Son of Man
by Robert Silverberg
Form: Novel
Year: 1971
ID: 1083
Publication history:
- 1971: Son of Man, Ballantine Mass market paperback, ISBN 345-002277-7, 213 pp.
- 1977: Son of Man, Del Rey Mass market paperback, 213 pp.
- 1978: Le Fils de l'homme, Livre de Poche Mass market paperback, in French as Le Fils de lHomme
- 1979: Son of Man, Panther Mass market paperback, ISBN 0586048073
- 1980: Son of Man, Del Rey Mass market paperback, ISBN 0-345-28884, 212 pp.
- 1983: Menschensohn, Ulstein Mass market paperback, in German
- 1984: Le Fils de l'homme, Livre de Poche Mass market paperback, in French
- 1987: Son of Man, Warner Mass market paperback, ISBN 0-446-34511-3, 213 pp.
- 1991: Son of Man, Gollancz Mass market paperback, 192 pp.
- 1993: Syn chelovecheskii / Uniraiushchii iznutri / Stekliannaia bashnia, Egos Hard cover book, ISBN 5854760177, 700 pp., in Russian as Syn chelovecheskii
- 1996: Chute dans le réel, Omnibus Hard cover book, ISBN 2258040590, 1070 pp., in French as Le fils de l'homme
- 1996: Filho do Homem, Mass market paperback, ISBN 972-1-04228-5, in Portuguese as Filho Do Homem
- 2000: Son of Man, Fictionwise Online
- 2003: Son of Man, , ISBN 0575075015, 192 pp.
- 2003: Le Fils de l'homme, Livre de Poche Mass market paperback, in French
Blurb:
(from Del Rey 1980)
In the beginning...
there was no Brooklyn, no St. Louis, no Shakespeare, no moon, no hunger, no death...
In the beginning...
there were no real men, no real women, nothing but dispassionately passionate ambisexuals of the lowest and highest order...
In the beginning...
the heavens, the seas and the Earth belonged to more intelligent species than a man called Clay could ever have dreamed possible in his own time
but his own time as a man had passed, and now his time as the son of man had come!
Other resources:
[None on record]
Comments:
Clay is a man from the 20th Century, an educated person who considers himself open-minded. His mind is in for quite a trip when he is caught up in a
and whisked untold billions of years into the future (not the beginning of time). The earth of this distant era retains no recognizable features from our time, and its population consists of wildly variant life forms. In the intervening eons, the human race has taken many forms, from squid-like aquatic creatures to tyrannosaur-like eating machines to grotesque goat-like creatures. Clay is befriended (if that's the word) by a group of humans called Skimmers, who can change form at will, sometimes male, sometimes female, sometimes a pale gray cloud that can travel interstellar space. All of the strange human forms are called races descended from Homo sapiens. With the Skimmers, and in spite of them, Clay goes on a journey of discovery which takes him around the future earth into the depths of his own soul. What is it to be human? How do I fit in? These are some of the questions Clay must answer.The technology of this distant future is pure magic, quite bizarre, and utterly fascinating. Silverberg set up a situation where pretty much anything can happen. It's a wild riot of imagination, probably not for the casual reader, and captures that rare feeling of cosmic vision, an expansive view of the universe. Everything has meanings within meanings. As an interesting sideline, James Tiptree Jr took the title of the novel Brightness Falls from the Air from a passage of this book.
Silverberg revisited this world in the story
, which explains a little about the origin of the time-flux.