The Gate of Worlds

The Gate of Time

Author	Robert Silverberg
Country	United States
Language	English
Genre	Science fiction novel
Publisher	Holt, Rinehart & Winston
Publication date	1967
Media type	Print (hardcover)
Pages	244 pp
Followed by	Beyond the Gate of Worlds (short stories)

The Gate of Worlds is an alternate history novel by Robert Silverberg. It was first published by Holt, Rinehart & Winston in the United States in 1967.

Plot summary

The Black Death killed three fourths of the European population, delaying progress and, ultimately, the Industrial Revolution. Most of Central Europe was conquered by the Turks, who occupied it until the twentieth century, leaving it in no shape for colonization of much of the non-European world as in our timeline. Constantinople was conquered in 1420, the Ottomans moved into Vienna in 1440, and took over Paris in 1460, before invading the British Isles in 1490. The greater virulence of the Black Death in Europe allowed non-European powers to emerge. These included the Aztecs and Incas in Central America and South America, given that Europeans only 'discovered' the Americas in 1585 through an inadvertent Portuguese expedition. In Eastern Asia, Russia and Japan are now the main powers. By contrast, Turkey has undergone a period of instability that cost it control over the United Kingdom, from which it was expelled in the early twentieth century due to the leadership of a new royal dynasty inaugurated by "James the Valiant." Evidently, William Shakespeare's ancestors survived the epidemic, although Shakespeare wrote his histories, tragedies and comedies set in the Ottoman Empire milieu of England's new Muslim masters. The narrator and protagonist is eighteen-year-old Dan Beauchamp, who travels from impoverished England in 1967 to seek his fortune in the Aztec Empire. Along his way, he is accompanied by Aztec philosopher Quequex.

Sequel

In 1991, Silverberg wrote a thematic sequel to The Gate of Worlds, entitled Beyond the Gate of Worlds, consisting of three short stories that are set in the same fictional universe, further exploring its non-western multipolar world and its international relationships.

Similar works

Given that it also occurs in a divergent timeline that originated in the context of a more virulent fourteenth century Black Death than our own, Kim Stanley Robinson may have read The Gate of Worlds before he penned his own The Years of Rice and Salt (2002). However, in Robinson's analogous post-pandemic timeline, Europe never recovered from its decimation at the time of the epidemic, and India's Mughal Empire retains its ascendancy, as do the empires of China, Persia and the Ottomans, North America's Iroquois confederation, the Aztec and Inca empires and other inhabitants of this multipolar world. Like Silverberg's alternate history, Muslim civilization declines during the alternate 19th to 20th centuries, leading to the triumphs of China and India during a decades-long 20th-century global war. Unlike Silverberg's world, there is comparable technological progress to our own timeline, due to that prolonged multipolar global war. By its early 21st century, Robinson's world has aircraft, information technology, and potential access to nuclear weapons.

See also

• Kim Stanley Robinson: The Years of Rice and Salt: 2002.