I have the Gollancz paperback edition which has the "Silverberg at his best" quote from Analog on the front. I can only assume they must be referring to Dying Inside, which is dated, but his best work. The Masks of Time is good for 60's sci fi, but not remotely among Silverberg's best.
One of the central themes of The Masks of Time is a physicist's (Jack Bryant) moral quandary in which he's worried that publishing his dissertation, which would unlock the secrets of how to convert matter to energy in a safe and controlled way (thus putting essentially limitless free energy in the hands of individuals) would "smash the world's money structure." Hunh? Energy is just one of the world's industries. For the average joe, free energy means that their utility bills go away, and that's only after enough of these new energy conversion devices are built that energy actually becomes free to give away. Jack's friend (Leo Garfield, the protagonist) correctly and sanely points out all the future benefits to limitless free energy, and yet Jack reads up on Oppenheimer and frets about "a fifty-year upheaval while the new order of things was taking shape." Really? You're comparing your problems to Oppenheimer's? Teller suggested the A-bomb might cause the atmosphere to catch fire and you're worried free energy might cause fifty years of "upheaval", after which the world should be hunky dory and better than it was before? Yeesh, and I thought Silverberg's other characters were neurotic.
At any rate, his quandary is tied up with the arrival of Vornan-19, a supposed visitor from 2999 (the book is set in 1999) that the government suspects is a fake, but wants to use to quell the fin de siecle rioting of the Apocalyptists. They put together a team of top scientists to pump him for information about the future; however, even the U.S. Federal Government couldn't be this incompetent at putting together a team to interview the man from the future. After two weeks of contact with Vornan-19, their only "intelligence" on the future is a blood sample taken when he submits to a medical examination in order to use the facilities at a government-run brothel?! If they are going to so thoroughly meet with failure, then the book should center around their relationships to one another, but instead of being *shown* their relationships, we're mostly *told* about them... and in classic 60's style, the two women on the committee are juvenile male stereotypes; one's a whore and the other is frigid, but soon to be turned into a whore by the man from the future. Argh. Would these authors please just grow up? Likewise, we're told about Vornan's magnetic personality, but little that we're shown about him is at all compelling. Stay away from characters you can't deliver on, or at least keep them as remote as possible.
By this time, I've lost all serious interest and am simply marking time. It's a fairly quick read.
completed reading 4/4/10
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