This is a collection of 3 novelettes and 2 novellas including the title story. The 5 stories are:

The Feast of St. Dionysus
Schwartz Between the Galaxies
Trips
In the House of Double Minds
This is the Road

First published in 1975, my edition was published in 1979 and includes a lengthy introduction from Silverberg dated August 1978. What is notable is that Silverberg says that he thinks this is the last short fiction he would likely write. He hadn't written any in 5 years (The Schwartz story written in 1973 had been his last) and had no plans to do more - he enjoyed writing novels much more (and they paid much better also). This small collection of longer short fiction could have been the last he did, but he did return to the form in late 1980 at the request of Omni magazine. He must have re-sparked because I read a lot of his short fiction in magazines in the 1980's and although he was never as prolific as in his young days, the stories were of rather high quality and certainly kept my interest and looking for more of them. It would become in my view Silverberg's second era of great writing. Now, Silverberg has turned 80 this year and has pretty much given up writing fiction for the last decade. He writes a monthly magazine column and does a few other things, editing and introductions to compilations and reissues.

But back to this collection. I didn't think this was all that great. Tends towards psychological and angsty science fiction. The title story that opens is the longest and I never knew quite what to make of it. There are two parts to this story of the survivor of a NASA Mars expedition that ended badly and it was a like/not-like story for me. As the sole survivor from the trip he suffers from a tremendous amount of guilt, although he was completely without fault for what befell his crewmates. This part of the story is interesting. He tries to find some sort of peace and answers and falls into a very odd religious cult that worships wine, wrestling, Jesus and Dionysus. Vision quests on wine fueled bodies. Wine, wine and more wine. and more wine. and more wine. I couldn't tell what was really happening and what might have been inside the mind of the main character and throughout almost the entire story I thought it was going to end very badly. It didn't, although I don't understand how it
ended. The dread that I felt was inevitable really colored my reading of the story. I'd say I didn't like this one.

Part of my problem with these stories is that the early 70's were a very experimental time in science fiction - the new wave was still washing over the genre. Silverberg had been a very traditional author when he started in the 50's. He grew a lot when he was writing novels in the late 60's and beyond, blending some of the new with the old. In these stories he doesn't get real wacky as some of the stuff was, but he clearly was pushing himself to expand with some of his concepts.

"Schwartz Between the Galaxies" was interesting and one of the better stories. It proposes that a hundred years later the cultures and peoples of the planet have homogenized. An anthropologist has nothing to study, but he develops a theory that makes him famous and continuously travels the planet giving lectures. Still he yearns for difference and daydreams of a life in the stars with many alien cultures that becomes more real for him the reality. He begins to lose his grip on reality in a big way.

"Trips" was very trippy. Very stream of consciousness for most of it, with the result that it felt extremely dated. The idea in it was interesting, a man travelling between alternate realities finding the world and life he lived varying in degrees, mostly major and at least one barely different. It was soooo trippy I got bored and didn't like most of it, Despite saying that, there is nothing completely lousy in this collection and there is at least one pretty good story here. That story for me was "In the House of Double Minds" which posits a future where each year for a hundred years 12 talented 10 year olds are given a surgery to sever the connection between the lobes of the brain. For some of them extreme talents can emerge. The story is told from the viewpoint of a young woman who wanted to have the surgery but was ineligible and chose to serve the project as a teacher for the children. The creepiness of the story put me off, but Silverberg does a good job explaining and exploring what might happen. The experimental mode of storytelling was thankfully absent here.

"This Is the Road" also was better than the average here, and told in a conventional non-experimental manner. It is a novella of the far future where mutants are the norm and this is of course a "road story," an adventure, as a group of mutants travel ahead of a menace called "The Teeth." The mutants aren't "deformed" people as some stories portray them. There are entirely new breeds (classes in the story) of humans with all sorts of variations. I think it says somewhere in the story that mankind had changed the world, and the changed world then changed mankind. A bit of a sad story but full of intricate details such as the carriage they travel on and how they travel. Some people will like it a lot. This story of all of them has the most memorable characters and will be the one to stick in my memory.

Overall this was a slightly sub-par collection for my tastes. I think there is much better Silverberg out there. I think Silverberg made a good decision to step away from shorter stories at this point in time. ( )

Indeholder "The Feast of St. Dionysus", "Schwartz between the Galaxies", "Trips", "In the House of Double Minds", "This is the Road".

"The Feast of St. Dionysus" handler om ???
"Schwartz between the Galaxies" handler om ???
"Trips" handler om ???
"In the House of Double Minds" handler om ???
"This is the Road" handler om ??? ( )

NIL