Voyagers: Twelve Journeys Through Space and Time

SFWA Grand Master Silverberg brings together 12 tension-filled speculative stories from throughout his long career in this impressive collection. Silverberg’s adventurous and melancholy tales are united in taking characters to vividly detailed settings, including a grisly ancient Egyptian embalming market in “Thebes of the Hundred Gates”; a “nightmare world” of “gaudy monsters” called Sidri Akrak in “Travelers”; and even the microscopic space between electrons in “Chip Runner.” Exploring themes of death and identity, the stories range from the bittersweet to the truly tragic, yet the collection never feels grim. These timeless topics also mean that even the decades-old stories still resonate. Silverberg is not one to shy away from moral quandaries, as in “The Pleasure of Your Company,” in which a fleeing refugee consults AI copies of family, friends, and even historical figures about whether it is “better to live in exile than to join the glorious company of martyrs” he left behind, and the self-reflective “Why?” in which a pair of planet-hoppers discuss the merits and pitfalls of travel itself. Readers will be won over by the immersive worldbuilding and clever plot twists of these thought-provoking stories.[em] (Apr.) [/em]