Nightwings

Nightwings by Robert Silverberg

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The last time I read this, I was in my middle teens around 50 years ago. Silverberg was one of the “go-to” writers for young science fiction readers. He was an author whose works you had to read, like those of Heinlein, Clark, Asimov, Farmer, etc. In the 1980s, Silverberg essentially dropped off the map for me. I wasn't interested in his Maljipoor stories.

I probably haven't read Silverberg in the last four decades, but a recent YouTube on classic science fiction novels got me interested in Silverberg again. So, I decided to pick out a story I dimly remembered mostly as flashes of image. I was surprised in fact to see how much of the story's plot and characters I remembered.

Nightwings is a novel composed of three novelettes. The first part “Night Wings” is the best. The story is set in the far distant future, maybe 40,000 years in the future. Our time is dimly remembered as the First Cycle. The story is set in the Third Cycle, long after Earth has slid into backwardness and poverty from the height of the Second Cycle. The inhabitants of Third Cycle Earth know that they have lost their greatness. They live among the great architectural wonders of the prior world and know that they can't ever build such things ago.

Silverberg effectively communicates that the Earth of the Third Cycle is buried under its own history. The Third Cycle world is organized into various guilds in a hierarchical fashion under the Dominators, Masters, Defenders, Indexers, and the rest. The feel of the story is medieval, not Divergent. The guild system was set up to provide stability to the Earth after it had fallen from its peak of glory.

Earth has more problems than a loss of glory. An alien race has promised to conquer the Earth in order to avenge an ancient slight to their ancestors. They are not prosecuting their mission with alacrity. It seems that the promise of revenge has been outstanding for thousands of years.

In the face of this threat, Earth has organized a guild of Watchers, whose job is to use a kind of telepathic device they cart around at set intervals during the day to scan the galaxy for the invading force. Once they detect the invasion force, they are to give a warning, and then their life mission is over.

The focal character is an old Watcher. He has walked along the land bridge from Afreek to Talya to visit Roum. A feature of the book is the familiar strangeness of the world. He is in the company of a Changeling - a human subspecies created to be mutant monsters during the Second Cycle - and a Flyer - another human subspecies created during the Second Cycle with wings that can be used only at night when they do not have to fight solar radiation. They meet the Prince of Roum, visit the sites of Roum, and the Watcher learns that his long watch may be ending.

The story begins with these classic lines:

“ROUM IS A CITY built on seven hills. They say it was a capital of man in one of the earlier cycles. I did not know of that, for my guild was Watching, not Remembering; but yet as I had my first glimpse of Roum, coming upon it from the south at twilight, I could see that in former days it must have been of great significance. Even now it was a mighty city of many thousands of souls.”

Silverberg, Robert. Nightwings (p. 5). Open Road Media. Kindle Edition.

That is the perfect opening to set the hook. It communicates a sense of nostalgia for our future. We learn so many things obliquely. We know we are on Earth, but that it is a different Earth.

My earlier self could not have recognized that this story may have influenced Gene Wolfe's magisterial “the Shadow of the Torturer” in its nostalgia for our future amidst a world that has declined from greatness.

The next two parts follow the old Watcher as he joins the guild of Rememberers and then makes his way to Jorslem to be rejuvenated.

The story moves along cleanly, telling a captivating story. The world sketched by Silverberg is surprising and engaging. I liked the character of the Watcher.

The Nightwings portion of the book won a well-deserved Hugo Award for Best Novella in 1969.