I bought "Sailing to Byzantium" -- a collection of novellas from Robert Silverberg -- for a whole two bucks from Kindle because I'm a recovering literary snob trying to expand my horizons a bit. The stories here were originally published in some of the better known science-fiction magazines, which is to say "pulps" -- and they're good, but perhaps not quite for me. Silverberg, to his credit, isn't afraid of tackling the big themes -- religion, death, and love -- and the stories are told well, but I get the sense that he sacrificed some complexity for readability. That impression might also have something to do with the fact that Silveberg was probably working with a word limit. It makes the stories an easier read, but perhaps not what I was looking for. They tend to improve as they go along. "Born with the Dead" is a sort of modern zombie tale written a couple of decades before that sort of thing becomes ubiquitous, and serves as a lovely allegory for the awful, unbridgeable space between the living and the dead. "We Are for the Dark" -- whose title was borrowed from Shakespeare -- was perhaps my favorite story here. In it, a taciturn church administrator gets his faith tested and renewed by traveling to the further ends of the galaxy that his organization is attempting to colonize. The story's a lovely illustration, applicable to many human ideals, of how practices and beliefs tend to mutate as you move outward from the metropolis to the frontier, but it also takes some truly unexpected turns and seems to be trying to illustrate humanity's place in a dazzlingly grand vision of the cosmos.

In short, I'm not sure that Silverberg is the sci-fi that I'm looking for, but that isn't to say that this is bad stuff. Silverberg's introductions to each of these novellas make it plain that he cares deeply about the genre and wants others to take it seriously. But readers who are already fans of the genre will probably get more out of these stories than I did. ( )