of Modern Science Fiction. 

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    3.5/5

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    • 3/5
      Original Review, 1980-10-28)If it is in fact Silverberg's intention to make the sexual encounters uncaring in order to give an indication of the interpersonal encounters of the society in general, then why attribute them to the androids in "The Glass Tower" since it seems that he is trying to make the point that the androids CAN care and that they should therefore be considered equal to the humans? Is this contradiction his intention? Has he thought things out far enough that he even notices the contradiction? Or is this whole idea about his conscious decision to make the encounters uncaring simply a rationalization made by certain parties who would not like to see this type of cheap filler taken out of certain SF novels. In any event, I will admit that certain authors have used the technique of including uncaring sexual encounters in SF novels in order to show just the type of decadent society that considers such encounters typical. A notable example is "Brave New World". However, in order to make such a point, the number of such encounters need not be inordinately high. I highly doubt that this is what Silverberg had in mind when he wrote "The Glass Tower". My thanks go out to MD@XX for his remark about the coverless paper-back rip-off (no pun intended). I was not aware of this practice. The place at which I purchased this and other books in the same condition is not a book store at all, but merely a corner convenience store in Lisbon.My parting comment is that this discussion of "The Glass Tower" is rapidly becoming more boring than the material in the book that I was initially remarking about. Let us cease and desist and get on with another discussion.Some of you may recall that about 6 months ago I made a title/author request for which the winning answer was "The Man in the Maze" by Robert Silverberg. Recently, I re-read the book for the first time since I was 14. The book was still excellent. Good plot, execution, even good sociological commentary. However, to appease my curiosity about the general quality of Silverberg books, I then read "The Glass Tower" which happened to be the only other book by him that I happened to have on hand. I was severely disappointed. He raised several conflicts early in the book (the messages from space; his own ensuing mental breakdown; the building of the tower; his differences with his son; and the android equality issue) that led me to a point of eager anticipation. However, he then spent the next 100 pages continuing with characterizations that were not getting any deeper as well as several (read "too many") somewhat boring sexual encounters. And then as the topper, he finishes up with an ending that only resolves one and possibly two of the conflicts. The others are simply sidestepped as if to say, "They really weren't important ones anyway".I am not the type that objects to sex in SF. I am even willing to have a lot of sex in the book and enjoy having it there (for example, Heinlein's "Time Enough for Love"). However, I am not willing to have another boring sexual encounter on every other page. I began to feel as if I was reading a gothic romance! The sexual encounters should ADD something to the characterizations, or should be an integral part of the plot, in order to justify their existence.I realize that this is not a new book by Silverberg, but I felt so strongly about this one that I just had to write this post. I will not take this as a final comment on Silverberg, either; I intend to read more in the hopes that other of his works will be better.[2018 EDIT: This review was written at the time as I was running my own personal BBS server. Much of the language of this and other reviews written in 1980 reflect a very particular kind of language: what I call now in retrospect a “BBS language”.]
    • 3/5
      I'm beginning to see a pattern with Silverberg. He is a good writer with a good imagination and has contributed much to classic SF. But... I am finding I don't like many of his protagonist. It's hard to enjoy a book when you don't give a hoot for any of the characters. I admit I didn't finish this one. It appears to be skillfully written with the usual amount of Silverberg sex scenes. Unfortunately, I could tell where this one was going early in the book and couldn't be bothered to watch it unfold. I'll try more of his works but it may be a while.
    • 4/5
      Tower of Glass - Robert Silverberg ****Simeon Krug is a man with a vision. He has always wanted to contact extraterrestrial life and when a strange signal is received hundreds of light years away he decides the only way in which to communicate would be to build a glass tower many hundreds of meters high. Not just a visionary but also a giver of life, Simeon has created the worlds first flesh androids and even divided them up into a simple class system. However, little does he know that the while he just regards them as property, they are looking towards Krug as a God. Can a man ever live up to expectations bestowed on a God? They are not just thinking for themselves but creating political parties for independence and even have a bible dictating ethics.A really different type of book to one that I would normally read but I really enjoyed parts of it. The way the story unfolds is very closely mirroring the slavery period in worlds history, with all sorts of moral question being raised. The way Krug's relationship differs between his sons towards man made objects highlights a changing world and provides a glimmer of hope for the future of mankind. Why is Krug obsessed with finding new life in the stars when he has created his own on earth?An easily recommendable book, but one that at time seemed a little too geeky for me, especially with all the Technology explanations, hence 4 stars instead of 5.

    Book preview

    Tower of Glass - Robert Silverberg

    INTRODUCTION

    By

    Robert Silverberg

    The late 1960s were a crazy time in American life—Vietnam, Nixon, inflation, non-negotiable demands—and a heady, dizzying one in science-fiction publishing. Perhaps because our country, and in fact the whole world, had gone so weird, everybody seemed to want to read novels of fantasy and science fiction. The Tolkien books were on the best-seller list and so was Frank Herbert's Dune, and Robert A. Heinlein's 1961 novel Stranger in a Strange Land was enjoying new popularity in that suddenly psychedelic era. Readers couldn't get enough of the stuff, it seemed—the wilder the better. And publishers who would not have dreamed of publishing science fiction a few years before were eager now to add it to their lists.

    One of those was the fine old publishing house of Harper & Row,which had done Moby-Dick back in the day, and had done many another distinguished book, too, by the likes of Washington Irving, Henry James, and George Eliot. In 1968 a a young and very serious-minded Harper editor named Norbert Slepyan with a background in literary fiction was given the task of assembling a science fiction list for them, and one of the first writers he contacted was Robert Silverberg. Norbert and I met for dinner on October 1, 1968. At his request I suggested a number of writers as possibilities for him—Philip K. Dick, Roger Zelazny, John Brunner, R.A. Lafferty, and three or four others. And, of course, when he asked if I would do a book for him myself, I was not at all shy about accepting the offer.

    I was then in the midst of a madly prolific phase of my career, experiencing a surge of irrepressible creativity that often left me exhausted and dazed, but which I knew was the sort of thing that comes to a writer only once in his life, and must not be denied. I was too prolific for any one publisher to cope with. Ballantine was my primary house—Thorns, The Masks of Time, Up the Line, Son of Man—but I did Downward to the Earth and A Time of Changes for New American Library, To Live Again and The World Inside for Doubleday, The Man in the Maze and Nightwings for Avon. Despite all that, I was confident that I could make room in my schedule for yet another publisher, especially such a notable one as Harper & Row.

    After forty-plus years, I don't remember where the idea for the book came from. Probably, as has so often happened in my career, the title arrived first: Tower of Glass. I must have looked at it, wondered what kind of story a title like that might involve, and, piece by piece, a tale of megalomaniacal architectural hubris began to assemble itself in my mind. At any rate, I worked up an outline for Norbert Slepyan, Harper & Row offered me a contract, and in October, 1969 I began to write the book.

    It wasn't easy. I was playing with style, trying to do all sorts of ambitious things with stream of consciousness, with changes of tense, with switches in viewpoint. Two or three weeks into the book, I became totally stuck—unable to move forward at all. In despair, I phone my friend Barry Malzberg, who offered me one of the most memorable bits of writing advice I have ever received:

    Literary it up, Bob.

    I knew exactly what he meant. I returned to the manuscript at the point where I had hit the wall and began to write a spate of feverish quasi-Joycean prose, frenzied stuff, a sort of free-form mumbo-jumbo that carried me swiftly onward like a bit of flotsam swept along on a tide of words. Before I knew what was happening I was past the sticking point and into my story again at the place where I had been unable to move forward earlier. The next day I went back, deleted the arty couple of pages, made a smooth join to link pre-blocked pages with post-blocked pages, and continued from there without further difficulty.

    Slepyan loved the book. You have many things going for you, he wrote, including various levels of significance that make for strong, mature, and far-seeing fiction. He had some editorial suggestions—he was that sort of editor—and they were good suggestions, because he was that sort of editor, too. (The main need for doctoring lies in tightening the writing. I have bracketed words, phrases, etc., that I think disturb the effectiveness of the novel.) I did most of the revisions he requested. Some I resisted, explaining my reasons in a three-page single-spaced letter on January 10, 1970. He accepted my arguments and the book started on its way toward publication.

    Meanwhile I arranged for magazine publication, selling the novel to GALAXY, at that time the top magazine in the field. GALAXY's editor, Ejler Jakobsson, had taken quite a fancy to my work; he was already serializing Downward to the Earth, and after Tower of Glass he would go on to do, more or less in consecutive issues, The World Inside, A Time of Changes, and Dying Inside—quite a run of serials in one magazine for one writer.

    About the same time, Norbert Slepyan left Harper & Row for the equally venerable and prestigious house of Charles Scribner's Sons, best known as the home of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Thomas Wolfe. Scribner's was also starting a science-fiction list, and, since Norbert had been so deeply involved in the editing of Tower of Glass, Harper & Row allowed him to take the book along with him to his new employer, which published it in October, 1970. (I went on to do The Book of Skulls and Dying Inside for Scribner's, too, before they decided to fold their s-f line, but, prolific devil that I was, I stayed with Harper & Row as well, with The Stochastic Man and, eventually, Lord Valentine's Castle.)

    Tower of Glass sold reasonably well for Scribner's, though what made them really happy was the reprint sale in 1971 to Bantam Books for a five-figure sum, something that was quite unusual for a science-fiction novel at that time. The book's readers seemed to like it very much: it was a finalist for the Hugo award in 1971, though it lost out to Larry Niven's invincible Ringworld, and the Science Fiction Writers of America put it on the final ballot for the Nebula trophy, where it also was trumped by Niven's hugely popular novel. It was the fourth year in a row that a book of mine came in as runner-up for the best-novel award—the others were Thorns, The Masks of Time, and Up the Line—and I was getting used to those second-place finishes, although SFWA finally let me have a Nebula in 1972 for A Time of Changes.

    And here is Tower of Glass again, in a shiny new format for a shiny new century. I'm pleased to have survived into it, and that some of my books have, too.

    —Robert Silverberg

    April, 2011

    1

    Look, Simeon Krug wanted to say, a billion years ago there wasn’t even any man, there was only a fish. A slippery thing with gills and scales and little round eyes. He lived in the ocean, and the ocean was like a jail, and the air was like a roof on top of the jail. Nobody could go through the roof. You’ll die if you go through, everybody said, and there was this fish, he went through, and he died. And there was this other fish, and he went through, and he died. But there was another fish, and he went through, and it was like his brain was on fire, and his gills were blazing, and the air was drowning him, and the sun was a torch in his eyes, and he was lying there in the mud, waiting to die, and he didn’t die. He crawled back down the beach and went into the water and said, Look, there’s a whole other world up there. And he went up there again, and stayed for maybe two days, and then he died. And other fishes wondered about that world. And crawled up onto the muddy shore. And stayed. And taught themselves how to breathe the air. And taught themselves how to stand up, how to walk around, how to live with the sunlight in their eyes. And they turned into lizards, dinosaurs, whatever they became, and they walked around for millions of years, and they started to get up on their hind legs, and they used their hands to grab things, and they turned into apes, and the apes got smarter and became men. And all the time some of them, a few, anyway, kept looking for new worlds. You say to them, Let’s go back into the ocean, let’s be fishes again, it’s easier that way. And maybe half of them are ready to do it, more than half, maybe, but there are always some who say, Don’t be crazy. We can’t be fishes any more. We’re men. And so they don’t go back. They keep climbing up.

    2

    September 20, 2218.

    Simeon Krug’s tower now rises 100 meters above the gray-brown tundra of the Canadian Arctic, west of Hudson Bay. At present the tower is merely a glassy stump, hollow, open-topped, sealed from the elements only by a repellor field hovering shieldlike just a few meters above the current work level. Around the unfinished structure cluster the android work crews, thousands of synthetic humans, crimson-skinned, who toil to affix glass blocks to scooprods and send the rods climbing to the summit, where other androids put the blocks in place. Krug has his androids working three shifts round the clock; when it gets dark, the construction site is lit by millions of reflector plates strung across the sky at a height of one kilometer and powered by the little million-kilowatt fusion generator at the north end of the site.

    From the tower’s huge octagonal base radiate wide silvery strips of refrigeration tape, embedded fifty centimeters deep in the frozen carpet of soil, roots, moss, and lichens that is the tundra. The tapes stretch several kilometers in each direction. Their helium-II diffusion cells soak up the heat generated by the androids and vehicles used in building the tower. If the tapes were not there, the tundra would soon be transformed by the energy-output of construction into a lake of mud; the colossal tower’s foundation-caissons would lose their grip, and the great building would tilt and tumble like a felled titan. The tapes keep the tundra icy, firm, capable of bearing the immense burden that Simeon Krug is now imposing on it.

    Around the tower, subsidiary buildings are centered on a thousand-meter radius. To the west of the site is the master control center. To the east is the laboratory where the tachyon-beam ultrawave communications equipment is being fabricated: a small pink dome which usually contains ten or a dozen technicians patiently assembling the devices with which Krug hopes to send messages to the stars. North of the site is a clutter of miscellaneous service buildings. On the south side is the bank of transmat cubicles that link this remote region to the civilized world. People and androids flow constantly in and out of the transmats, arriving from New York or Nairobi or Novosibirsk, departing for Sydney or San Francisco or Shanghai.

    Krug himself invariably’ visits the site at least once a day—alone, or with his son Manuel, or with one of his women, or with some fellow industrialist. Customarily he confers with Thor Watchman, his android foreman; he rides a scooprod to the top of the tower and peers into it; he checks the progress in the tachyon-beam lab; he talks to a few of the workmen, by way of inspiring loftier effort. Generally Krug spends no more than fifteen minutes at the tower. Then he steps back into the transmat, and instantaneously is hurled to the business that awaits him elsewhere.

    Today he has brought a fairly large party to celebrate the attainment of the 100-meter level. Krug stands near what will be the tower’s western entrance. He is a stocky man of sixty, deeply tanned, heavy-chested and short-legged, with narrow-set, glossy eyes and a seamed nose. There is a peasant strength about him. His contempt for all cosmetic editing of the body is shown by his coarse features, his shaggy brows, his thinning hair: he is practically bald, and will do nothing about it. Freckles show through the black strands that cross his scalp. He is worth several billion dollars fissionable, though he dresses plainly and wears no jewelry; only the infinite authority of his stance and expression indicates the extent of his wealth.

    Nearby is his son and heir, Manuel, his only child, tall, slender, almost foppishly handsome, elegantly dressed in a loose green robe, high buskins, an auburn sash. He affects earlobe plugs and a mirror-plate in his forehead. He will shortly be thirty. His movements are graceful, but he seems fidgety when in repose.

    The android Thor Watchman stands between father and son. He is as tall as Manuel, as powerfully built as the elder Krug. His face is that of a standard alpha-class android, with a lean caucasoid nose, thin lips, strong chin, sharp cheekbones: an idealized face, a plastic face. Yet he has impressed a surprising individuality on that face from within. No one who sees Thor Watchman will mistake him the next time for some other android. A certain gathering of the brows, a certain tension of the lips, a certain hunching of the shoulders, mark him as an android of strength and purpose. He wears an openwork lace doublet; he is indifferent to the biting cold at the site, and his skin, the deep red, faintly waxy skin of an android, is visible in many places.

    There are seven others in the group that has emerged from the transmat. They are:

    Clissa, the wife of Manuel Krug.

    Quenelle, a woman younger than Manuel, who is his father’s current companion.

    Leon Spaulding, King’s private secretary, an ectogene.

    Niccolò Vargas, at whose observatory in Antarctica the first faint signals from an extrasolar civilization were detected.

    Justin Maledetto, the architect of King’s tower.

    Senator Henry Fearon of Wyoming, a leading Witherer.

    Thomas Buckleman of the Chase/Krug banking group.

    Into the scooprods, everybody! Krug bellows. Here— here—you—you—up to the top!

    How high will it be when it’s finished? Quenelle asks.

    1500 meters, Krug replies. A tremendous tower of glass full of machinery that nobody can understand. And then we’ll turn it on. And then we’ll talk to the stars.

    3

    In the beginning there was Krug, and He said, Let there be Vats, and there were Vats.

    And Krug looked upon the Vats and found them good.

    And Krug said, Let there be high-energy nucleotides in the Vats. And the nucleotides were poured, and Krug mixed them until they were bonded one to another.

    And the nucleotides formed the great molecules, and Krug said, Let there be the father and the mother both in the Vats, and let the cells divide, and let there be life brought forth within the Vats.

    And there was life, for there was Replication.

    And Krug presided over the Replication, and touched the fluids with His own hands, and gave them shape and essence.

    Let men come forth from the Vats, said Krug, and let women come forth, and let them live and go among us and be sturdy and useful, and we shall call them Androids.

    And it came to pass.

    And there were Androids, for Krug had created them in His own image, and they walked upon the face of the Earth and did service for mankind.

    And for these things, praise be to Krug.

    4

    Watchman had wakened that morning in Stockholm. Groggy: four hours of sleep. Much too much. Two hours would suffice. He cleared his mind with a quick neural ritual and got under the shower for a skin-sluicing. Better, now. The android stretched, wriggled muscles, studied his smooth rosy hairless body in the bathroom mirror. A moment for religion, next. Krug deliver us from servitude. Krug deliver us from servitude. Krug deliver us from servitude. Praise be to Krug!

    Watchman popped his breakfast down and dressed. The pale light of late afternoon touched his window. Soon it would be evening here, but no matter. The clock in his mind was set to Canadian time, tower time. He could sleep whenever he wished, so long as he took at least one hour out of twelve. Even an android body needed some rest, but not in the rigidly programmed way of humans.

    Off to the construction site, now, to greet the day’s visitors.

    The android began setting up the transmat coordinates. He hated these daily tour sessions. The tours slowed the work, since extraordinary precautions had to be observed while important human beings were on the site; they introduced special and unnecessary tensions; and they carried the hidden implication that his work was not really trustworthy, that he had to be checked every day. Of course, Watchman was aware that Krug’s faith in him was limitless. The android’s faith in that faith had sustained him superbly through the task of erecting the tower thus far. He knew that it was not suspicion but the natural human emotion of pride that brought Krug to the site so often.

    Krug preserve me, Watchman thought, and stepped through the transmat.

    He stepped out into the shadow of the tower. His aides greeted him. Someone handed him a list of the day’s visitors. Is Krug here yet? Watchman asked.

    Five minutes, he was told, and in five minutes Krug came through the transmat, accompanied by his guests. Watchman was not cheered to see Krug’s secretary, Spaulding, in the group. They were natural enemies; they felt toward one another the instant antipathy of the vat-born and the bottle-born, the android and the ectogene. Aside from that they were rivals for eminence among Krug’s associates. To the android, Spaulding was a spreader of suspicions, a potential underminer of his status, a fount of poisons. Watchman greeted him coolly, distantly, yet properly. One did not snub humans, no matter how important an android one might be, and at least by technical definition Spaulding had to be considered human.

    Krug was hustling everybody into scooprods. Watchman went up with Manuel and Clissa Krug. As the rods rode toward the truncated summit of the tower, Watchman glanced across at Spaulding in the rod to his left—at the ectogene, the prenatal orphan, the man of cramped soul and baleful spirit in whom Krug perversely placed so much trust. May Arctic winds sweep you to destruction, bottle-born. May I see you float sweetly toward the frozen ground and break beyond repair.

    Clissa Krug said, Thor, why do you suddenly look so fierce?

    Do I?

    I see angry clouds crossing your face.

    Watchman shrugged. I’m doing my emotion drills, Mrs. Krug. Ten minutes of love, ten minutes of hate, ten minutes of shyness, ten minutes of selfishness, ten minutes of awe, ten minutes of arrogance. An hour a day makes androids more like people.

    Don’t tease me, Clissa said. She was very young, slim, dark-eyed, gentle, and, Watchman supposed, beautiful. Are you telling me the truth?

    I am. Really. I was practicing a little hatred when you caught me.

    What’s the drill like? I mean, do you just stand there thinking, Hatehatehatehatehate, or what?

    He smiled at the girl’s question. Looking over her shoulder, he saw Manuel wink at him. Another time, Watchman said. We’re at the top.

    The three scooprods clung to the highest course of the tower. Just above Watchman’s head hung the gray haze of the repellor field. The sky too was gray. The short northern day was nearly half over. A snowstorm was heading southward toward them along the shore of the bay. Krug, in the next scooprod, was leaning far into the tower, pointing out something to Buckleman and Vargas; in the other rod, Spaulding, Senator Fearon, and Maledetto were closely examining the satiny texture of the great glass bricks that made up the tower’s outer skin.

    When will it all be finished? Clissa asked.

    Less than a year, the android told her. We’re moving nicely along. The big technical problem was keeping the permafrost under the building from thawing. But now that that’s behind us, we ought to be rising several hundred meters a month.

    Why build here in the first place, she wanted to know, if the ground wasn’t stable?

    "Isolation. When the ultrawave is turned on, it’ll scramble all communications lines, transmats, and power generators for thousands of square kilometers. Krug was pretty well limited to putting the tower in the Sahara, the Gobi, the Australian desert, or the tundra. For technical reasons having to

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