Silverberg creates a fascinating depiction of a far future Earth that has seen the rise and fall of several "cycles" of human civilization. The fatal blows dealt to civilization are inevitably the result of human hubris, the last of which resulted in catastrophic environmental devastation. Now it is essentially a desolate backwater, serving as a destination for alien tourists. In the current cycle, humanity has been segmented into guilds, based on occupation, special abilities, genetic engineeri...

I read this as half of a double with Jack Vance's The Last Castle–and yes, I am old enough to have read some doubles back when they were a thing. So I think I only got the original novella, and I'm fine with that. In 81 pages Silverberg shows us a future world in surprising detail, introduces multiple characters with individual arcs, throws us a crisis and what it reveals about our characters. It's a sinking world, but the slightly enigmatic last part of the ending is a brilliant uplift coda. Ye...

Silverberg is a good writer, in that he writes intelligently and mellifluously. He is generally a joy to read. But here, I found the world-setting more interesting than the actual story he tells. I have to agree with Frederick Pohl, who loved the first novella but had reservations about the following two. (MINOR SPOILER ALERT). By the second novella, it becomes clear this book is something of a picaresque. Each novella takes place in a different city (Rome, Paris, Jerusalem) and the main charact...

This review is for the novel version of Nightwings, which is comprised of three tightly linked novellas.Robert Silverberg is possibly the most underrated sf writers of all time considering how long he has been at it and the numerous awards he has won and been nominated for. For some reason, he just does not seem to be "in vogue" these days. It is a pity that most of the younger generation of sf readers today have never read anything by him. What Silverberg does better than almost any sf authors

Fix-up novel uniting threw short stories, but most importantly "Nightwings", an amazingly touching love story from 1969 about, seemingly, the conquest of Earth. The second story gives a much better background to the causes of the overstory, and the third part wraps it up, more uplifting-ly but less... well, just less.

Wonderful! This Robert Silverberg novel from 1969 is ageless. Good science fiction with a touch of fantasy, to satisfy all fans of the fantastic genre. I recommend the book if you have not read it yet.Special mention to the narrator of this audiobook, Stefan Rudnicki. When I started the book I didn't like it but after I was able to see the great variety of registers that his voice can adopt, I was convinced.

The ultimate tale of redemption, renewal...and coexistence. Such a wonderful story in less than two hundred pages. For a proper review, look for those written by Sandy, Apatt, and Stuart.

Nightwings is a far future science fiction novel. Well, a fix-up novel, consisting of three linked short stories.I first read the short story "Nightwings" when I was around 13 years old. I didn't understand all of it, but the ending demolished me. That same week I read Poul Anderson's "Goat Song", which had a similar effect: mental stretching and emotional shattering.I reread it now, almost 40 years later, thanks to a nice Kindle sale.Nightwings takes place thousands of years from now. Humanity

This is another excellent novel from Silverberg’s most prolific period that depicts a far-future Earth that has seen greater ages, and now has become a backwater destination for alien tourists. Humanity is segregated into rigid guilds, including the narrator who is a Watcher assigned to scans the heavens for signs of alien Invaders. When they do arrive, it is not with the expected intentions, and when the story’s narrator discovers why they have come (a secret lost in Earth’s far past), he is to...

Ah - I read this book at 13 and created a stained glass window from the inspiration!

Have you ever noticed the weird psychological effect where, if you're reading a new edition of a work, it just doesn't "feel" old (but if you're reading an old paperback with yellowed pages and a half-naked chick on the cover, it will undoubtedly feel dated?) Well, this copy of 'Nightwings,' which was written in 1968, does, admittedly, have the unclad female (tho' such a pretty, tasteful one!), but it's all new and shiny, and I didn't feel the story seemed dated at all. Interesting.Anyway.Silver...

Originally appearing as three separate but linked novellas in the pages of "Galaxy" magazine, Robert Silverberg's "Nightwings" was, remarkably, the author's 35th science fiction novel in 15 years; just one of six that he came out with in 1969 alone (the others being "Across a Billion Years," the remarkable "Downward to the Earth," "Three Survived," "To Live Again" and "Up the Line"). Released during one of Silverberg's most prolific and highly creative phases, during which he pushed back the par...

Nightwings, Robert Silverberg’s 1969 work is a very Ursula K. LeGuin type novel.It is actually, three novellas put together to make a novel sized work, anchored by the Hugo award-winning novella Nightwings.This is set in the far future, thousands of years, and the earth has survived, generations ago, a cataclysmic apocalypse which destroyed the “second cycle”. The first cycle would be where we are now, the second beginning when we first met aliens. Society is regimented into occupational guilds,...

An alternative or future earth story, Roman Empire ascendant, but fallen anyway, with fantasy aspects. Pretty okay if your aim is to read all of Silverberg's works, but if you are new to him and want to try something by him in this style, stick with the Lord Valentine's Castle series. He outdid himself there.

Nightwings isn't really a science fiction book, for all that it takes place in the far future. I actually think a lot of it would work better as straight fantasy, but that would get rid of all the obvious time-changed place names like Jorslem and Roum and Eyrop and prevent as many allusions to real history. One of the other reviews casts it as a retelling of the fall of Rome and the spread of Christianity, which does make a lot of sense. A lot of the interest I had in the book came out of the se...

It usually takes a while to get into the world of a fantasy novel -- unless you are in the hands of a master like Dunsany or Tolkien -- so I wasn't sure how I felt about Nightwings until I finished the book. By that time, I had a much better feeling for Robert Silverberg's Earth of the future than I did at the beginning. I suspect that part of my problem is that the novel I read was actually three novellas pasted together: The original Nightwings followed by Perris Way (the weakest of the three)...

At first I found that I wasn't particularly engaged by the story but I was expecting science fiction when in fact this is more science fantasy in the Dying Earth tradition. Indeed, it works much more as a fantasy novel than SF and once I had made the mental adjustment to the right mode, I began to enjoy it much more.The human race has gone well past its peak and is now in the third age in which much of the technological marvels that it attained in the previous age have been forgotten and what is...

Nightwings by Robert SilverbergPlease give my Amazon review a helpful vote - https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-re... The last time I read this, I was in my middle teens around 50 years ago. Silverberg was one of the "go-to" writers for young science fiction readers. He was an author whose works you had to read, like those of Heinlein, Clark, Asimov, Farmer, etc. In the 1980s, Silverberg essentially dropped off the map for me. I wasn't interested in his Maljipoor stories. I probably haven't read...

Another impulse $2 street-vendor paperback from the 60s. I would probably not be all that likely to read this if someone actually tried to pitch it to me (in the post-utopian post-post-apocolyptic future, the remainder of human civilization has reformed into a quasi-medieval guild system intermixed with interstellar visitors/invaders, mutants, etc, and our protagonist must move, with earth, through a series of stages towards a sort of redemption). But found at random with a vaguely surreal cover...

A short and elegaic SF novel in the 'dying earth' tradition that follows the wanderings of a member of the Watcher's Guild as he looks to the stars in anticipation of a foretold alien invasion of Earth. His companions include a beautiful young 'Flyer' (the "Nightwings" of the title) and an enigmatic Changeling.As the story unfolds we see great changes come over both the main character and the earth itself. I enjoyed this story for the tone it conveyed as well as the world & characters that were