Tower of Glass by Robert Silverberg

I've made my position on how or whether authors and what you know of them belong in a review perfectly clear, on Goodreads, and copied here on this blog. It's a point people still try to argue on the Goodreads version, although I gave up responding a long time ago - I think through that and a bunch of responses, I've done my part to explain clearly, why I do think that it is perfectly acceptable, even necessary, to bring what you know of an author into a review, at least the kind of reviews that I write.

Because when I sit down, I'm trying to capture something of what the experience of reading was, and the me I brought to the book is not irrelevant. And if that me I brought to the book had knowledge of the author that changed what I made of it, it's disingenuous to pretend that I didn't. I am not a neutral medium who reads books. I'm a complex human, with prior knowledge. It might mean I'm inclined to like an author, or inclined to be a bit cynical when I read. By bringing up authors and their behaviour, I'm trying to be transparent about my experience reading the book, instead of hiding it.

Which is to say, I'm a little jaundiced about Robert Silverberg right now. He felt the need to take N.K. Jemisin to task for addressing the racism she and other Black authors have experienced when they try to be present in SF/F spaces. Apparently he thought that doing this while accepting a Hugo was graceless and playing identity politics, to identify racism and give it the middle finger. Well, that's pretty damn graceless right there, not to mention how much it downplays Jemisin's achievements in winning three extraordinarily well-deserved Hugos in a row, for all three volumes of a stunning trilogy.

So, I can't pretend I don't bring that baggage with me when I read Tower of Glass. I was grumpy, and expected to be grumpier. But I do find it worthwhile to read old science fiction, even when there are things about it that grate on me. I'm a historian at heart, and I want to understand where we came from, and what led to what. No one has any obligation to read old SF, but I find it fascinating, particularly when I've read enough to start noticing patterns, common themes, ways in which authors were building on or responding to each other.

So take into account that I'm not inclined to give Silverberg too much benefit of the doubt when I say that...actually, this one is still pretty good. Not great, absolutely, and there are definitely some weird undertones I'd like to talk about with my historian hat on, historical signifiers of racial and ethnic difference, but on the whole, this is quite interesting and not overtly bothersome.

I mean, yes, as with a lot of Silverberg, we have the oversexed woman and the more virginal one, and that got even ickier with the introduction of a man lusting after his pure white daughter-in-law. It's such a minor part of the book, but it definitely was a moment of "what the hell?" Were I writing my "old SF" series at the moment, where I really pull apart how things are written, I'd go to town, but this is only partially that, and I don't have the time to do that deep a dive at the moment.

Let's get to what it does well, though, before I go back to what is maybe not so great. The world the characters live in is a future, but not far future. Creating vat-grown humans is a big business, and these androids (they have no mechanical features I remember) do not have full human rights. They are indentured employees or slaves, and as the natural-born population has fallen, the android population has risen.

The main character, Krug, is a rather loutish businessman who created the process by which androids are made, so he is very rich, and very powerful. He's using that money and influence to have many of his androids build the eponymous Tower of Glass, a very thinly-veiled Tower of Babylon parallel. It's built on permafrost, and his eventual plan is to use it to quickly send a message in response to an alien signal that has come in, instead of taking a slower route by which he would not be alive to see the results.

While he's not careless of android life (androids are expensive), he also doesn't consider them fully human. Which is, funnily enough, a problem, not least because the androids have developed their own religion in secret, and one of their core values is that their creator, Krug, will someday emancipate them. Other androids are working on political avenues for emancipation, which is interesting, but I'm not sure the clear division (religion or politics) really works - many people have combined the two!

His right-hand android is a high priest of the android faith, and works to convert first Krug's son, who is having an affair with a beautiful alpha (the androids are divided into races of alpha, beta, and gamma - more about that in a minute.) The female alpha shows Manuel the android world and the religion, and he mostly but not entirely recoils from it. He flirts with taking up the cause of android freedom, but that's half thinking with his dick, and half wanting to find a good way to rebel against his father.

Of course, eventually the androids find out that Krug thinks of them as possessions, not children, and the religion is shaken and a revolution begins. Guess what happens to the monstrously tall tower? No, go on, guess!  (Okay, that sounds snarky, but it is really a pretty good book.)

So, let's go on to the section about how signifiers of race are layered in here. And the question becomes, is it done well? Uh...not really. Silverberg relies strongly on oblique references to race that conflate high intelligence with low sex drive (think of stereotypical historical depictions of Asian men) and low intelligence with high sex drive (that horrible stereotype of black men). And women who are either virginal and pure or all about the sex, all the time.

But it was an offhanded reference that got to me the most. When Silverberg shows Manuel exploring Android Town, we see him encountering not only the very intelligent alphas, but also some betas, and notably, a lot of drunken, carousing, sexing, drug-addicted gammas. Skin colour isn't matched the same way (I think alphas are red? I don't remember what the others are), but there are class as tied to race delineations going on in this created species.

And then there's the mention of how the smell of garlic permeates the android quarter, which today may sound relatively innocuous.  Garlic has a very long history of being a signifier of foreignness, particularly when dislike of the smell is directed at Italian immigrants, who occupied the space we mark as "white" only recently. If you remember that the Ford Motor Company used to send home visitors to the houses of their employees suggesting ways in which they could live more American lives, then think of the part where one of the major "suggestions" made to Italian women was to cook with less garlic.

Of course, I'm making a lot of only a few short passages. But they're indicative passages, and if you have studied how stereotypes are both developed and disguised, Silverberg uses a lot of these to split the androids into three races that hearken back to strong stereotypes of the 19th and 20th centuries. And of course, since they're vat grown humans, the androids are genetically programmed to be smart or stupid, sexual or asexual. They may end up ruling the world, but their stratifications are all too familiar, and Silverberg just recreates them instead of interrogating them.

And that, gentlefolk, is something that Jemisin does exceptionally well, never taking easy answers to explore how power is creating and sustained. I'm never going to prefer Silverberg to what she's doing. Still, for a time, and place, there's some interesting stuff here, going hand and hand with less innocuous authorial decisions.