Author:	Robert Silverberg
Copyright:	1968
Date Reviewed:	10/28/84
Rating:	6.5

Synopsis: Bill Hastings has a singularly unique opportunity. Winner of an essay contest among one and a half million High School students, Bill is selected to work for one year in the World's Fair of 1992, held in a gigantic space station in orbit 50,000 miles above the Earth. The topic of Bill's essay is the possibility of life on Pluto, a possibility no one else has even imagined. Bill arrives at the World's Fair and goes to work as an assistant to a staff of xenobiologists who are studying Old Martians that have been brought to the World's Fair in their own inhabitant. Bill spends six months learning about xenobiology, the Old Martians and about the people who come to see them. Just as it looks like the Fair is going to fold because of lack of sales, Claude Regan, the multibillionaire entrepreneur who engineered the Fair, announces a trip to Pluto, using new nuclear drives. The mission is to bring back Plutonians and Bill is to be one of the crew members. The mission is of course a success.

Review: "World's Fair 1992" is a Heinleinian type of science fiction but doesn't quite live up to its classification. In Heinlein's novels, the young man is placed in situations that require him to mature very quickly. In this novel, Bill learns some new science but there is nothing that forces him to grow. The story is written in the style of Asimov with chapters that end with cliff hangers forcing the reader to go quickly to the next chapter. In this way it sometimes seemed hard to put down but that really wasn't that case.

Although the first half of the book is interesting, I soon realized that nothing new was going on. Bill goes to the World's Fair and works there. No big deal. The one real surprise was the trip to Pluto and that was brought from so far out of left field that it degraded the novel. An author should be constrained by his own plot (as one is constrained in his own life). The introduction of a new nuclear drive and real live plutonians to an otherwise mundane story was too convenient. "World's Fair 1992" is one of many Silverberg resurrections of his early career. Silverberg's later work is superb but his early novels generally don't deserve to be undusted. In his introduction, Silverberg says that he did not read the novel for its second publication. If he couldn't be bothered to read it, why should we?