The Face of the Waters
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- £2.99
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- £2.99
Publisher Description
It is the year 2450. Humanity is scattered among the stars, which teem with intelligent life, while the home world has been destroyed by an inadvertent catastrophe two hundred years before. Thus all Earthmen are exiles, and Earth itself is only a memory.
Hydros is a world of great complexity. It has almost no landmass, only a great globe-encompassing ocean with occasional tiny islands. Its seas swarm with apparently intelligent life-forms of a hundred kinds, and one - a bipedal humanoid form - has created a kind of land for itself: floating islands, woven from sea-borne materials, buffered by elaborate barricades against the ceaseless tidal surges that circle the planet.
To Hydros have come an assortment of Earthmen. For them it's a world of no return: having no form of outbound space transportation. This brilliantly inventive novel tells their story, as they travel across the planet's endless ocean in search of the mysterious area from which no human has ever returned - the Face of the Waters.
(First published 1991)
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Silverberg (Among Strangers) demonstrates why he's earned the title of SFWA Grand Master in this immersive epic. Centuries after the destruction of Earth, humanity struggles to survive on other planets, including Hydros, a world covered in oceans dotted with the occasional artificial island. At the start of the book, 78 humans live on Hydros's Sorve Island, but after Nid Delagard, the owner of a fleet of ships, accidentally kills a group of intelligent aquatic mammals known as divers, the entire human population is forced into exile from Sorve by the Gillies, the aliens who built the island. This involuntary exodus leads to a desperate quest for a new home, with the population divided among six ships, which must brave interactions with multiple hostile life-forms and foul weather that threaten to sink them. The ensuing epic voyage is largely told through the perspective of the community's doctor, Valben Lawler, a devoted healer himself tormented by psychological wounds he treats with an addictive narcotic. The intricate plot offers plenty of surprises as it builds toward a haunting and complex ending. This is hard sci-fi done right.
