To Live Again

Rating:
Summary: Excellent entertainment...
Review: ...this is one of my favorite Silverberg novels. Five stars may seem rather high, but I have found pleasure in reading it many times, and what truer measure of value is there than repeated enjoyable readings?
It is considered to be a minor work in the Silverberg opus, however. If you are looking for pretense or snob-literature, this is not the book for you. If you are looking for the definitive statement of Silverberg-the-writer, then this is not that either (and there is no such book, Silverbob has had too varied and rich a career to be epitomized by any one work).
If, on the other hand, you want a strongly plotted story with some interesting characters and events, a world you can enjoy dipping into from time to time, then this book is great! The story has great drive and the motivations are well-justified and intense.
One note: Although I have never yet seen it mentioned (well, I haven't looked very hard), I suspect that this book is a "tribute novel" to Jack Vance's "To Live Forever" which contains many of the same devices and even very similar scenes in certain places (this is legitimate in SF, by the way; TLA is a very different work than TLF in essential ways). I wonder if anyone can confirm this for me? TLF was published, I believe, in the same year that Silverberg won the Hugo for Most Promising etc (1956).
Anyway, buy it, enjoy it, read it again later. I did.

Rating:
Summary: Very dubious science, but worth reading
Review: Hard to suspend my disbelief on this one. Still, it's worth
reading. In the future, somehow, people's personalities are
recorded and, upon death, transferred into someone's else's
brain. The receipient supposedly has the transferred under
control, with acess to all the knowledge and experience of the "dead" person. A problem with this is people have to get recorded every week or so, so their tape will be up-to-date. So actually there are many tapes available. The dead person can actually be transferred into many people's bodies, with each recording slightly younger than the others. A bit hard to believe. An added problem is that if the transferred is strong
enough, he can take over the receipient, a process known as
"going dybbuk." Really, really hard to take seriously all these ideas. Silverberg handles this novel fairly well, but it's not his best. Still, I found it worth reading.

Rating:
Summary: Back cover of To Live Again
Review: To Live Again

Robert Silverberg is one of the most prolific authors in the history of science fiction. He's written over one-hundred science fiction books, not to mention sixty non-fiction books and sixty anthologies. He continues to produce major work with his uniquely sardonic style.

In addition to being a one-man industry in the fifties and early sixties, he was a significant player during the New Wave. This novel comes from that period.

First published in 1969, To Live Again explores an idea that is truly far out. Imagine a future world where death is not exactly the end. You can record everything about you that ever made you a distinct human being and then be implanted in the mind of someone living.

Paul Kaufmann had been the richest and most powerful man on Earth. Imagine having his knowledge and insights integrated with your own persona. The tycoon's mind becomes the prize in a deadly game for those still living who want more out of life than they could ever achieve on their own.

The great man's "soul" is stored in the Scheffing Institute, waiting for the time when someone hungry enough gives him back his appetite. Silverberg extrapolates as only he can from this intriguing premise. To Live Again is about a future where the dead are slaves to the living -- until at last someone leads a rebellion.

Rating:
Summary: Not just Science-Fiction.
Review: To me, TLA is not just the average sci-fi story, it is set in the future (at least the future, as Silverberg saw it in the sixties), but that is merely a help to let the story unfold, as the transplanting of people's mind was not quite possible (yet?) The story primarily focuses on the Kaufmann family, and their greatest enemy Roditis, whom all want the mind of a deceased multinational, it is really about greed and power, about human nature, and it is very interesting at that.