I have just started reading The Collected Stories of Robert Silverberg: Volume 2: The Secret Sharer, first published in 1993.
I have read books or short stories by Robert Silverberg in the past, probably in my early twenties and probably mostly short stories. I know he has a very good reputation as a writer of science fiction and has written a lot of books. The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America made him its 21st SFWA Grand Master in 2005.
This collection has a very good Introduction by Robert Silverberg, written in 1990. He discusses how he writes his short stories, and also talks about writing novels vs. short stories. It also has an excellent paragraph about novellas and where they fit between short stories and full-length novels. Of the eleven stories in this collection, two are novella length: "The Secret Sharer" and "We Are For the Dark."
The only story I have read so far from this book is "The Pardoner's Tale." It is a longish story, 25 pages in this edition. The protagonist is a Hacker, living in the US in a future where aliens, called the Entities, have taken over the world. They use humans as slave labor and control them through computer implants that connect all humans to their computers.
Only Hackers can fool the computer and get around the country with relative ease. Hacker's support themselves by selling "pardons" to other humans; they alter that person's profile in the main computer to give them an easier work assignment or save them from medical experimentation. Hacker's have to be careful not to do too many pardons and sometimes deliberately "fudge" them up to cover their tracks. So Pardoners don't have a very good reputation. People have to be desperate to use them.
This was an excellent story, told in first person from the Hacker's point of view. I liked the writing and the story held my interest. It whetted my appetite for more writing by Silverberg, either short stories or novels.
There was another element in this story that I enjoyed. The setting was the Los Angeles basin and there were a number of references to other places along the coast, including Santa Barbara and San Francisco.
An interesting fact: Of the stories in this book, three of them were first published in Playboy magazine, and "The Pardoner's Tale" was one of those. It was first published in 1987.
Each story has a separate introductory paragraph or two by Silverberg, and for "The Pardoner's Tale" he talked about working with Playboy's fiction editor, Alice K. Turner, and changes she had suggested to stories he had submitted. Also very interesting.
If anyone has any favorite novels or story collections by Silverberg, please let me know.
21 comments:
I really like Silverberg's writing. One of his books, Downward to the Earth, (the story is not about Earth but is an alien planet yarn) is one of my all-time favourite sci-fi novels. I've also read one, maybe two, of his Majipoor books and have a couple of unread books by him on my shelves. This collection looks really good, I'll have a look for it. Enjoying my sci-fi year so far and have loads of good reads lined up - I hope.
The Reality Trip & Other Implausibilities has three really good stories: "The Reality Trip," "Entropy's Jaws" & "Hawksbill Station" (a novella later extended to a novel). I also enjoyed his novella "Born with the Dead" (received the Nebula & shortlisted for Hugo) & the short "Passengers" (received the Nebula & shortlisted for Hugo). Being so prolific, many of his stories are also underwhelming. I have not read his novels.
https://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?45938
Hi Tracy, I must read Robert Silverberg as with Robert Heinlen he is writer I have been hearing about pretty much all my life. I believe he belongs to the Golden Age of Science fiction and though I am not familiar with the science fiction genre I think I would have success with the Golden Age writers and one science fiction novel from the 1940's I have read is Earth Abides by George Stewart which I highly recommend.
Depends on when you set your "Golden Age"...a number of sf writers might plump for the 1950s, as the period when the majority of writers working "within" the field built around the sf magazines were writers first, and paying attention to the niceties of prose and plotting and characterization, as opposed to more a mix of hobbyists or secondarily writers and full-time or otherwise skilled writers in the previous decades, going back at least as far as founding of AMAZING STORIES in 1926 and a little before...albeit certainly H. G. Wells and a slew of others were doing good to brilliant work before the term "science fiction" had much currency (the second set of sf magazines, SCIENCE WONDER STORIES and its stablemates starting in 1929, picked up that then-obscure phrase and pushed it along).
Silverberg began selling as a Very young writer in mid 1950s, and was by intent a high-production writer, willing to write Acceptable-Enough copy, from getting established as a pro a couple years later for about the next five years or so of his career, in sf and even more outside that field (while also writing some more carefully-crafted sf stories early on, such as "To See the Invisible Man"). He then started gaining success with more ambitious nonfiction, and the novella "Hawksbill Station" that Frank (justly) recommends above was his return to writing sf at the top of his abilities, in the mid '60s. Most of his best work has appeared since then; I think he (and not he alone) thinks his best novel might be DYING INSIDE, but there are no few others that come close (the first adult sf novel I read by a living writer, as opposed to Wells, Verne, Edward Bellamy, et al.) was the novel version of HAWKSBILL STATION, which I can also heartily recommend, and such shorter stories as "Schwartz Between the Galaxies" and "Sundance". His THE BEST OF ROBERT SILVERBERG: STORIES OF SIX DECADES is detailed here, and thoroughly recommended: https://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?408200
Cath, I am glad to be getting some suggestions. Silverberg wrote so much, I don't know where to start. I will definitely look for Downward to the Earth. I don't want to wait until the book sale, but I can also look there next September, although for some reason I haven't had a lot of luck with science fiction there. But my son checks the science fiction tables meticulously, so I can have him be on the lookout for Silverberg books.
Also, the 1950s was the first time most US writers in the sf field could make a living wage from writing sf and related work such as fantasy and horror fiction alone, if they chose to, and were prolific enough...at least in the early years of the decade, when Ballantine Books was founded and paid well, the similarly writer-friendly Fawcett Gold Medal stuck a toe into the fields, and Doubleday and Ace were considerably less generous but had regular programs (among less prolific others), while fiction magazines proliferated in the wake of the commercial successes of STARTLING STORIES and, even more, GALAXY, also at the turn of the decade...there was a recession in the sf publishing field by the end of '50s, alas.
Casual Debris, Thanks for the suggestions. I will look for a copy of The Reality Trip & Other Implausibilities, possibly at the annual book sale, or online used. And thanks for the link to the isfdb listing.
PLAYBOY, from shortly after founding to about the time karma was catching up with Hugh Hefner, and the last good fiction editor Alice Turner left in 2000, had a long tradition of seeking out an array of good fiction, very much including sf and fantasy of various sorts (Ray Russell, a notable horror writer, was their first good fiction editor very early on). And till they essentially stopped running fiction, they were among the last magazines in the US to pay well for short fiction, though not quite what the likes of the SATURDAY EVENING POST would pay in the '50s (much less what it would pay, in inflation-adjusted dollars, around 1900); $800-$2K a story was my hazy recollection of the probable range in the '70s, for example, and not much if any less by the end of Turner's work there. OMNI then, and Tor.com now, are about the only other markets offering that kind of money for shorter work in fantastica, if I'm not mistaken. (I'm not sure how much the UK science magazine NATURE pays for its vignettes, but probably less.)
Interesting how Playboy was attracted to science fiction stories. It must be a genre appealing to men. I read some good stories in there back in the day. I wonder if they publish any fiction now.
P.S. It also answered a lot of my question about sex.
PLAYBOY doesn't publish anything these days...it's folded as a magazine, might have a vestige of a website.
COSMOPOLITAN, even after Helen Gurley Brown transformed it into a women's magazine with some edge to it (from its general-interest previous inpulpation...inslickation?), continued to publish the occasional sf story, before they gave up on fiction...a collaboration by Robert Silverberg and Harlan Ellison. "The Song the Zombie Sang", was one of them! And OMNI was Kathi Keeton's baby, even if her husband Robert Guccione published it, till her death (and its longest-running fiction editor was Ellen Datlow)...no lack of women readers for sf, nor ever a complete lack of women writers...though for no really good reason Hefner was afraid that PLAYBOY readers would resent seeing women writers' fiction in the magazine, and even Ursula Le Guin's first story there was bylined "U. K. Le Guin" to hope to slip by unnoticed...
Hefner basically was trying to recreate a slightly more risque version of the 1940s ESQUIRE, and had been a lifelong lover of cartoons and was a big fan of the fantasy and horror magazine WEIRD TALES...probably part of why Russell was among the first hires.
Oh, Tracy, I'll have to tell my husband about this. He likes Silverberg's work very much, and I'm not sure he has this collection.
Kathy, I agree that it would be good to read something by Robert Silverberg. The problem is that there is so much he wrote it is hard to decide where to start... at least for me.
I will look into Earth Abides by Stewart. I did find it on Goodreads and will read some more about it there.
Todd, thanks for more information about Silverberg and your recommendations. I will add both of the novels to my list. I had seen THE BEST OF ROBERT SILVERBERG: STORIES OF SIX DECADES, and wondered if it would be worthwhile. I will follow up on the link you supplied. I have not read all of your comments here yet but I will and may have more to reply.
Patti, I think science fiction probably did appeal more to men, although that is not necessarily true nowadays. One reviewer of that story noted that it was odd that such a story had no sex or even much of a sexual interest in it. I remember reading a Playboy magazine when I was in college, around 1970, at a small party, and getting teased about it, but I was reading an article and it seems like it was about some area of science. My impression then (and later) was that the stories were of all different types. But my memory could be wrong.
Margot, I was checking into Silverberg's bibliography and there are a lot of short story collections of his work. There are some other collections that include the stories that are in this collection. So maybe he has the stories already. Glad to hear he like Silverberg's writing.
Todd, thanks for the very interesting information on magazines like Playboy, Cosmopolitan, and others that published science fiction and fantasy. The dedication page for this book included Alice K. Turner, along with Ellen Datlow, Gardner Dozois, Martin H. Greenberg and others, all editors I believe?
They are, though among those, Dozois was also a fiction-writer (he was the editor of a best of the year volume for about just over forty years, between slim volumes for E. P. Dutton--a series Lester Del Rey began, then left to Dozois after joining his wife to edit at Ballantine/Del Rey), then bugcrushers for Bluejay/St. Martin's Press for 35 volumes (plus retrospectives), as well as editing ASIMOV'S SCIENCE FICTION magazine from 1986-2004, with Sheila Williams as assistant editor for most or all of that period...they also edited magazine issue/hardcover best-of volumes from the magazine, and he had a some other populous series of anthos before and during...Datlow and the late Greenberg have been hugely prolific editors (Greenberg was Ed Gorman's partner for much of the early run of MYSTERY SCENE, and co-edited anthologies with Ed and nearly everyone who was game along with producing probably more of them than anyone else so far in one capacity or another), and Turner no slouch beyond her PLAYBOY gig (and related books of fiction), as she wrote book-length nonfiction and other matter, and edited some other books.
PLAYBOY did indeed run an eclectic list of fiction, and while some of it was shallow, typically "slick" fiction or goofily trying to be cool/sexy (more the former!), a lot of it wasn't. I did go look at the surviving PLAYBOY site, and it's more interested in selling t-shirts and lingerie than even access to their archive of digitized issues, but among the issues they were using as teasers, a 1973 George V. Higgins novel as serialized was among the fiction in one I checked at random, in fact his second, after THE FRIENDS OF EDDIE COYLE, THE DIGGER'S GAME (Higgins one of us who died way too young...heart attack just before he made it to 60yo). Turner joined the magazine's staff in '76. Her NYT obit: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/24/business/media/alice-k-turner-fiction-editor-of-playboy-for-20-years-dies-at-75.html
Datlow, after OMNI (and an online version, and a brief print revival), has been slightly more likely to be a horror editor in most projects, though has also done other sf and fantasy editing and other sorts...now she's among the editors at Tor.com, as well as continuing her current horror BOTY annual, after sharing a fantasy and horror BOTY for a couple of decades with Terri Windling, then with Kelly Link and Gavin Grant, for the folks who were publishing Dozois sf book and briefly also did Gorman and Greenberg's crime fiction annual...the one After their MYSTERY SCENE-branded one...
You're quite welcome...if you have sense you've tapped a shaken keg, I sympathize...glad you like that story and Silverberg's other work. I helped him track down a Brazilian edition of one of his books once.
https://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?58627 provides interesting commentary on how "The Pardoner's Tale" was incorporated into a novel, soon after:
Silverberg states in The Best of Robert Silverberg: Stories of Six Decades that he used three prior stories, renaming the characters, as the basis for the The Alien Years (1998): "Against Babylon" (1986) - almost entirely as opening chapters; "Hannibal's Elephants" (1988) - small piece in one of the early sequences; and "The Pardoner's Tale" (1987) - nearly all in later part of book. He also states that he later carved out three new stories from the novel: "Beauty in the Night" (1997), "On the Inside" (1998), and "The Colonel in Autumn" (1998).
Todd, thanks for all that additional information, especially the last comment about using "The Pardoner's Tale" in a novel. That is one I will look for, for sure.
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