To Live Again

...this is one of my favorite Silverberg novels. Five stars may seem rather high, but I have found pleasure in reading it many times, and what truer measure of value is there than repeated enjoyable readings?It is considered to be a minor work in the Silverberg opus, however. If you are looking for pretense or snob-literature, this is not the book for you. If you are looking for the definitive statement of Silverberg-the-writer, then this is not that either (and there is no such book, Silverbob has had too varied and rich a career to be epitomized by any one work).If, on the other hand, you want a strongly plotted story with some interesting characters and events, a world you can enjoy dipping into from time to time, then this book is great! The story has great drive and the motivations are well-justified and intense.One note: Although I have never yet seen it mentioned (well, I haven't looked very hard), I suspect that this book is a "tribute novel" to Jack Vance's "To Live Forever" which contains many of the same devices and even very similar scenes in certain places (this is legitimate in SF, by the way; TLA is a very different work than TLF in essential ways). I wonder if anyone can confirm this for me? TLF was published, I believe, in the same year that Silverberg won the Hugo for Most Promising etc (1956).Anyway, buy it, enjoy it, read it again later. I did.

To me, TLA is not just the average sci-fi story, it is set in the future (at least the future, as Silverberg saw it in the sixties), but that is merely a help to let the story unfold, as the transplanting of people's mind was not quite possible (yet?) The story primarily focuses on the Kaufmann family, and their greatest enemy Roditis, whom all want the mind of a deceased multinational, it is really about greed and power, about human nature, and it is very interesting at that.