The Second Trip
A 1972 New Wave novel about personality erasure and reawakening.
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The Second Trip is a 1972 science fiction novel by American writer Robert Silverberg. It was published in serialized form in Amazing Stories from July to September 1971 before its publication by Doubleday. The novel is notable for its controversial content and its place within the New Wave subgenre of science fiction.
Background
The novel is set in the year 2011, about forty years from the time it was written. In this future, capital punishment has been deemed too harsh, and violent criminals are subjected to coercive therapy that erases their personalities, replacing them with artificially constructed memories to form a character deemed useful to society. The protagonist is Paul Macy, a rehabilitated criminal who finds his original personality, a serial rapist named Nat Hamlin, reasserting itself in defiance of the conditioning. The novel includes several graphic scenes of copulation and sexual assault, and long stretches of the narrative consist of interior dialogues between Macy and Hamlin loaded with blunt and obscene language.
More in Novels by Robert Silverberg
Sources
Compiled from Wikipedia and the sources listed below. Text from Wikipedia is available under CC BY-SA 4.0; this entry is adapted from it.
- Wikipedia: The Second Trip (CC BY-SA 4.0).
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