The Secret Sharer

In The Secret Sharer Grand Master Robert Silverberg takes us on a far-future voyage that pushes against the limits of human consciousness and identity. Captain Adam of the Sword of Orion, a ten-kilometer-long Megaspore ship needling through spacetime, opens his chronicle as “no one at all,” but will end his tale utterly transformed by his passage through the heavens.

On the fourth virtual day of the young commander’s first mission he discovers that one of the ship’s disembodied passengers, a “matrix,” has broken free from her storage circuit and killed one of the Orion’s cryo-sleepers. With a ship-wide hunt for the fugitive matrix underway, the Captain makes a decision that will not only endanger his life in the Service, but irrevocably change his perceptions of the universe itself.

Against an imagined backdrop of technology so advanced that it courts the theological, Silverberg skillfully transmutes Joseph Conrad’s story of the same name into a heady, genuinely science fictional foray into the heart of cosmic darkness. Following a frontispiece paying tribute to this literary predecessor, Tom Canty’s illustrations for this new edition beautifully capture Silverberg’s fusion of cold, mechanistic inevitability with celestial romanticism. The novella’s starwalk sequence alone is one of the most memorably questing and epiphanic scenes in the author’s entire body of work.

This haunting and evocative story, a Hugo and Nebula nominee, and winner of the 1988 Locus and SF Chronicle Awards, sees Silverberg at the peak of his inventiveness and lyrical wonder, tenderly portraying two troubled and yearning souls whose chosen pathways of escape from loneliness result in an unforgettable collision—and communion—of spirits.