Beyond the Doors of Death Paperback – May 18, 2013

I wanted this book to be so good...Robert Silverberg is a superb science-fiction writer. "Beyond the Doors of Death" republishes one of his classics, "Born with the Dead" and adds to it a sequel written by Damien Broderick, "Quicken".I can see why "Born with the Dead" just missed winning a Hugo Award. It is based on an audacious concept and centers around a desperate personal quest. The elements of a terrific story are there, but it resolves in an anticlimactic fashion. Almost as if Silverberg ran out of ideas and decided to wrap things up and move on. Still, the story is memorable, and the reader -- meaning myself! -- feels the experience to have been unique and satisfying. Good Silverberg if not the very best Silverberg.I can't say the same about "Quicken". Broderick takes Silverberg's concepts and characters and drives them on into a future of conflict and brutality -- not to mention extraterrestrials. Now it is not as bad as all that. The story does not degrade into a pointless shoot-em-up. But the tone of the story is vastly different from that of Silverberg's seminal work, and moves far beyond his personal drama into one literally intergalactic.Aside from the story, a separate issue is that Broderick often indulges in mighty bouts of convoluted prose and obscure cultural references, often without any clarification for the not-so-astute reader. I found myself slogging through pages of his jumbled introspections, re-reading the same paragraph two or three times because I was going cross-eyed from the turgid text. Mr. Broderick would benefit tremendously from an editor who has the nerve to tell him "cut this cr*p down and tighten it up!"My guess is Broderick created his story as a tribute to Silverberg's earlier work, and a publisher decided it would be profitable to publish both stories together, thus gaining Silverberg's brand recognition while expanding the original novella into a minimal novel.I'm happy enough to have read "Born with the Dead". I do recommend it, if only because it is part of the Silverberg oeuvre. If you choose not to read "Quicken" I won't fault you.

Robert Silverberg's "Born with the Dead", written in 1974, is a justly celebrated classic of science fiction. In a near future where the dead are "rekindled" and form a separate society of their own, a man obsessively seeks to understand and know his dead wife's new existence. An icy parable of such precisely controlled tone and so lacking in rationalizing technology or science babble that it has as much the flavor of a weird story as of science fiction.It has been widely anthologized, and the first half of Silverberg's introduction to this book is taken from the story's appearance in  Trips (Collected Stories of Robert Silverberg) . The second half talks about how Damien Broderick's sequel, "Quicken", came to be written. Silverberg made only three alterations in his story. Apropos to updating a 40 year old story, he changed two dates from 1993 to 2033 and the name of an airline.Broderick picks up the story of the newly Dead Jorge Klein. He becomes sort of an apostle of the Dead to the world of the warms as tension mounts. The Dead, rich, freakish, and seemingly true immortals are resented and feared and fetishized.It's when this cultural cold war goes hot, and shortly after we learn a startling truth about how the Dead came to be "rekindled", that the story starts to justify Silverberg's description of Stapledonian. The narrative starts to jump forward in century long leaps.Where Silverberg's prose is smooth and lightly anchored to 1974, Broderick's prose is spiky with specifics, contemporary political and cultural allusions, thick with, as fitting Broderick's literary and scientific interests, technical jargon and literary and mythological references. No attempt was made by Broderick to match Silverberg's tone or style, and his story attempts commentary on many issues, most having to do with his professional interest in the Singularity.The denouement was a bit too clotted with mythological references and vague to ultimately satisfy me, but the journey through most of Broderick's story was interesting and held my interest. Don't think of Broderick's story so much a sequel as a variation on master work with some faltering notes but still satisfying.

Beyond the Doors of Death by Robert Silverberg and Damien Broderick – Part one of this book is Silverberg’s 1974 novella (Born With the Dead,) which I liked very much. That novella won both a Nebula and a Locus award and was nominated for several other awards. In this book Silverberg’s novella acquaints reader with the split society of “warm” (normal living people) and “cold” (rekindled dead people). I find Silverberg’s writing to be both thought-provoking and entertaining and I enjoyed reading it very much. However, part two of the book is Broderick’s continuation of the story using many of the same characters, but moving them through time into the fathomless future. I was very disappointed with Broderick’s expansion of the story. It had some interesting segments and an ambitious storyline. However, I found his story to be convoluted and confusing and his prose to be tedious and boring. Of course, that may be due to my own deficiencies instead of Mr. Broderick’s. However, I should have quit reading at the end of Silverberg’s contribution, which I enjoyed very much.

The original Silverberg story is a classic. I remember reading it when it first came out, which should give an idea of my age and how many years I've been reading science fiction (almost 50). The follow up story may seem to add some philosophy expanding on the original, but I disagree. For new readers of science fiction it may be worthwhile, but not for me.

If you liked Carl Sagan's "First Encounters", you will find this a fascinating other take on extra terrestial intelligence in the Universe. It is very well written, thoughtful and a little disturbing.

Bites off a bit more than they can chew, but the plotting is well done and they manage to hold things together despite the staggeringly large subject.