As Silverberg has noted, many reviewers were confused by The Book of Skulls on its first appearance: Some mainstream reviewers saw it as science fiction, and some reviewers for science fiction magazines questioned whether the novel was actually science fiction or a simple story of betrayal and murder. Since Silverberg leaves the identity of the mysterious monks an ambiguous matter, there is no clear indication that the novel is either science fiction or fantasy. Yet the book is clearly in the tradition of the quest romance which has influenced both genres; it also owes much to the ironic vision of modernist literature, as it is represented in the works of T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, and other modernist writers. Certainly The Book of Skulls may be described as a novel that is constructed around a pattern of comprehensive irony, for the journey of the four seekers...