Robert Silverberg

David Selig comes of age in the 1960s. He is a telepathic receiver who, even as a child, was smart enough to know that he should keep his ability a secret. He knows too much about people to respect them. His moral compass wavers a bit, and he is often depressed. He exploits his lovers and business colleagues. For a while, he makes his living writing term papers for desperate college students. Along the way, he meets only one other telepath, and he doesn’t like him.

Silverberg gives us the show more sex and drugs of the ‘60s without the rock ‘n’ roll. Dying Inside is probably his best book, and is so New Wave that one reviewer says it isn’t sci-fi. Selig is not a likable protagonist, nor is he meant to be, as you might expect for someone who identifies himself with Franz Kafka.

It is a good thing that David was not born in our era, because AI would undercut his prices in the fake-term-paper trade. show less

With this third volume of Robert Silverberg’s Collected Stories, spanning the years from 1969 to 1972, we finally get to the really good stuff. While there were some excellent stories among his earlier output, the period from ca. the late sixties to mid seventies marks the high point of Silverberg’s Science Fiction witing and sees most of his major works published, among them acknowledged classics like Dying Inside and The Book of Skulls. In fact, I’d argue that this period is much show more more deserving of the epitheton “Golden Age of Science Fiction” than the fifties to which it is usually applied, because from about the middle of the sixties onwards Science Fiction stopped (for the most part, at least) to naively and unknowingly project the present into the future: instead, the genre became self-aware when authors found out that they had something meaningful to say beyond pulp adventures and and began to use the future to consciously examine the present.

Robert Silverberg is a prime example of this, as can be seen in this collection – where the first two volumes were a rather mixed bag, there is not a single weak story in Something Wild Is Loose, his writing did not just flourish, it soared during this period. The reader can watch him here exploring new territories in form as well as content, treating subjects that would have been off limits for Science Fiction a decade ago, and quite often treating them in ways that seem breathtakingly original even today (because, of course. there was the unavoidable backlash… but that will likely be a subject for posts on later volumes). A rather surprising (to me, at least) amount of the stories here concern themselves with explicitely religious themes, and in a manner that is largely, if not sympathetic, then understanding – even a satirical story like “Good News from the Vatican” (about the first ever robot Pope) never ridicules the urge to believe as such, even while it pokes fun at organised religion. I think this might point towards something characteristic of Silverberg as a writer – in all of his work, even when writing satire, he is rarely judgmental but appears above all as an inquisitive mind whose main drive a restless curiosity and who is chiefly interested in exploration, in trying to understand.

And it is this which drives the best stories in this volume, too. There is some difference in quality, but the range extends from “merely” good to utterly brilliant. My favourites are:

“In Entropy’s Jaws” – the twist at the end is pretty much obvious from the start, but I liked the way the story is told on several different time levels simultaneously.
“Going” – a long novella, almost a short novel, in which nothing much happens but that a very old man faces the end of his life. Mostly a character study as well as an exploration of what it means to (literally) have all the time in the world, and it might well be among the best things Silverberg wrote.
“Thomas the Proclaimer” – takes a not exactly SFnal premise (a miracle actually happening for everyone to see) and then uses it for an extended exploration of religion and its significance to the human psyche.
“When We Went to See the End of the World” – a short satirical story about how the end of the world ends up as party entertainment.
“Some Notes on the Pre-Dynastic Epoch” – another short one, this one an elegiac look back on human civilization.
“The Feast of St. Dionysus” – an astronaut returns from Mars and stumbles across a strange cult in the Mojave… or does he? Reads a bit like Malzberg without the nihlism and is very good in creating a weird, hallucinatory atmosphere.
“Many Mansions” – a time travelling story inspired by, of all things, by Robert Coover’s seminal story “The Babysitter.” Probably the story in this volumeI found most entertaining (although it’s also the one that suffers most from Silverberg’s usual issues with the depiction of female characters – it’s strange how he is so progressive in pretty much everything else but appears to be stuck in the 50s in that particular regard).

As in the previous volumes, each story comes with an introduction by the author – in a curious reversal those seem to get less interesting the better the stories themselves become, maybe because they stand better on their own. There are also fewer of them, as many stories in this collection (and often the best ones) are novella-length – it seems Silverberg is best in longer forms when he has some space to spread out in. show less

This novel, originally published in 1991, features a group of humans, descendants of a long-destroyed Earth, living on a watery world of strange sea creatures. When they offend the alien inhabitants of the island they're currently living on, they're forced to make a journey across the seas in search of a new home.

There's a fair bit of conflict and danger and death here, but the word I sort of want to use for the way this story unfolds is "slow." But not at all in a bad way. In a way, show more perhaps, that captures the feel of a long sea voyage very well, that stops to be philosophically contemplative, and that allows us lots of time to take in the experience of being on this alien world, all while Silverberg's smooth writing style pulls the reader right along. The ending, it must be said, is pretty weird, but it's weird in a way that's interesting, and that does hit some kind of poignant emotional note, and that is more thematically satisfying the more I think about it. show less

Recently while shopping at a used bookstore I found a battered collection of Ace Double science fiction novels from the 1950s in their giveaway bin. While they were published before my time, seeing them brought back fond memories of the cheap mass-market paperback novels I enjoyed as a youth, some of which were reprints of these Ace Doubles split into in single-book format. The combination of availability and nostalgia proved too irresistible to pass up, so I decided to pick them up and show more indulge in a trip down into the past's future.

I started with this pair of novels. The first one I read was Across Time, which was written by Donald A. Wollheim using his pen name "David Grinnell." It was an appropriate place start for reasons I didn't appreciate until afterward, as Wollheim is the editor who invented the Ace Doubles series. He is regarded as one of the most important, perhaps even the most important, figure in the history of science fiction publishing, and has been recognized for all he did in that area (his daughter credits him as well with kick-starting the modern fantasy field by publishing the first edition of the Lord of the RIngs trilogy in paperback, so there's that, too). Wollheim was modest about his skills as an author, though, and (to borrow from Churchill) he has much to be modest about, as his novel is a rather pedestrian tale involving flying saucers and a love triangle between two brothers and a woman. While there are some nifty elements in the book — including a sentient warship that is probably the first of its type in science fiction — overall the outcome was so predictable as to rob the book of narrative tension.

After finishing Wollheim's novel I flipped the book over and started Robert Silverberg's Invaders from Earth. And once I began it, I found myself drawn into a fantastic story in which a 21st century expedition to Ganymede finds both an inhabited world and one with valuable minerals, and an advertising firm is hired to pave the way for exploitation. The plot revolved around one of the men spearheading the campaign, whom the firm sends to Ganymede to give his ideas added verisimilitude, only for him to have a crisis of conscience when he realizes just what he's done. There's a nice Mad Men vibe to the tale (unsurprising for a novel written in 1957 that's set in an ad firm), as well as an anti-imperialist commentary that is unusual for science fiction novels of the time. It was definitely the highlight of the pair, and it left me eager to see what other gems I might find in my newly-acquired trove. show less