Tower of Glass

I picked up a Humble Bundle of 30 odd novels and short story collections by Robert Silverberg (although this is still just a fraction of his back catalogue!) More or less at random I took a look at this one, written in 1970, well before the Majipoor books. This is pretty straight science fiction that has aged pretty well. Following a fall in population, Androids created in a factory take on many roles in society. There’s some high technology involved, mind transference (offered as a plaything for the rich) and teleportation (helpful to literally keep the plot moving along) and fusion drives, none of which seem jarring to the reader 50 years later. This at first appears to be an alien first contact story but later evolves into a meditation on artificial life and how that artificial intelligent life might think about its creator – and, what’s more, how that creator might react to his own creations and their ideas about him. Not on a par with the sweeping imagination and sense of wonder…