Search - Lord Valentine's Castle (Majipoor Chronicles, Bk 1)

I first read this book in college, and found a world unlike any other. The sheer size of Silverberg's Majipoor is amazing, and he somehow has managed to blend fantasy with science fiction in a way I have never seen before. The feeling I got when reading this book was similar to the feeling I had when I first saw The Matrix... a sense that there was much more to the story than was being told, and hints of greater things. I especially loved the fact that a simple thing like juggling could be a part of a much greater story set in a world that had been imagined so richly. Silverberg has built a mythology and a class structure into the world of Majipoor that is extremely detailed, and his characters are much more real than most characters of literature. Even though I haven't picked up my dog-eared copy of the book in probably ten years or more, I still remember the names Valentine, Carabella, Zalzan Kavol, the lands of Ni-Moya and Pidruid, and much more. To me, that says a lot about the power of this novel.