MOTHER'S DAY SPECIALS! SHOW ME MORE
SALES POINTS * #23 in the Millennium SF Masterworks series, a library of the finest science fiction ever written * 'Could be his finest book so far' -- Greg Bear * Silverberg has been nominated for, and won more awards for his fiction than any other writer in the genre
Silverberg, as Theodore Sturgeon just commented, has of late vaulted into a new order of magnitude - for magnitude, a questionable magnitude, you might substitute hieratic mystery in this story of four young men who go to a monastery in the Arizona desert in the knowledge that two will live and two will die according to the ninth canon of the Book of Skulls. The story is told in alternating insets by each of them (two are jocks ; two are queers although one admits to the latter only toward the close) and in between all the hip talk recorded on this ultimate purgative high ( A psychic enema might not be such a bad thing ) the interest naturally centers on which life for an immortal life will be exchanged. Metaphysical Russian roulette? (Kirkus Reviews)
