Notes
The Face of the Waters, a standalone novel by Robert Silverberg.

The image opposite and the blurb below are from the 2000 Diamond Books paperback edition, ISBN 0261671955. Cover illustration by Jim Burns.

Publisher's Blurb – Lower Cover
'WHERE SILVERBERG GOES TODAY, SCIENCE FICTION WILL FOLLOW TOMORROW'
-ISAAC ASIMOV

Robert Silverberg is one of the greatest names in science fiction, winner of more awards than any other sf writer. The Face of the Waters is his most ambitious novel yet – a towering epic of imaginative adventure.

It is the year 2450. Humanity is scattered among the stars, which teem with intelligent life, while the home world has been destroyed by an inadvertent catastrophe two hundred years before. Thus all Earthmen are exiles, and Earth itself is only a memory.

Hydros is a world of great complexity. It has almost no landmass, only a great globe-encompassing ocean with occasional tiny islands. Its seas swarm with apparently intelligent life-forms of a hundred kinds, and one – a bipedal humanoid form – has created a kind of land for itself: floating islands, woven from sea-borne materials, buffered by elaborate barricades against the ceaseless tidal surges that circle the planet.

To Hydros have come an assortment of Earthmen. For them it's a world of no return: having no form of outbound space transportation. This brilliantly inventive novel tells their story, as they travel across the planet's endless ocean in search of the mysterious area from which no human has ever returned – the Face of the Waters.