Search Results for: exiles

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)

‘You will be a King, and Great King, and then you will Die, and you may not avoid that destiny, try as you may¿’

Two-thirds god, one-third human, Gilgamesh is a giant among men and a formidable warrior, even as a boy. When his father the king of Rurk dies, Gilgamesh is forced into exile by the newly crowned Dumuzi, jealous of his prowess and fearful of his intentions.

In neighbouring Kis his fighting skills are honed to perfection, and when in time Dumuzi dies, Gilgamesh returns to be proclaimed king by the wily priestess Inanna, goddess of beauty. Together they rule Uruk, and prosperity descends upon the land.

However, the kingship is not enough to satisfy Gilgamesh’s gargantuan appetite for adventure, and his boredom is only relieved by the coming of Enkidu, a strange wild man who proves the king’s equal in combat. The two become closer than brothers, but when Gilgamesh incurs the wrath of Inanna, the gods conspire to tear them apart, and for Gilgamesh all that remains is his search for immortality.

In retelling the legend of the great Sumerian monarch, Robert Silverberg brings all his superb storytelling powers to a mesmerising tale of ambition, power and obsession, against the background of an ancient and fearsome world.

It is a thousand years from now.

The tenuous galactic empire humanity has cast across the skies depends for its very existence on hyperspace and the pilots who can ride its bizarre force-fields. And these pilots are gypsies. The Romany have come into their own. But there is a price: the legendary Romany Star. All the leverage the gypsies can bring to bear is used in the search for their ancestral home. Intergalactic blackmail? Of course. But also a statement of intent, romantic but implacable.

Who better to orchestrate a scam so colossal than Yakoub, once and future King of Gypsies? Sulking in luxurious exile, he has been planning his return to power and reminiscing over his extraordinary life. But when the moment of truth arrives, nothing seems to go according to (Yakoub’s) plan. All his ingenuity, every sacrifice (even his pride) may not be enough . . .

Britain has fallen to the technological might of the Aztec Empire whose armies have rampaged across the globe. Now, for the first time in a millennium, the British are a subject race.

Inevitably there is resistance – and among those determined to fight the invaders is Princess Catherine, elder daughter of the British monarch. But she is torn between her patriotism and her growing involvement, political and personal, with the Aztecs – and with one Aztec in particular. Then her sister is arrested and exiled for her part in an alleged terrorist attack – and Catherine finds herself walking a perilous tightrope…

Sweeping from occupied Britain to the horrors of the Russian front and the savage splendour of the imperial capital in Mexico, Aztec Century is a magnificent novel of war, politics, intrigue and romance, set in a world that is both familiar – and terrifyingly alien.

Winner of the BSFA Award for best novel, 1993

The Roman Empire never fell. Riven by political ambition and internal dissent, thrown into turmoil by rebellion and civil war, it changed and adapted, and somehow it survived. The balance of power between Constantinopolis in the east and Roma in the west ebbed and flowed, but the Empire endured. And it continued to expand, encountering the New World while still dominating the old.

Robert Silverberg’s superbly accomplished and ambitious novel explores over fifteen hundred years of Roman history through the very human stories of some of those who lived it. The young soldier encountering the exoticism of the New World for the first time; the minor official exiled to Arabia, for some misdemeanour, whose meeting with a religious fanatic may have changed the course of history; the military hero seizing his destiny; the innocent British aristocrat witnessing at first hand the bloody destruction of the royal family, and the children who find the last emperor in a decaying house in an old wood are all vividly and memorably portrayed.

During his heroic first encounter with an alien race, Dick Muller was permanently altered, hideously transformed in a way that left him repulsive to the entire human race. Alone and embittered, he exiled himself to Lemnos, an abandoned planet famed for its labyrinthine horrors, both real and imagined.

But now, Earth trembles on the brink of extinction, threatened by another alien species, and only Muller can rescue the planet. Men must enter the murderous maze of Lemnos, find Muller, and convince him to return with them.

But will the homeless alien, alone in the universe, risk his life to save his race, the race that has utterly rejected him?




(First published 1968)

The torturer Severian continues his journey of exile to the city Thrax, carrying with him the ancient executioner’s sword and the Claw of the Conciliator, a gem of extraterrestrial power and beauty which no one man is meant to possess . . .

Winner of the Nebula Award for best novel, 1981