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Robert Silverberg's Belzagor #[nn]
☆ Be the first to review + Add to your collection — Join freeRobert Silverberg's Belzagor (Humanoids, May 2024) marks the first time Silverberg's celebrated 1970 novel Downward to the Earth — itself a deliberate science-fiction homage to Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, nominated for both the Nebula and Locus Awards — has been brought to the comics medium in English, placing one of New Wave SF's most morally serious anti-colonial texts alongside the visual storytelling tradition of the Franco-Belgian bande dessinée school. The volume is doubly significant because it packages the previously French-only graphic sequel 'Children of Belzagor' in its first-ever English-language publication, extending the narrative of ex-colonial administrator Edmund Gundersen and the alien Nildoror and Sulidoror species beyond the source novel for the first time in any language accessible to Anglophone readers. As an adaptation personally sanctioned by Silverberg, the book represents a rare author-approved expansion of a Grand Master SFWA's intellectual property into comics form, bridging a fifty-four-year-old literary property to a contemporary graphic-novel readership.
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The adaptation originated in France, where Humanoids (Humanoïdes Associés) facilitated the collaboration between prolific Parisian comics writer Philippe Thirault and Italian artist Laura Zuccheri, with Silverberg personally entrusting the project to them; the French-language 'Retour à Belzagor' preceded the 2024 English hardcover. The sequel arc, 'Children of Belzagor,' was scripted by American author Sam Timel and illustrated by Adrien Villesange, with Silverberg granting his approval to the new story before Humanoids packaged both arcs together for the May 7, 2024 English-language hardcover release through their Simon & Schuster distribution partnership.
Trivia · 8 facts
- Published May 7, 2024 by Humanoids, Inc. as a single hardcover trade (208 pages, full color, 7.8 × 10.5 in.; ISBN 9781643376929); also released as a digital omnibus (ISBN 9781643376448).
- Adapts Robert Silverberg's 1970 New Wave SF novel Downward to the Earth — a Locus Award–nominated, Nebula-nominated work that Silverberg constructed as a conscious homage to Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, transplanting its post-colonial themes to the alien planet Belzagor.
- Part One, 'Return to Belzagor,' is written by Philippe Thirault (French novelist and comics writer, born Paris 1967) and illustrated by Eisner-nominated artist Laura Zuccheri (Italian; Grand Guinigi Award winner for Best Art at Lucca Comics Festival for her work on Swords of Glass).
- Part Two, 'Children of Belzagor,' is a Silverberg-approved original sequel written by Sam Timel and illustrated by Adrien Villesange — published here for the first time anywhere in English.
- The book contains an afterword written by Robert Silverberg himself.
- The story centers on ex-lieutenant Eddie Gundersen, who returns to the post-colonial alien world of Belzagor and interacts with its two native intelligent species: the elephant-like Nildoror and the Sulidoror — the comic's first visual depictions of those species in English-language sequential art.
- Silverberg is a multiple Hugo and Nebula Award winner who was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 1999 and designated a SFWA Grand Master in 2004; his works have been translated into forty languages.
- The source novel Downward to the Earth was originally serialized in Galaxy Science Fiction beginning November 1969 before its 1970 book publication; it has been selected for David Pringle's Science Fiction: The 100 Best Novels.
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