Bonus FFB on Wednesday: The Emperor and the Maula -- Robert Silverberg

I know what you're saying.  You're saying, "How can a brand-new book be forgotten?" Well, I'm not saying it's been forgotten by current readers. I'm saying that even the author, Robert Silverberg, had forgotten it.  The short version is that he wrote The Emperor and the Maula, a 30,000 word novella for a publisher as part of a multi-author project that never came to  fruition.  Silverberg eventually sold the story again by cutting it in half and selling it to a space-opera anthology.  Then he forgot about it until one day he happened to run across the original on his computer's hard drive.  He read it, liked it, and decided to sell it again, this time in is almost original version, with the difference being that he added an ending that was more conclusive than the original one.  It's all in Silverberg's introduction, which is not to be missed. 

I enjoyed the novella.  Although it was written about 1992, it reminded me very much of the kind of SF I liked to read much longer ago than that.  It's an old story in a new form, the story of Scheherazade and the thousand nights and a night as space opera.  Laylah Walis is the teller of the tales, and she's telling them to the emperor of the Ansaar. Her purpose is to stay alive from night to night, but also to tell him about her world of Earth, conquered by the Ansaar, and about the things that happened there after the conquest. And also to tell him about her travels through parts of the Ansaar empire.  The story's old-fashioned in the best sense, with a real sense of wonder (and bushels of adverbs), along with Silverberg's usual storytelling panache.  Since Silverberg isn't writing fiction anymore, it's a real gift to have something new from him.  Check it out.