A diplomat who successfully negotiated with intelligent aliens finds his loyalty to the human race tested in this novel by a Nebula Award–winning author.
Richard Muller was an honorable diplomat who braved unimaginable dangers to make contact with the first-known race of intelligent aliens. But those aliens left a mark on him: a psychic wound that emanates a telepathic miasma his fellow humans can neither cure nor endure. Muller is exiled to the remote planet of Lemnos, where he is left, deeply embittered, at the heart of a deadly maze . . . until a new alien race appears, seemingly intent on exterminating humanity. Only Muller can communicate with them, due to the very condition that has made him an outcast. But will Muller stick his neck out for the people who so callously rejected him?
Robert Silverberg (b. 1935) sold his first science fiction stories to the lower-grade pulps in the mid-fifties, moved swiftly to the three prestigious magazines (ASTOUNDING, GALAXY and THE MAGAZINE OF FANTASY & SCIENCE FICTION) and as his style deepened and themes expanded in through the next reached the first rank of science fiction writers. He is regarded as the greatest living writer of science fiction, an SFWA Grandmaster, ex-President (in the 1960’ s) of that organization, winner of five Nebulas, four Hugos and many other domestic and foreign awards. Among his famous novels are DYING INSIDE,THE BOOK OF SKULLS, DOWNWARD TO THE EARTH, A TIME OF CHANGES; his novella BORN WITH THE DEAD (1974) is perhaps the finest work of that length published within the genre. Shifting to a predominating fantasy in the late 1970’ s (LORD VALENTINE’ S CASTLE and the attendant Majipoor Series), Silverberg continued to write science fiction and won a Nebula in 1986 for the novella SAILING TO BYZANTIUM, and Hugos for the novelettes GILGAMESH IN THE OUTBACK and ENTER A SOLDIER: LATER, ENTER ANOTHER. He was editor of the long-running original anthology series New Dimensions and of important reprint anthologies such as THE SCIENCE FICTION HALL OF FAME, ALPHA and THE ARBOR HOUSE TREASURY OF MODERN SCIENCE FICTION.