To Open the Sky
This sprawling, episodic novel by the Hugo and Nebula Award–winning author is a “tour de force sci-fi outing . . . a wonderful read” (Fantasy Literature).
2077. With Earth reeling from centuries of unregulated population growth and environmental decimation, a new religion has taken root. The Vorsters worship science and the material world over all else, searching for the promise of immortality through new technology and the promise of heaven among the physical stars.
But on Venus, a renegade sect has found its home. The Harmonists find the answers to life’s eternal questions in their own spirituality and in their own bodies, which have undergone genetic changes on Venus, giving them paranormal abilities.
With humanity’s future at stake, religion becomes a political business, and both groups will have to face their motivations and manipulations when a shocking discovery threatens the balance of power in the universe.
“The absorbing story of an overpopulated and economically depressed world clinging to the outcome of a religious schism for its salvation.” —sff180
Robert Silverberg
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.
