Or is “soft porn” more or less failed porn, porn which did not have it’s intended effect, or the reaction was less than desired?

I’m going out on a limb here, a saggy limb, and saying that “soft porn” is an oxymoron, a failed attempt at eroticism which leaves one wanting and is therefore not porn at all. And that if the man wrote it, the point was missing.

Not that you can’t write a ton of good stuff using a recurring theme. Stephen King has done well with that.

I have read a number of his short stories (none of which stand out)and two of his novels. At Winters End and it’s sequel, The New Springtime.

Humanity has abandoned Earth after an extinction level impact event. I don’t recall whether they transcended or just left in spaceships. Humanity was highly evolved at the time and had already spread through the galaxy. Humanity never reappears in the two novels but they are ever present as a source of the Simian’s religion and folklore.

When they left they established a bunker far underground for Simians that they believed were evolving as then next intelligent species.

Winter’s End refers to the time when the Earth starts to thaw from a 100,000 year ice age that had engulfed the planet after the impacts.

The story is about the Simians leaving the shelter and reclaiming the Earth. They are still culturally backward, similar to early homo sapiens but they are somewhat aided by simple tech from the shelter. They later uncover more human technology that gives them a big jump start.

The New Springtime sequel is about their spreading out shedding their superstitions and dealing with an intelligent insect species that has also survived.

I also recall the TWZ episode mentioned but I don’t recall connecting it with Silverberg at the time.

The novels you mentioned sound interesting and I would include them on my very long list of things I would like to do but might never get around to.

The test of a book is how it affects you. For the hours you spend in its pages, you are intimately intertwined with another human brain, you are seeing the universe through its eyes, learning what the author knows and how he thinks. Even if you don’t agree with him, or even if you dislike what you find there, you are immersed in it. The experience of reading a book will change you, if it is a good one, good ideas well crafted, it will change you profoundly.

Even years later, when you have forgotten all the small details of the plot and the characters and what happens to them, that change the book wrought in you still remains. A little piece of Silverberg is inside me, is part of me, now. I see the world a little differntly because I once gazed at it through his eyes.

Unfortunately, something isn’t quite the same. The reborns are different somehow. Their personality changes, their interests change, as do their likes and dislikes. Its sort of like meeting someone you knew a long time ago: they are recognizable, but they are not the same. They act the same, but to people who knew them well, they become strangers.

The reborns themselves feel uncomfortable around their former family and friends, and start to hang out with other people. Eventually, they lose interest in the “living” altogether, and simply start associating with other reborns.

Our story begins when a young married couple, very much in love are struck by tragedy. The wife is killed in a skiing accident, but quick action by the rescue team and the cold temperatures allow for a full reconstitution. But the marriage quickly starts to unravel. THe man is still desperately in love with his wife, but she becomes indifferent to him. She is polite and friendly, but the spark is gone, and he can sense it. The couple drifts apart, no matter what he tries to do to keep them together, and she eventually leaves him and joins a group of other reborns who only spend time with one another.

The husband is desperate. He is being torn apart, he stalks her, he follows her all over the world, but she treats him as a stranger. She wishes him no ill, is fond of him in a cold and distant way, but she no longer loves him. Eventually, the protagonist realizes the only way he will be able to approach his wife emotionally and intimately again is if he dies too…

This is more than science fiction, its not about a new technolgy and its effect on man and society, it is a meditation on love and marriage, death and grief. I often wonder if Silverberg had just suffered a divorce or had been widowed when he wrote this. Powerful stuff.