“I’ve tried being human for quite a while.
Maybe it’s time to try something else.”
– Downward to the Earth by Robert Silverberg
Reading Robert Silverberg at 47 is a much different experience than reading him at 17. As a teenager, I went through a powerful and prolonged Silverberg phase – I read everything that I could get my hands on that had Silverberg’s name on the cover: Hawksbill Station, The Masks of Time, Nightwings, Tower of Glass, The Shores of Tomorrow, Son of Man, The World Inside, and Downward to the Earth, to name just a few. (The guy was – and is – prolific!)
It was a magical period in my life: the visionary speculation and mind-blowing mysticism in Silverberg’s stories not only made me a hardcore science fiction fan for life but also instilled in me a sense of hope for humankind’s (and my own) future.
And thanks to Tor Books, I’ve been able to revisit in small part that magical time when I first discovered Silverberg so many decades ago. Over the last few years, Tor has been reissuing some of Silverberg’s timeless masterpieces: Dying Inside, A Time of Changes, The World Inside, and, recently, Downward to the Earth.
Anyone who has ever read Downward to the Earth (originally published in novel form in 1970) knows that it is a profoundly moving – and cunningly complex – story about redemption and rebirth. When Edmund Gundersen, a former Company employee who returns to the wilderness planet of Belzagor where he spent most of his adult life after being away for eight years, his reason is simple: he’s making a “sentimental pilgrimage.” What was once a colonial outpost that was thoughtlessly exploited by human adventurers is now a planet that has been recently relinquished back to the world’s native sentient species: the nildoror, highly intelligent and deeply spiritual elephant-like beings; and the sulidoror, intimidating bipedal carnivores.
Gundersen has done some regrettable things on Belzagor but his return is much more than a journey of atonement; he wants to travel to the remote mist country and witness the nildoror’s sacred rebirth ceremony. He wants to participate in the ritual and actually experience rebirth. “I’ve tried being human for quite a while. Maybe it’s time to try something else.”
Upon his arrival on Belzagor, he finds the Company’s mark on the planet almost gone. The spaceport and hotel are falling into disrepair, buildings are being reclaimed by forest, the roads all overgrown. The taint of humanity is almost gone. He finds a nildoror to accompany him north and begins a perilous quest that will lead him to the edge of insanity… but what he ultimately finds at journey’s end is nothing short of transcendental.
It’s ironic that Silverberg initially considered Downward to the Earth as a failure. In this edition’s preface, he writes: “While I was at work on it, it seemed routine and dreary to me, a mere mechanical job. When I looked at it a year later, after the awards nominations and the glowing reviews, I began to think that someone had mysteriously altered the text so that the book I had shrugged off as a failure had somehow become something else, not a bad book at all, in fact quite a good one.”
Silverberg’s world building is exceptional in this novel and it also works brilliantly as an homage of sorts to Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (an integral character is even named Kurtz). But it’s the spiritual speculation that makes this such an unforgettable read. The reality behind the nildoror’s mysterious rebirth ceremony, for example, was simply jaw dropping, described as “some sort of transcendental merging with the universe, an evolution to the next bodily level, a sublime ascent…”
Almost half a century after being originally published, Downward to the Earth remains an intensely spiritual, utterly mind-blowing, masterpiece. Science fiction fans who haven’t read this classic in decades should most definitely reacquaint themselves with it again and those who have yet to experience it should seek out and read this consciousness-altering book asap.
Paul Goat Allen has been a full-time book reviewer specializing in genre fiction for the last two decades and has written thousands of reviews for companies like Publishers Weekly, The Chicago Tribune, Kirkus Reviews, and BarnesandNoble.com. He is a member of the National Book Critics Circle. You can follow him on Twitter at @paulgoatallen and get all the latest Barnes & Noble book news from @BNBuzz.
