Nightwings

Nightwings is a story about the Watcher, a servitor to the stars. Every day he assembles a complicated device made of instruments and levers which is a trance inducing telescope used to open visions of deep space, a radar detection system to look for the arrival of hostile invaders. This is what people do in the future, a future where Earth is in its “Third Cycle,” a future that is both better and worse than now.

Organized religion is over. Spirituality is innately tied to a universal force called “The Will.” Genetic engineering is part of normal everyday reality. Society is made up of “guilds” whose members are divided into sects called Watchers, Rememberers, Dominators, Masters, Swimmers, Somnambulists, Defenders and Fliers, among others including a guildless group called Changelings. Earth's oceans and geology have been totally rearranged by climate change and the polar ice caps were melted. In this future the archived memories of actual human brains are preserved in electromagnetic tanks. Alien life forms have already arrived/made themselves known during Earth's Second Cycle and so, by the time of the events in Nightwings, this planet has become an intergalactic tourist trap. A truck stop on the way to scenic nebula clusters, a budget version of Disneyland visited by alien families from outer realms who spent their whole light year’s income on a vehicle capable of star tripping to the other side of space/time.

And the Watcher watches and waits for an invasion. He has been waiting a very long time. It’s been so long that he has become a somewhat creepy old man. In fact, he doesn’t remember why an alien race would want to invade Earth in the first place. Eventually though, during a late in life career change to the Rememberer guild, he learns that humans once kept the ancestors of certain interplanetary visitors in zoos and laboratories for both study and amusement. This species' ancestors (with a code designation of H362 since their real name is unpronounceable) have now technologically evolved to an extent which spells out a real threat to Earth people.

With Nightwings Robert Silverberg transposes facets of history and global politics onto one possible future that is not much diverged from the past. The planet's First and Second Cycles have influenced the events of the Third Cycle. Global geography, both spiritual and physical, is permanently altered, but both inter and outer species communication remains central to the intrigue. Indeed, Silverberg's characters bear resemblance to actors from the Shakespearean Renaissance era. Only instead of stalking the wooden planks of The Globe, these intergalactic players move across living cellular stages of pulsating matter and walk forest paths where menacing spaceships float overhead.

Nightwings is very much of the time it was written, circa Earth date 1968. The series of cities which the Watcher wanders through are marked more by psychedelic atmosphere than operatic space western environment that had dominated much of science fiction up to that point. The progress through each location comes to resemble a vision quest in more ways than one: vision and eyes being a central plot theme in the literal, figurative, and Oedipal sense. It’s a quest that climbs towards a cosmic peak: an interplanetary, interspecies communion between all living beings. There is something recognizable in the similarities between historical transformations of idealist hippie communes into cult-like nightmares and Silverberg’s framing of the dogma in his various guilds. Then there are the characters themselves: The Watcher, the fairy-like Flier Avluela (possessor of the wings which only fly by night), the mutated Changeling who is not what he seems, and other mismatched wanderers met along the way. Together they come to resemble an unsettling version of ragtag travellers stumbling out of the haze of one era into a much more complicated future. Sometimes the future really is what it used to be.