Search Results for: beyond-time

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.

This is the strange, compelling story of Roger Bacon. Ambitious, impatient, mutinous, Bacon was a man of his times with a vision reaching far beyond even our own day. Subject to the harsh, narrow confines of Church-dominated ‘science’, Bacon dared to venture into the deep waters of theory, risking deadly accusations of heresy and black magic. Set against a vividly realised backdrop of thirteenth-century England, Paris and Rome, this is an engrossing account of this lonely prophet and suspected sorcerer.

Kemper had the answer; Reuter had the problem. Kemper had figured it all out by the twenty-second century; he was a man of temporal science. The past did not exist. The past upon which the present was based had no credence unless it could be reconstructed, bit by tiny bit. Surrogates would have to go back in time and become the cast of thousands. Napoleon was needed; likewise the Kennedys, all four of them.

There were those who would have taken argument with Kemper, but Kemper, unfortunately, was beyond dispute; in other words he, like all the other famous and infamous, was dead. Reuter’s problem was that he had gone back to Vienna in the early 1800s to be Beethoven. Beethoven, Reuter has decided, was a disgusting man. Someone must listen – don’t they realise that it was all a fraud?

AWAKEN, TERROR!

When the first expedition descended to the bottom of the Atlantic in a perfected high-pressure diving bell, their speculation ran wild as to the wonders they would encounter in that unknown sea-bottom world.

But their wildest dreams did not prepare them for uncovering first, the stones of an ancient civilization, and second, the monstrous body of an inhuman creature that had been sealed beneath the waters for countless eons.

Then, at the height of their excitement, elation turned to horror. For they had brought back an abomination so old that the memory of it had been lost to man’s remotest ancestors. Shops were disappearing, men and women were becoming enslaved by invisible whips of mental mastery, and it began to look as if it might be beyond the powers even of modern science to stop something that had so successfully defied time and space.