n a future when humanity has already spread throughout the solar system and to several of the nearby stars, the grotesquely obese media baron Duncan Chalk makes his living producing entertainment spectacles for an increasingly jaded audience. Chalk is also, unknown to anybody but his trusted lieutenants, an emotional vampire, feeding on human pain. He deliberately orchestrates tragedies, not just because it provides his audiences with fresh thrills, but because he needs to feed on the heartbreak of his victims.
Chalk is bored and unsatisfied when he is introduced to an autistic savant named David Melangio, who can perform miracles of memory and calendar calculation but who seems utterly disconnected from the abundant pain of his own life. Chalk needs a more nutritious meal.
Minner Burris is a professional starman who was captured and transformed into a grotesquerie by alien surgeons whose motivations remain a mystery. Though humanoid in outline, his face and his body no longer resemble those of a man. Embittered, he lives on a pension in a tiny apartment, refusing to see anybody, refusing to be seen. Then he is visited by a representative sent by Duncan Chalk, who promises a cure if Burris will only emerge to interact with the world once again. Burris agrees to make his life an open book for Chalk’s media conglomerate in exchange for the cure, which will supposedly be available within three years.
Lona Kelvin is a 17-year-old girl who participated in an experiment where scientists grew babies from 100 of her harvested eggs. She has not been permitted to raise or see her children, and pines for them so desperately she has twice attempted suicide. A Chalk representative visits her also, promising aid in reclaiming at least some of her children if she will just agree to befriend Minner Burris in exchange.
Chalk is orchestrating the beginnings of a love affair fueled by mutual empathy. He intends to broadcast its progress to the world. But he also intends to feast on the pain that results when the affair reaches its inevitable messy conclusion.
A why-they-can’t-love story
Read only as science fiction, Thorns is not nearly as startling a work as it may have seemed in 1967. After all, Lorna’s angst as a disenfranchised egg donor is nowadays more Oprah than Heinlein, and the idea of orchestrating the lives of real people to produce popular entertainment is old hat to anybody who’s seen Big Brother or Survivor. Fortunately, Silverberg had a lot more on his mind than mere prognostication. Thorns is a novel of character, which uses science-fictional tropes to explore the interface between human relationships and human pain.
Minner Burris, rendered monstrous by alien surgeons, may have been somewhat cut off from humanity even before his transformation; he is cold, judgmental, quick to anger and demonstrative in his arrogance. Lona is in many ways his exact opposite. She is quick to fall in love with him, whereas Minner just seems to go through the motions.
Chalk knows that the natural limitations of a relationship based only on their separate traumas will never be able to keep all their respective pain from boiling over to burn them both. That moment is what Chalk wants. The novel’s heart lies in the aftermath of that explosion, the couple’s subsequent confrontation with Chalk, and a resolution that explores whether this pair of profoundly damaged people can ever progress beyond what has happened to them. It argues, finally, that the very ability to feel pain is what makes them alive, and therefore places them in fortunate contrast to people like the idiot-savant David Melangio, who, though awash with pain of his own, drifts through life without ever being touched or affected by it.
Silverberg, who is renowned as a prosesmith, and has produced some of the most exquisitely sensual descriptions in science fiction, places their not-quite-a-love-story in the context of a journey throughout the solar system. His detail work is superb, albeit by necessity more spare than that used in his many longer novels. There may be a few scattered infelicities--there is a sex scene I have seen widely derided for its use of a particularly unfortunate phrase, and another sentence stopped cold by the tin-eared use of the word "knowledgeableness"--but they are far outnumbered by phrases that show the master’s touch. This relationship novel disguised as science fiction emerges as a highlight of one of the field’s greatest careers.
