The Man in the Maze

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So what we get is a strange hybrid: on the one hand a kind of technological action feast, with the maze itself as a protagonist, and on the other hand a psychological study of those three characters, and how they interact. The alien mysteries that Silverberg set up work really well to keep the tension going, but in the end they turn out to be a sideshow only, and ultimately they are underdeveloped - as I said: they would get 100 pages per alien race extra if this book would have been written today.

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His template is the ultimate in seriousness though: Greek tragedy, Sophocles even - Muller was based on the Argonaut Philoctetes who got a festering wound with a terrible smell that made it impossible for other people to be around him, so he sought refuge on the island of Lemnos. It might be heresy, and I haven't read the Sophocles play, but in general lots of old Greek myths were not much more than cartoons either, augmented by centuries of scholarly interpretation - and Neil Gaiman of course.

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