Lord Valentine's Castle

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Valentine, a wanderer who knows nothing except his name, finds himself on the fringes of a great city, and joins a troupe of jugglers and acrobats; gradually, he remembers that he is the Coronal Valentine, executive ruler of the vast world of Majipoor, and all its peoples, human and otherwise... Lord Valentine's Castle was the first of Robert Silverberg's novels about Majipoor, in which he has for two decades explored the question of responsibility and authority; much SF and fantasy plays with constructed dreams of feudalism, but Silverberg asks the important questions of how a ruler can be a good person, and how can the person who rules all be free themselves. Inventively, Valentine's learned skills as a juggler become a fruitful metaphor for much of what he needs to know as he campaigns to reclaim his throne from a usurping imposter: Silverberg explores the implications of what might have been a mere narrative cliché. His portrayal of a huge light world where technology and magic have blended, and where different species and cultures have engineered a diverse harmony, is not the least attractive of SF's utopias; the sheer scale of the canvas gives Valentine's wanderings their own wild poetry. --Roz Kaveney(less)