Majipoor (15)

‘There's a room in there where millions of people of Majipoor have left memory-readings. You pick up a capsule, put it in a special slot and suddenly... you find yourself living in Lord Confalume's time, or Lord Siminave's, or out there fighting the Metamorph Wars…’

The archives of the House of Records of the planet Majipoor have been rediscovered by the boy Hissune in the time after the restoration of the Coronal Lord Valentine.

In tales of life, love, conflict and discovery, the complex and colourful world of Majipoor is explored from different perspectives, ranging across its long history and immense terrain.

On Majipoor — an immense world teeming with alien races and fantastic magical machinery, a certain Valentine wakes up one morning with only a vague and troubled idea of who he is. His dreams suggest he is the ruler of Majipoor — but no one believes him… so far.

For young Prince Harpirias, the journey into the frozen tundra of the remote borderlands of Majipoor might well have been a death sentence. But it was also the only way out of a petty bureaucrat’s job in a provincial city, where he’d been exiled as punishment for a youthful indiscretion. Doomed to spend the rest of his days hopelessly separated from the Coronal’s glittering court, he grasps at his only hope — a mission that could represent suicide or salvation.

Somewhere beyond the nine guardian mountains of the Khyntor Marches, a party of paleontologists were captured while searching for the fossils of a fabled species of land-dwelling dragons. Their captors are a lost race of humans who, cut off from the majesty and civilization of Majipoor, have reverted to a primitive hunter-gatherer existence. Only one of the party has returned, a Shapeshifter named Korinaam, to bring back the terms for the release of the scientists.

Harpirias sets out on a mission of negotiation and rescue with a small band of soldiers and the wily Shapeshifter, who acts as both guide and interpreter. Facing blinding blizzards and slashing ice storms, physical privation and the attack of strange beasts, they finally reach their destination, only to find themselves face-to-face with a shockingly barbaric culture ruled by a dangerous chieftain. One mistake, one minor violation of custom and taboo, and the prince and his companions will face instant death or endless captivity.

Lord Prestimion n’a pas gagné sans mal sa couronne de Coronal. Mais vingt ans plus tard, le Pontife meurt. Prestimion doit lui succéder et descendre dans le Labyrinthe tandis qu’un nouveau Coronal, Dekerret, le remplacera. De nouveaux nuages s’amoncellent sur l’avenir de Majipoor. Car Mandralisca, l’âme damnée de Dantyria Sambail, un puissant rebelle contre lequel Prestimion a dû lutter, s’est emparé d’un casque étrange qui permet à distance de contrôler les pensées. A son tour, le tout nouveau Coronal Dekkeret devra vaincre ses ennemis.

From one of the masters of SF comes this new collection of stories, all set on his most famous creation—the world of Majipoor.A massive world of adventure, romance and danger. A place where dreams can soothe the restless or flay the minds of the guilty. Where humans, aliens and natives live in a shifting, uneasy alliance and where two great men rule over all. No matter who bears the title, there is always a Coronal and a Pontifex, forever miles apart, forever striving to maintain the balance of their far-flung civilization. Here, collected for the first time, are the final tales of Majipoor. From the earliest legends of the Shapeshifters to an untold mystery late in the reign of Valentine Pontifex, the seven stories in this collection expand upon and flesh out the remarkable world that Robert Silverberg has created. Spanning a decade of writing from one of the masters of science-fiction, this collection is both a fantastic introduction for those new to Majipoor and a welcome return for those who have visited before.

Coronal of Majipoor, Prestimion’s first mistake is to use a sorcerer's device to obliterate the Civil War universally from memory. Majipoor must be seen as the perfect world. The resulting mass psychosis that sweeps around the planet will almost be his undoing.

A thousand years before Lord Valentine, the destiny of kinds is hostage to sorcery and deceit.

On the planet Majipoor, it is a time of great change. The aged Ponitfex Prankipin, who brought sorcery (and prosperity) to the Fifty Cities of Castle Mount, is dying. The Coronal Lord Confalume, who will become Pontifex, begins the Funeral Games before his own replacement is chosen. It is no secret that the next Coronal will be Prince Prestimion. By law and custom, the blood son of the present Coronal—Korsibar, an avid hunter—cannot rule. But Korsibar has a secret quarry—the Starburst Crown. Visited by an oracle, Korsibar has heard a prophecy that will plunge the planet into a fearsome conflagration and alter destiny itself: “You will shake the world!”

The years since first be gained the Starburst Crown have been difficult ones for Coronal Lord Prestimion and the vast, unfathoniable realm he rules. But finally peace has been restored to Majipoor. And now it is time for Prestimion to name the able Prince Dekkeret his succeeding Coronal and to descend to the Labyrinth as Pontifex. But a power from a dark past that both men believed was dead is stirring once again—an evil more potent and devastating than either leader dares to remember.

Once, decades past, a then knight-initiate Dekkeret had his dreams stolen from him. His quest for recovery led him to a remarkable helmetthat could invade the psyches of sleeping foes, a device the newly anointed Coronal Prestimion later utilized to defeat his enemy Dantirya Sambail, tyrant of the continent Zimroel. In the fires of civil war, the terrible weapon was destroyed forever—or so it was believed.

The noxious weed of rebellion was torn out at its roots but its seeds have borne frightening fruit. Dantirya Sambail is dead, and the hungry jackals who ran at his heels now scheme to recover his lost lands and power. At their head is the tyrant’s former henchman Mandralisca—a villain of great wiles and icy heart, who somehow has unleashed a devastating plague of the mind upon Prestimion’s subjects, Dark visions are invading the sleep of those loyal to the Lords and the Lady of Majipoor—soul-shattering scenes of madness and monstrosity, driving those inflicted to commit horrible, destructive acts. And the dark wave is flowing ever-closer to the throne, seeping beneath the doors of the 30,000 rooms of the towering edifice atop Castle Mount… and into sacrosanct depths of the imperial Labyrinth itself.

A new campaign for the soul of Majipoor has been declared—and its catastrophic opening salvos have been fired in silence and in mystery. Once again Prestimion and Dekkeret have been called onto the battlefield of nightmare. But this time it will be a war to the death against a foe greater than all who came before: the master of murderous shadows who aspires to be King of all.

After the War of the Rebellion Coronal Valentine visits archaeological digs of Velalisier—long-lost sacred city of Piurivars—when there occurs a murder that may cause great political upheaval.

The story presented here offers an episode dating back to a time before any of the Majipoor novels published so far — a period more than four thousand years before Valentine’s time, more than three thousand years before Prestimion. But its setting is ten thousand years after the time of the first human settlement, and the early history of Majipoor is already becoming legendary.