Majipoor has issues, I’m sad to say.

Not the same art as the one I first read, but cool.

So, back in 1980, I bought this thick paperback by an author I hadn’t ever read or heard of. It was called Lord Valentine’s Castle by Robert Silverberg, and I read it, loved it, & over the years re-read it once or twice. I thought it was a great fantasy novel about a huge World with magic, particularly oneiromancy, & a bunch of cool races. A fun, cool read.

A year or two ago, I got reminded about it, and that there had been a couple sequels. I checked, there were. Like, a bunch. I had a bit of spare cash, {unlike now} so I splurged bought the whole thing in ebook format, and away I went down the wormhole.

Still great stuff, amazing detail in world-building, but some things had changed. I knew the vast world of Majipoor was not set in a fantasy universe anymore, I now understood that it was a world in a universe that had interstellar travel, that the various ‘magical’ or ‘mystical’ aspects of the setting were technological. This isn’t a deal breaker but it, combined with my vastly more advanced understanding of just how fucked up humans are, how so much of what I was taught as history was edited, whitewashed, propaganda… it wasn’t fucking ‘fun’ anymore.

Mr. Silverberg is still alive. I honestly don’t know jack shit about his personal philosophical views, political & social stances. That’s not what this post is about.

This is about realizing that a book I thought was about a fictional society that was kind of cool and fun is actually a huge indictment of colonialism, elitism & racism, wrapped up in some incredible universe building.

Majipoor is a dictatorship run by mostly human elitist technocrats in a Universe with interstellar travel. The population of the planet are basically held at a medieval peasant level of ignorance, manipulation via herbal pharmaceuticals & psionic/oneiric machines of incredible power is used to maintain a stable society.

There’s more than one native race that has sentience, they are utterly demonized, marginalized and subjugated by the colonial social elite that came to the planet, millennium before. The world is left to run itself this way because it’s either a backwater that’s hard to reach, or there is not ‘higher government’ capable or willing to intervene.

It’s transformed, in my understanding, from a ‘fun fantasy world’ to a dystopian nightmare with no way out. Kind of like… reality.