Review of The Man In The Maze, by Robert Silverberg

some very beautiful prose, some very intriguing world building, and some very regrettable heterosexual porn. we get a glimpse of three alien races, the brevity of which heightens their charm and excites the readers own engines of immigration, especially in the case of the architects of the maze. our glimpse of humanity is more extended and appears to be culturally frozen in the author's own late 1960s, with the summer of love having been institutionalized into liaison and marriage contracts with clauses for extended solitude and expiring pending renewal after a few years. the plot recreates the events of Sophocles' Philoctetes, with only three real characters in addition to set piece soldiers, drones, and sexually available women, all three classes of which get about the same amount of development. unfortunately our central trio -- a crafty elder statesman, a tragic adventurer and former ambassador to an alien world, and the innocent, naïve son of the adventure's friend, are all fairly bland and one dimensionally cynical, self destructive, and morally scrupulous respectively. the story feels only half developed, yet probably saves itself a great deal of tedium by being brief and segmented. the main exception is the epynomous maze, which doesn't have nearly enough scenes. see for example probably the most interesting scene in the book, the screen which displays a nun’s striptease turned nightmarific for Ned and motionless marching geometric figures for Charles. if only we'd had more of that instead of the same copy and pasted r/menwritingwomen treacle about the softness of feminine flesh every six scenes. 2.71 Stars.