“It was like that all the time, in those years: an endless trip, a gaudy voyage. But powers decay. Time leaches the colors from the best of visions. The world becomes grayer. Entropy beats us down. Everything fades. Everything goes. Everything dies.”
― Robert Silverberg, Dying Inside
Robert Silverberg, born on January 15, 1935, in Brooklyn, New York, is a Jewish American author and editor whose work I greatly admire. Since 1954, he has written many interesting stories, articles, essays, and books. He is mainly known as a science fiction and fantasy author. When he began his writing career in the 1950’s, he not only wrote science fiction and fantasy, but also horror stories, westerns, adventures, mysteries, sports fiction, and erotica, and plus, he has written many nonfiction books I’d like to get my hands on someday. He has also many novels on his resume as well as a few adaptations of his fiction into television, hundreds and hundreds of short stories, plus editing of several anthologies of short stories. I couldn’t begin to tell you how much he’s done in sixty years since he was an undergraduate student at Columbia University in New York City.
I write this in Mr. Silverberg’s honor today because I am reading four of the eight books of his Collected Stories series, of which I have volumes one, two, seven, and eight. I have yet to get a hold of volumes three, four, five, and six. I ordered the volumes I have right now the other day from the library system and picked them up at my local library. Unfortunately, my library system did not have copies of volumes three, four, five, six, and nine. I think, after I finish volumes one, two, seven, and eight, I think that I want to read some of his nonfiction books. I say this because I haven’t read much nonfiction in my adult life, and the realization that I haven’t makes me feel quite uneasy within myself.
I often wonder how Mr. Silverberg has written so much fiction and nonfiction in sixty years. I think it has to do with the fact that he has a degree in Comparative Literature. He is very prolific indeed, and having written all those short stories, novels, nonfiction books, articles, and essays blows my mind away every time I come across him.
Anyway, as I said, I’m reading volumes one, two, seven, and eight of his nine Collected Stories books. The books are designed with a red leather hardcover and I just love how they look. Each of the nine volumes have a title of a short story in the book as their title, as I observe as I write this. The books are titled (in order) To Be Continued, To the Dark Star, Something Wild Is Loose, Trips, The Palace at Midnight, Multiples, We Are for the Dark, Hot Times in Magma City, and The Millennium Express. They’re pretty cool because he has an introduction to each story in each volume. The words he uses to tell his stories as well as the backgrounds to them, as I observe, seem to be chosen very carefully. I admire that a lot about Mr. Silverberg, and he inspires me to do the same. He is also the exact reason why I want to write short stories in every genre as well as many essays, articles, and nonfiction pieces. I would love to be as prolific as him but also as anyone. Which aspiring author wouldn’t?
Out of the hundreds of short stories he’s written in six decades, which have I read, you may be asking me as you read this? Well, here we go. Let me take a deep breath…….ah, that’s better. I have read “Gorgon Planet”, “The Silent Colony”, “The Road to Nightfall”, “Absolutely Inflexible”, “The Macauley Circuit”, “The Songs of Summer”, “Hopper”, “Slaves of the Star Giants”, “Sunrise on Mercury”, “Warm Man”, “Blaze of Glory”, “To the Dark Star”, “Ishmael in Love”, “Capricorn Games”, and “The Dybbuk of Mazel Tov IV”. Not all of those are in the volume which I’m currently reading, To Be Continued. All of the stories were wonderful. However, not every short story he’s written has been collected in any collection let alone the eight volumes of his Collected Stories, because the Collected Stories volumes only include his favorites.
Volume one, To Be Continued, includes stories from 1953 to 1958, such as “Gorgon Planet”, “The Road to Nightfall”, “The Silent Colony”, “Absolutely Inflexible”, “The Macauley Circuit”, “The Songs of Summer”, “To Be Continued”, “Alaree”, “The Artifact Business”, “Collecting Team”, “A Man of Talent”, “One-Way Journey”, “Sunrise on Mercury”, “World of a Thousand Colors”, “Warm Man”, “Blaze of Glory”, “Why?”, “The Outbreeders”, “The Man Who Never Forgot”, “There Was an Old Woman”, “The Iron Chancellor”, “Ozymandias”, “Counterpart”, and “Delivery Guaranteed”. As I just said, I’m currently reading this volume. I’ll be reading volume two, To the Dark Star, next.
Volume two, To the Dark Star, includes stories from 1962 to 1969, such as “To See the Invisible Man” (which was adapted as an episode of the 1980’s version of The Twilight Zone, one of my favorite television programs), “The Pain Peddlers”, “Neighbor”, “The Sixth Palace”, “Flies”, “Halfway House”, “To the Dark Star”, “Hawksbill Station”, “Passengers”, “Bride 91”, “Going Down Smooth”, “The Fangs of the Trees”, “Ishmael in Love”, “Ringing the Changes”, “Sundance”, “How It Was When the Past Went Away”, “A Happy Day in 2381”, “(Now + n), (Now – n)”, “After the Myths Went Home”, “The Pleasure of Their Company”, and “We Know Who We Are”.
Volume three, Something Wild Is Loose, includes stories from 1969 to 1972, such as “Something Wild Is Loose”, “In Entropy’s Jaws”, “The Reality Trip”, “Going”, “Caliban”, “Good News from the Vatican”, “Thomas the Proclaimer”, “When We Went to See the End of the World”, “Push No More”, “The Wind and the Rain”, “Some Notes on the Pre-Dynastic Epoch”, “The Feast of St. Dionysus”, “What We Learned from This Morning’s Newspaper”, “The Mutant Season”, “Caught in the Organ Draft”, and “Many Mansions”.
Volume four, Trips, includes stories from 1972 to 1973, such as “In the Group”, “Getting Across”, “Ms. Found in an Abandoned Time Machine”, “The Science Fiction Hall of Fame”, “A Sea of Faces”, “The Dybbuk of Mazel Tov IV”, “Breckenridge and the Continuum”, “Capricorn Games”, “Ship-Sister, Star-Sister”, “This Is the Road”, “Trips”, “Born with the Dead”, “Schwartz Between the Galaxies”, and “In the House of Double Minds”.
Volume five, The Palace at Midnight, includes stories from 1980 to 1982, such as “Our Lady of the Sauropods”, “Waiting for the Earthquake”, “The Regulars”, “The Far Side of the Bell-Shaped Curve”, “A Thousand Paces Along the Via Dolorosa”, “How They Pass the Time in Pelpel”, “The Palace at Midnight”, “The Man Who Floated in Time”, “Gianni”, “The Pope of the Chimps”, “Thesme and the Ghayrog”, “At the Conglomeroid Cocktail Party”, “The Trouble with Sempoanga”, “Jennifer’s Lover”, “Not Our Brother”, “Gate of Horn, Gate of Ivory”, “Dancers in the Time-Flux”, “Needle in a Timestack”, “Amanda and the Alien” (which was adapted for a television movie in 1995), “Snake and Ocean, Ocean and Snake”, “The Changeling”, “Basileus”, and “Homefaring”.
Volume six, Multiples, includes stories from 1983 to 1987, such as “Tourist Trade”, “Multiples”, “Against Babylon”, “Symbiont”, “Sailing to Byzantium”, “Sunrise on Pluto”, “Hardware”, “Hannibal’s Elephants”, “Blindsight”, “Gilgamesh in the Outback”, “The Pardoner’s Tale”, “The Iron Star”, “The Secret Sharer”, and “House of Bones”.
Volume seven, We Are for the Dark, includes stories from 1987 to 1990, such as “The Dead Man’s Eyes”, “Enter a Soldier. Later: Enter Another”, “To the Promised Land”, “Chip Runner”, “A Sleep and a Forgetting”, “In Another Country”, “The Asenion Solution”, “We Are for the Dark”, “Lion Time in Timbuctoo”, and “A Tip on a Turtle”.
Volume eight, Hot Times in Magma City, includes stories from 1990 to 1995, such as “In the Clone Zone”, “Hunters in the Forest”, “A Long Night’s Vigil at the Temple”, “Thebes of the Hundred Gates”, “It Comes and Goes”, “Looking for the Fountain”, “The Way to Spook City”, “The Red Blaze Is the Morning”, “Death Do Us Part”, “The Martian Invasion Journals of Henry James”, “Crossing Into the Empire”, “The Second Shield”, and “Hot Times in Magma City”.
And, finally, volume nine, The Millennium Express, includes stories from 1995 to 2009, such as “Diana of the Hundred Breasts”, “Beauty in the Night”, “Call Me Titan”, “The Tree That Grew from the Sky”, “The Church at Monte Saturno”, “Hanosz Prime Goes to Old Earth”, “The Millennium Express”, “Travelers”, “The Colonel Returns to the Stars”, “The Eater of Dreams”, “A Piece of the Great World”, “Against the Current”, “The True Vintage of Erzuine Thale”, “Defenders of the Frontier”, “The Prisoner”, and “Smithers and the Ghost of the Thar”.
Robert Silverberg is and will always be a legend in my book.
David J. Esteves 