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Gilgamesh #2
To the Land of the Living
In a disjointed, dreamlike, and violent afterworld, the hero Gilgamesh joins Helen of Troy and Picasso on a journey into a very familiar and infinitely more frightening realm than the one they had left behind
310 pages, Mass Market Paperback
First published January 1, 1984
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256 people want to read
About the author
Robert Silverberg
2,344 books1,604 followersThere are many authors in the database with this name.
Robert Silverberg is a highly celebrated American science fiction author and editor known for his prolific output and literary range. Over a career spanning decades, he has won multiple Hugo and Nebula Awards and was named a Grand Master by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America in 2004. Inducted into the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame in 1999, Silverberg is recognized for both his immense productivity and his contributions to the genre's evolution.
Born in Brooklyn, he began writing in his teens and won his first Hugo Award in 1956 as the best new writer. Throughout the 1950s, he produced vast amounts of fiction, often under pseudonyms, and was known for writing up to a million words a year. When the market declined, he diversified into other genres, including historical nonfiction and erotica.
Silverberg’s return to science fiction in the 1960s marked a shift toward deeper psychological and literary themes, contributing significantly to the New Wave movement. Acclaimed works from this period include Downward to the Earth, Dying Inside, Nightwings, and The World Inside. In the 1980s, he launched the Majipoor series with Lord Valentine’s Castle, creating one of the most imaginative planetary settings in science fiction.
Though he announced his retirement from writing in the mid-1970s, Silverberg returned with renewed vigor and continued to publish acclaimed fiction into the 1990s. He received further recognition with the Nebula-winning Sailing to Byzantium and the Hugo-winning Gilgamesh in the Outback.
Silverberg has also played a significant role as an editor and anthologist, shaping science fiction literature through both his own work and his influence on others. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with his wife, author Karen Haber.
Robert Silverberg is a highly celebrated American science fiction author and editor known for his prolific output and literary range. Over a career spanning decades, he has won multiple Hugo and Nebula Awards and was named a Grand Master by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America in 2004. Inducted into the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame in 1999, Silverberg is recognized for both his immense productivity and his contributions to the genre's evolution.
Born in Brooklyn, he began writing in his teens and won his first Hugo Award in 1956 as the best new writer. Throughout the 1950s, he produced vast amounts of fiction, often under pseudonyms, and was known for writing up to a million words a year. When the market declined, he diversified into other genres, including historical nonfiction and erotica.
Silverberg’s return to science fiction in the 1960s marked a shift toward deeper psychological and literary themes, contributing significantly to the New Wave movement. Acclaimed works from this period include Downward to the Earth, Dying Inside, Nightwings, and The World Inside. In the 1980s, he launched the Majipoor series with Lord Valentine’s Castle, creating one of the most imaginative planetary settings in science fiction.
Though he announced his retirement from writing in the mid-1970s, Silverberg returned with renewed vigor and continued to publish acclaimed fiction into the 1990s. He received further recognition with the Nebula-winning Sailing to Byzantium and the Hugo-winning Gilgamesh in the Outback.
Silverberg has also played a significant role as an editor and anthologist, shaping science fiction literature through both his own work and his influence on others. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with his wife, author Karen Haber.
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Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews
July 14, 2012
Sequel to Silverberg's "Gilgamesh the King". I don't own a copy of the first book, and hadn't read either for over a decade, so my memory of the first is pretty hazy at this point. However, the all seeing eye of Google confirms my impression that this one is different in tone to the first. It's set in a shared universe used by several writers, but I've never read any of the works by other authors, so from my perspective this is simply a sequel to a previous stand-alone.[return][return]The novel is set in the Afterworld, the dream-like place where everyone goes when they die. There is no escape from the Afterworld -- one can be killed there, but only to be revived again, sometimes within minutes and sometimes not for decades. For some, the Afterworld is Hell; for others, it is simply the place where they are now, different to life, better in some ways and worse in others.[return][return]The novel is set in the present day, so Gilgamesh the Sumerian has been in the Afterworld for a very long time indeed. The novel follows his wanderings in his quest to be re-united with his friend Enkidu, a journey that turns out to be as much about self-discovery as anything he had intended to do. But there are rumours that there exists a way back to the Land of the Living, and Gilgamesh is gradually drawn into the attempts to find that way. Along the way he meets a good many other historical figures, and one of the themes of the novel is the way in which history distorts real people and turns them into myths they barely recognise as themselves.[return][return]There's a lot of philosophy in this novel, but it's by no means dry. Indeed, it's often very funny. And it works well as a stand-alone, without knowledge of the first book. Definitely worth trying.
April 4, 2016
A little rocky for me at the beginning, but once it hits its stride a marvellous, picaresque adventure. A fix-up of two novellas written for the Hell anthology series by Janet Morris. Silverberg is great with words, wonderful poetic descriptions and very good at showing internal states. A Bangsian fantasy, many famous figures make an appearance herein, for the most part they are handled well. A lovely book, more unfocused than Gilgamesh, though the character of Gilgamesh is more well defined here.
March 23, 2021
Before the Christian conception of hell as the place of punishment and torment, numerous cultures held beliefs about a netherworld that contained the spirits of those who died on Earth. Probably the best known of these is Hades, the Greek’s land of shades, or spirits, which Odysseus visited on his way back from Troy. The Epic of Gilgamesh—originally composed nearly 2100 years before Christ, with addenda and translations occurring for another 1500 years thereafter, spreading throughout the mid-East and into Asia Minor—also describes a netherworld to which dead souls are ferried.
Silverberg uses this non-Christian conception of the afterworld as the setting for this novel, which deals with recent events in Gilgamesh’s five or six thousand years of posthumous existence. When the story commences, in media res, Gilgamesh is alone, hunting the wild, monstrous fauna of the Afterworld’s Outback. Converging on him are two emissaries from the court of Henry VIII, Robert E. Howard and H.P. Lovecraft, on a mission to establish an alliance with Prester John to repel the forces of Queen Elizabeth. Silverberg immediately thrusts us into a strange, distorted landscape where all the world’s historical figures coexist and vie in the same way they did in life for power and control over some part of the shifting contours of the Afterworld.
Gilgamesh initially is little concerned with the pretensions of the power-hungry “Later Dead” (ie, anyone arriving in the Afterworld later than his own era, but used with contempt to describe the largely English-speaking dead that begin to arrive with their presumptions of importance). Instead, Gilgamesh is for the time content with hunting and exerting himself in the absence, again, of his friend, Enkidu, lost to him on this occasion, not from death but to estrangement. However, the conflict of Prester John and Mao Tse-tung enables him to again meet and confront Enkidu in physical conflict, and they re-enact the fight that in Sumeria five thousand years before had made them fast friends.
Once they are reunited, the two friends depart the rivaling factions and head off into the Outback to lose themselves. Their idyll of hunting is soon interrupted, and they end up in the company of others, Enkidu is killed, and Gilgamesh finds himself the guest of Simon Magus on the island of Brasil. Gilgamesh agrees to participate in a quest with Simon to find the new Uruk, which Gilgamesh does not believe exists. But, after reaching Uruk, freeing the reborn Enkidu, then assuming the leadership of the great city, Gilgamesh begins to understand more about his faulty memory and the several deaths he has himself experienced while in the Afterworld.
He and Enkidu are content for a while, but the appearance of Helen (of Troy) excites Enkidu to consider a return to the Land of the Living. Reluctantly, Gilgamesh consents to leaving Uruk, his mother, Vy-Otin (Odin), Herod, and Picasso, and the three are granted passage to New York City (circa 1990, the date of this novel’s publication). This shortest section of the novel is charged with comedy at the expense of Gilgamesh’s dignity. The novel concludes with some sort of psychic break that returns Gilgamesh to the vast emptiness of the Outback, where he and Enkidu contentedly hunt with spear and bow and arrow the Afterworld’s grotesque version of lions.
The story moves at a brisk pace, and the introduction of diverse historical figures keeps things lively. Despite the events swirling around him, Gilgamesh is always preoccupied with his purpose and the meaning of existence (which may entail more than life). The memory lapses and other strange phenomena in the Afterworld thwart Gilgamesh’s understanding of things (that, for instance, he’d been the one to found, build, rule, and then abandon the Afterworld Uruk), but ultimately it becomes clear that Gilgamesh is fated to always query his purpose, to aspire to some sort of immortality, little realizing that it’s the brevity of life that gives it meaning. Silverberg’s story meanders and the setting enables a variety of dei ex machina, but there is nothing really at stake, and Silverberg realizes that he can only pull so many rabbits out of the hat before the magic fades, which in part explains the novel’s hurried conclusion.
One theme that I found amusing, having just finished Susanne Langer’s Philosophy in a New Key (which speaks of the necessity and the significance of myth), is the fact that the Later Dead were prone to look upon Gilgamesh and Vy-Otin as archetypes, and the latter describes a scene where he is in the company of Freud, Wagner, and Nietzsche, in which each of these great thinkers looked past the man in front of them to restate the significance of the myth that he’d become. Similarly, Gilgamesh has to deal with Robert E. Howard’s enthusiastic delusion that he (Gilgamesh) is the prototype for his fictional pre-historical warrior, Conan.
Silverberg uses this non-Christian conception of the afterworld as the setting for this novel, which deals with recent events in Gilgamesh’s five or six thousand years of posthumous existence. When the story commences, in media res, Gilgamesh is alone, hunting the wild, monstrous fauna of the Afterworld’s Outback. Converging on him are two emissaries from the court of Henry VIII, Robert E. Howard and H.P. Lovecraft, on a mission to establish an alliance with Prester John to repel the forces of Queen Elizabeth. Silverberg immediately thrusts us into a strange, distorted landscape where all the world’s historical figures coexist and vie in the same way they did in life for power and control over some part of the shifting contours of the Afterworld.
Gilgamesh initially is little concerned with the pretensions of the power-hungry “Later Dead” (ie, anyone arriving in the Afterworld later than his own era, but used with contempt to describe the largely English-speaking dead that begin to arrive with their presumptions of importance). Instead, Gilgamesh is for the time content with hunting and exerting himself in the absence, again, of his friend, Enkidu, lost to him on this occasion, not from death but to estrangement. However, the conflict of Prester John and Mao Tse-tung enables him to again meet and confront Enkidu in physical conflict, and they re-enact the fight that in Sumeria five thousand years before had made them fast friends.
Once they are reunited, the two friends depart the rivaling factions and head off into the Outback to lose themselves. Their idyll of hunting is soon interrupted, and they end up in the company of others, Enkidu is killed, and Gilgamesh finds himself the guest of Simon Magus on the island of Brasil. Gilgamesh agrees to participate in a quest with Simon to find the new Uruk, which Gilgamesh does not believe exists. But, after reaching Uruk, freeing the reborn Enkidu, then assuming the leadership of the great city, Gilgamesh begins to understand more about his faulty memory and the several deaths he has himself experienced while in the Afterworld.
He and Enkidu are content for a while, but the appearance of Helen (of Troy) excites Enkidu to consider a return to the Land of the Living. Reluctantly, Gilgamesh consents to leaving Uruk, his mother, Vy-Otin (Odin), Herod, and Picasso, and the three are granted passage to New York City (circa 1990, the date of this novel’s publication). This shortest section of the novel is charged with comedy at the expense of Gilgamesh’s dignity. The novel concludes with some sort of psychic break that returns Gilgamesh to the vast emptiness of the Outback, where he and Enkidu contentedly hunt with spear and bow and arrow the Afterworld’s grotesque version of lions.
The story moves at a brisk pace, and the introduction of diverse historical figures keeps things lively. Despite the events swirling around him, Gilgamesh is always preoccupied with his purpose and the meaning of existence (which may entail more than life). The memory lapses and other strange phenomena in the Afterworld thwart Gilgamesh’s understanding of things (that, for instance, he’d been the one to found, build, rule, and then abandon the Afterworld Uruk), but ultimately it becomes clear that Gilgamesh is fated to always query his purpose, to aspire to some sort of immortality, little realizing that it’s the brevity of life that gives it meaning. Silverberg’s story meanders and the setting enables a variety of dei ex machina, but there is nothing really at stake, and Silverberg realizes that he can only pull so many rabbits out of the hat before the magic fades, which in part explains the novel’s hurried conclusion.
One theme that I found amusing, having just finished Susanne Langer’s Philosophy in a New Key (which speaks of the necessity and the significance of myth), is the fact that the Later Dead were prone to look upon Gilgamesh and Vy-Otin as archetypes, and the latter describes a scene where he is in the company of Freud, Wagner, and Nietzsche, in which each of these great thinkers looked past the man in front of them to restate the significance of the myth that he’d become. Similarly, Gilgamesh has to deal with Robert E. Howard’s enthusiastic delusion that he (Gilgamesh) is the prototype for his fictional pre-historical warrior, Conan.
November 19, 2025
Read this at some point in the early 90s as a youngster thanks to my mother indiscriminately getting me any book labelled as SF/FAN from the mobile library that arrived on our road every fortnight (which was not overall a bad thing). Reading it then left me with a bit of a haunting recollection of the overall setting and an interest in Gilgamesh that was rekindled when I read the Epic itself at university. Reading it again now, as one would expect, given Gilgamesh and Enkidu are the original bromance, it's a bit of a sausage party, and other elements haven't aged particularly well either, but it does still have some charms.
February 7, 2022
Another mashup of three short stories into a single novel... and it worked once again! As far as I remember, Gilgamesh is the single large than life protagonist of Silverberg (surely, he is not Silverberg´s at all) but it works! All his heroes are full of life, though dead and the reader will not notice that the stories are quite static, the breathtaking moments are deeper than just an action. Just the last chapter seems to be just an ex machina moment, RS clearly had no idea how to stop his hero climbing out of the Afterworld...
May 20, 2020
A good yarn though I thought the end was a little rushed.
June 5, 2020
A strange tale, but well told.
June 7, 2023
A smogasboard if historical characters
February 16, 2024
I did enjoy the historical figures. Maybe I did not understand the ending. It was so anticlimactic.
April 28, 2025
Reminiscent of Philip Jose Farmer’s Riverworld books, but then again not, because it’s Silverberg. A very philosophical book.
July 23, 2023
Silverberg has always had an interest in ancient history, and has written non-fiction essays on the Mayans, Romans, and ancient Mesopotamia. This fictional yarn is all about power hungry alpha males of the past who now vie for dominance in the afterlife. Julius Caesar and Gilgamesh argue about what is the manliest lifestyle. There’s also King Henry VIII, Odysseus, King Minos, Helen of Troy, and all the others, and just to spice up the story there are a few eccentrics and artistic types like Picasso who is now a sorcerer.
But things get even weirder: the dead bring with them new technology and ideas which give the older dead, such as Julius Caser lots of ideas. So now we have a Nova Roma with electricity, steam locomotives, and machine guns! Since this is Silverberg, the story is skillfully told, but I just find the antics rather goofy, and the concept itself not particularly edifying. Once was enough, my copy to the donation box.
But things get even weirder: the dead bring with them new technology and ideas which give the older dead, such as Julius Caser lots of ideas. So now we have a Nova Roma with electricity, steam locomotives, and machine guns! Since this is Silverberg, the story is skillfully told, but I just find the antics rather goofy, and the concept itself not particularly edifying. Once was enough, my copy to the donation box.
April 19, 2008
been a while, but I think this was a Gilgamesh continuation. . .
July 20, 2012
The continuing story about Gilgamesh and his friend Enkidu (the sequel to Silverberg's "Gilgamesh the King").
July 25, 2013
Not a great book. But a nice fun read.
July 3, 2015
The first book in the series was a lot better, but this book was a worthy read.
Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews