Amazon.co.uk Review
Robert Silverberg has been one of SF's most prolific and popular writers since the mid-1950s. His science-fantasy stories set on the huge, exotic world Majipoor began with
Lord Valentine's Castle (1980), which the
SF Encyclopedia calls "polished but rather languid". In
Lord Prestimion the hero Prestimion takes the throne as Coronal, co- ruler of Majipoor, a millennium before Lord Valentine's reign. His crowning follows the long, ruinous civil war to overthrow a usurping Coronal, a war now literally forgotten: Prestimion's sorcerers have imposed amnesia on Majipoor in hope of preventing any further uprising. Such a memory- wipe reeks of wrongness and has seemingly caused the plague of insanity currently spreading. Meanwhile, one very bad man who was a leading rebel and warmonger recovers his memories and escapes to make new mischief.... After various colourful, almost dream-like travelogues, the situation is saved--a little too easily?--by telepathic gadgetry. (The device in question and several crossover characters appeared in the 1982 story- cycle
Majipoor Chronicles.) Smoothly written, but somewhat short on real suspense...even in the swashbuckling comic sequence when Prestimion's Regent fights and kills at least 21 would-be assassins during one morning's office paperwork. It's a man's life in the Majipoor civil service. --
David Langford
Synopsis
The latest volume in the bestselling fantasy saga that began with Lord Valentine's Castle: the eagerly awaited new novel in the Majipoor sequence, one of the most famous and fully realized worlds of modern fantasy. The Majipoor books have been Silverberg's most successful books by far, beginning some years ago with LORD VALENTINE'S CASTLE, which has since sold well over 100,000 copies. This is the new novel in that series, a sequel to THE SORCERERS OF MAJIPOOR, sumptuous fantasy set in a world with four moons in the sky, a Desert of Stolen Dreams, a deadly Labyrinth which is the Register of Souls, rootless trees, flesh-eating flowers, four-armed Skandors, scary Ghayrogs, tiny Vroons -- and a whole new breed of monsters created during the Civil War finally won by Prestimion in the last book. He won the war, and in doing so lost the woman he loved, Thismet. Now Coronal of Majipoor, Prestimion's first mistake is to use a sorcerer's device to obliterate the Civil War universally from memory. Majipoor must be seen as the perfect world. The resulting mass psychosis that sweeps around the planet is slow to register in Prestimion's consciousness, and will almost be his undoing.
He concentrates instead on repairing the damage done to Majipoor by the war, and on finding suitable punishment for the adversary he spared on the battlefield, the Procurator of Ni-moya, Dantirya Sambail. When Sambail escapes with his sinister henchman Mandralisca before either can be brainwashed, the possibility of another civil war, however unthinkable, arises. Thanks to his mother's worldwide control of minds from the Isle of Sleep and the allegiance of clever Prince Dekkeret, Prestimion will defeat Sambail and cure his people of psychosis, but only just...
