Silverlock

[RPG Post]

Silverlock

The number of books I have read more than once is small. More than twice is down to a handful. The hobbit I have read five times. But the champion is Silverlock: eight or nine times since I bought it in 1985. I am about to read it again. I have a stack of books from friends and the library to read first, but I read fairly quickly. So I expect to be deep into Silverlock next week, lost in familiar characters and exciting adventures, incredible songs and people and places lifted from myths and legends of western civilization, including Robin Hood, Dante's Hell and Procrustes.

If you have never read Silverlock and at all enjoy literature, get it. I can tell you it's a picaresque adventure with characters from all of literature, a bard guide and a main character that finds heroes wherever he travels, but no description does the book justice. The version I have has praise heaped upon it in publisher's notes and forwards by Jim Baen, Poul Anderson, Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. The book is as much a puzzle, a literary who's who game, as it is a book, and it is a damn fine book.

Part of reading it is identifying where the characters and places come from. Silverlock, or A. Clarence Shandon, is shipwrecked off the shore of the Commonwealth of Letters. And seemingly everything is a reference to something or somewhere. Wikipedia has a very brief list of characters. Most of the online sites I found links to no longer exist, so maybe the book is fading from it's eighties Renaissance and life as a source of Filking material. Which means more research. As Silverlock notes "A man is not dead until he ceases to be curious"

I have bought the book five or six times because I keep pushing it on people and all have been appreciative. Then they keep my book. This is exactly why I don't lend out my Ellison collection.

While writing this entry I read Instructions by Neil Gaiman, illustrated by Charles Vess. A short book, a faerie tale, an instruction manual for life, the illustrations capture the mood perfectly, a sense of the familiar in the fantastic. I own a lot of, in name at least, children's books. Many of them for the illustrations, but many for the stories too. This book is one I will be happy to share with children and grandchildren (I ain't there yet, I'm just saying when it happens I'll let them look at the books from a distance as I read them.)

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