I'm indebted to Conrad for suggesting the 'Phases of the Moon'
anthology as although I've read upwards of twenty of RS' novels now,I
haven't read any of his short stories for the simple reason that I
don't read short stories. I remember as a child of 10 or 11 being
enchanted by Ray Bradbury's short stories but in adulthood have lost
the appreciation altogether (although funnily enough back in the 70s
Ian McEwan was an excellent and original short-story writer before he
turned into an Establishment literary grandee).I'm aware of this
deficiency on my part and on a short break in the New Year took with me
an anthology of horror stories one of which was H.G.Wells'
marvellous 'The Country of the Blind'.So this is exactly what I've been
looking out for,or at least I hope it is.I had a look at that
Subterranean Press edition but it seemed to be more for the seasoned
devotee rather than a relative newcomer like myself.I managed to order
the book from Amazon (with a gorgeous cover,by the way) and I'm really
looking forward to it. There's a wait of four to six weeks (it's
probably a USA-UK import) but that gives me an excuse to re-read
classics like 'Dying Inside' and 'The Book of Skulls'.So thanks for
answering a question I was too shy to ask.'Sailing to Byzantium' is a
poem by Yeats, by the way, in case anybody didn't know.

Keith - it was great of you to admit that you don't read short
stories, as short stories have alwaays been the rock on which SF has
rested. I hope that you will get caught up on this wonderful
treasure house of literature by RS and others. I have a collection
of the complete short stories of H.G. Wells, which I read when I was
ten years old, and which fuelled my love of SF. The very first RS
story I read way back in the early Sixties was a classic time travel
paradox tale, "Absolutely inflexible." Here are a few mind-blowing
stories by other writers which every SF fan MUST read - trust me:
"Light of other days" - Bob Shaw; "Flowers for Algernon" - Daniel
Keyes; "I have no mouth and I must scream" - Harlan Ellison; "Sail
on! Sail on" - Philip Jose Farmer; "Who can replace a man?" - Brian
Aldiss; "Mimsie were the borogroves" Lewis Padgett; "The Little
black bag" C.M. Kornbluth; "Fondly fahrenheit" - Alfred
Bester; "The cold equations" - Tom Godwin - and on and on and on.
And let us not forget that some of the best SF movies have been made
from short stories - "2001 Space Odyssey" from Arthur Clarke's "The
Sentinel", Bradbury's "The Sound of thunder"; and several of Philip
K. Dick's short stories, including "Bladsrunner", "Total
recall", "Minority report" and "Payback."
Perhaps you could make a start by checking out RS's "Worlds of
wonder" an anthology he edited in 1987, containing some of these
sories.

One of the things I love most about this group is the wonderful
privilege and opporunity of receiving Mr. Silverberg's comments,
insights, and plans for the future.
It has always meant a lot to me to meet and to chat with my favourite
writers. I find that these days most writers are too busy or too
protected by PR people to respond. I wrote to Ray Bradbury and to
Arthur C. Clarke a number of years ago, but I never did get a
response. I have found that by hanging around book signings at
bookstores, one someeimes gets lucky by being in the right place at
the rightr time. I met two well-known main-stream authors, Margaret
Atwood (Canada) and Nadine Gordimer (South Africa) in this way.
Both of them have contributed two fascinating and well-worth-reading
dystopian novels to the field of SF: "The Handmaid's Tale" and "July's
People" respectively. I also hve a beutifully produced, boxed,
signed, numbered limited edition (no. 23 od 250 copies) of RS's
"Sailing to Byzantium."
I have specialized in collecting the autographs of authors, and when I
was a teenager growing up in South Africa in the Fifties, I wrote to
some of the most prestigious names in the literature of the time, and
got responses from every one of them. My most treasured possession is
an autograph album containing the actual signatures or personalized
notes from writers such as T.S. Eliot, Aldous Huxley, J.B. Piestley,
John Steinbeck, Pearl Buck, P.G. Wodehouse, Thornton Wilder, etc., as
well as a number of long-forgotten British young people's writers,
such as Enid Blyton, Percy F. Westerman, Arthur Ransome, etc.
Nobody writes proper letters with pen and ink any more, and e-mail
isn't the same thing, but, as you say, we have to keep abreast of the
times. However, one of Canada's foremost authors told me that he
wrote his latest novel with a pencil - but it took him ten years to
complete.

As someone who is the same age as Robert Silverberg, but who has
always lived in medium-sized towns, I found the discussion about the
concrete sidewalks of New York and the lack of natural places to play
most interesting. However, an urban/rural environment shouldn't have
to be either/or. Any well-planned city can have modern technology,
efficient transportarion systems, comfortable living areas and open
parkland spaces in which to run and play. It has a lot to do with
individual mindset and civic attitude.
I remember years ago looking across the border at my home town of
Windsor, Ontario from the 70th floor of the Renaissance Centre in
Detroit, and an American said to me: "You mean there are people and
streets and factories among all those trees?"
Robert Silverberg did address this issue in one of his novels, "The
World Inside". He describes a North America in which billions of
people lived in gigantic urbmons, thousands of metres high.
Procreation was considered to be the purpose of life, and the greatest
good (quite the opposite theme of John Brunner's dystopian novel,
"Stand on Zanzibar") and everyone was content to procreate
indiscriminately as soon as they reached puberty. Land was too
valuable to spread living and working space horizontally. The entire
technological and social civilization was designed to rise vertically.
They were very satisfied with their idyllic existence, as all their
needs were met with very little effort on their part. This idyllic
existence depended on the rural farming communes that surrounded the
urbmons, and provided the population with food. These rural residents
performed strange fertility rituals involving pregnant women, to
ensure a plentiful harvest (unlike the urbmons, pregnancy was a rare
occurence in the communes). The big fly in the ointment would be if
they decided to stop the flow of produce, as the urbmons didn't seem
to offer anything in return. Anyone interested in the Big Apple
discussion should read "The World Inside."
What I have missed all my life is a view of the night sky. Our
firmament is completely obscured by the lights from Detroit. It is
only when I travel to one of our isolated parks, such as Furillon on
the Gaspe Peninsula, that I can lie on my back and actually see the
immensity of the cosmos, and wonder what lies out there, and ask
myself what it all means. I believe most strongly that primitive
humans started on the road to culture, art, mus, through the influence
and the inspiration of the night sky. The fact that we can no longer
see the stars, will, in my view, result in the decline of humanity,
which has probably already begun. However, the opposite view was
presented by Isaac Asimov in "Nightfall", a story voted the best SF
story ever written. It was later expanded into a novel by Asimov and
Silverberg. It describes how everyone goes insane and their
civilization collapses, when darkness descends and the stars come out
as all their planet's multiple suns are obscured at the same time, an
event which happens every thousand years. Fascinating stuff!

I don't want to get into a game of one-upmanship, but I have lost
count of the number of times I have read LVC and its sequels - AT
LEAST six times. In years past I used to be only a hard-core SF
aficionado, and was attracted to RS because of a reading
of "Hawksbill Station" and his short story "Absolutely inflexible."
I didn't care for "fantasy" at all, and disparagingly referred to
it as "sword and sorcery." But then my step-daughter, who believes
in fairies, bludgeoned me into getting into the Majipooe series,
which is a masterful link between SF and fantasy - and the rest is
history. My life was re-energized a few years ago when RS
published "The Seventh shrine," "The Sorcerer's apprentice" and "The
Book of changes." I, along with many other fans, was devastated when
he informed us on this site that "The King of dreams" was the end of
the road.
The only negative thing I can say about RS is that he has ruined the
rest of SF for me. I have tried to read books by other authors, but
none of them measure up. However, I do admit that I have just
finished "Hellstrom's Hive" bt Frank Herbert (which was regrettably
and unjustifiably overshadowed by his more famous and
popular "Dune.") It was re-issued a couple of months ago by Tor
Books. "Hellstrom's Hive" is a fascinating book, and anyone who
enjoyed RS's "At Winter's End" and in particular its sequel "The New
Springtime" (also known by the title that RS prefers, "The Queen of
Springtime.) should enjoy HH. QS was recently re-issued by the
University of Nebraska Press. It included an introdution describing
RS's bizarre experience with his former publisher regarding the
title, and a synopsis of a volume three that he has indicated will
never be written.
Anyway, both "The Queen of Springtime" and "Hellstrom's Hive" have
as a theme the imposition of insect society, lifestyles and thought
processes onto humans, although they each adopt a completely
different spin. QS emphasizes the value of love as a force for the
common welfare, and as a power to attract humans to the fold,
whereas HH has a darker mood, and discounts the value and utility of
all emotions, in order to accomplish the higher purpose of the Hive,
which is to dominate the world. Howeveer, the Hijks in the coming-
forth of the primates from hundreds of thousands of years hiding
from the long winter after the falling of the death-stars, have a
lot in common with the denizens of Nils Hellstrom's underground
warren society, in which humans are genetically bred to fulfil
speccialized functions.
I think that I would give the edge to the two "Coming forth" books
over the Majipoor series, even though it is a tough choice.

It may amuse you to know that I nearly wrote HELLSTROM'S HIVE
myself. The Frank Herbert book was actually a novelization of a
movie script -- the movie came out somewhere around 1970. I was then
a Bantam Books author, and my Bantam editor offered me the
novelization job. But I was then in the middle of a white-hot streak
of books -- DOWNWARD TO THE EARTH, TOWER OF GLASS, THE WORLD INSIDE,
stuff like that -- and wasn't interested. So Bantam gave the job to
Frank Herbert. (I never read the Herbert book, never saw the movie,
but I vaguely recall the script as having something to do with
intelligent insects.)

Now there's an odd bit of trivia, and an amusing speculation: what if
RS had written Hellstrom's Hive. As a voracious reader back in the
70s, and a Frank Herbert fan, I bought HH when it came out, and as I
recall, found it a fascinating but rather unpleasant read. Who knows
what I would think now. I'm sure I've still got my copy packed away
somewhere, but it seems unlikely I'll revisit it with so many other
things to read. I also vaguely remember seeing the movie, and recall
that it was quite different than Herbert's book. Likely, Herbert based
his book on the pre-shooting script, and by the time the movie was
done, it had been changed by the producer or director.

I too was fascinated by the bit of Hellstrom trivia provided by Mr.
Silverberg. I looked up this movie on IMDb, and apparently under
the title of "Hellstrom Chronicle" it won an Oscar for best
documentary in 1971. However, it was described as a "quasi-
documentary" because it contained SF elements,about insects taking
over the world, and was compared to "The Blair Witch Project." I
have tried to find a video or DVD copy, but except for the sound
track it seems to be currently unavailable.

A palpable hit here. When Ian Watson reviewed LVC, he said -- Ian is
a socialist, I am anything but, and we have had many an amiable
political discussion over the years -- "Silverberg appears to believe
in the divine right of kings." Not exactly, since I don't have any
religious beliefs, but it is plain from that list of books below that
something real is going on for me in all of them, that I believe in
the Great Man theory of history and am anything but egalitarian in my
political views. I do recognize that great men can make very big
mistakes -- Hitler was nothing if not a messianic charismatic leader,
but he was also a monster -- but that doesn't mean that I think
people like Hitler (or Napoleon, or Julius Caesar, or Augustus
Caesar, or FDR, or Charles de Gaulle, or Alexander the Great) are "no
different from the rest of us." Quite the contrary.

RS

I'd like the privilege of being the first to comment on Mr.
Silverberg's new story, which has just appeared in the October-
Novenber issue of "Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction." The
Master has lived up to all our expectations - again. This is a
marvellous story. It is written in precise but vivid language
which keeps you turning every page. It has a "What if ...?" theme:
What if one started trsvelling back in time for no reason. The
protagonist shows us what it would feel like - which is a hallmark
of most RS's characters - viewing events from a very personal and
introspective viewpoint.
Without giving anything away, I would have liked to have seen a bit
more exposition on cause and effect, and the denouement was slightly
anti-climactic. But the story had a very distinctive H.G. Wellsian
feel about it. The theme is also reminiscent of a 1957 movie, "The
Incredible Shrinking Man", about someone who gets smaller and
smaller until he disappears into the Infinite.
I don't subscribe to MFSF, but I managed to find the only copy
available in any bookstrore in the city where I live. I also
downloaded a printable copy of the issue as an e-book in .pdf format
for $6.00 - the first time I have tried this. It's a great system.
Anyone who wants a copy of the issue should go to
www.mfsfmag.com/current.htm and select one of the format options at
the bottom of the page.

Don't worry about this one becoming a novel, Ali. Or anything else
except what it is right now. Novels are not part of my plan from
here on in (although I just did agree to write a new story this
winter for an anthology Gardner Dozois and George RR Martin are
doing.)
And of course I'm in complete agreement with your appraisal of the
story!
> I think this story is perfect. There's a touch of sadness to it I
> like. I don't require an explanation for anything in this story. I
> hope it stays a short story and doesn't get to become a novel or
> something. I like the naturalistic writing style; I could almost
hear this story.>Ali

jimkog wrote:
> About 20 years ago I read a Silverberg book that took place in
> colonial africa. A young helmsman wound up in a portugese/african
> jail and eventually wound up in the jungle with a bunch of warring
> canibals. I can't remember the title and am looking for the book.
> Does anyone know name of this book?
>
> thanks,
> jim

Great news about the stories! We look forward to them.

As a long time Apple user, I very much hope the transition goes well.
It will take some adjustment, but I hope the new system works well for
you.

I realize I've been a Silverberg fan even longer than I've been a Mac
user, and I hope there's a small chance that another novel may emerge
from the new keys of your new computer.

I've read a lot of literature over the years, from Conrad, to Henry
James, to Camus, to J. M. Coetzee and many others. But after all that
reading, I have found no author I've ever read to exceed the best
works of R. Silverberg. Here's hoping there might be one last novel
from one of the greatest novelists of the last few centuries....

I appreciate the praise, though I don't quite share your high opinion
of me: I'm content to have been a pretty damn good s-f writer and let
Shakespeare have the top rung unchallenged. But with the 73rd
birthday staring me in the eye, I just don't have much yearning to
set out once again on the long road that is a novel. Sometimes when
I'm reading a book I admire -- something by Philip Roth, for example -
- I feel for a moment or two like tackling another book-length
project myself. But then I remember what modern-day s-f publishing
has turned into, and how much day-by-day effort it takes to write a
novel, and I overcome that feeling with the greatest of ease. It's
work enough to do the occasional short story, as I found out this
week -- a very satisfactory story, I thought, but the daily grind
was, well, grinding.

Coetzee is among my favorites too, by the way. But not his last
couple of books.

RS

I think Coetzee has had a fair amount of attention in the US, even
pre-Nobel. I discovered him 25 or 30 years ago with the slender
paperback "Waiting for the Barbarians" and went on to read the rest
of his fiction and some of his essays. I've found little pleasure in
his last couple of books, as I said -- perhaps his transplantation to
Australia has done something ungood to him (although I think I've had
only benefits from my own midlife transplantation to California) or
else he's just losing his touch. But I do regard him as one of the
most important twentieth-century novelists, and now that I think of
it, I suppose he hasn't had as much as attention here as he deserves
(despite the Nobel) because not only am I the only person I know who
can pronounce his name correctly, I don't know anyone who has read
anything of his either! He has had critical attention but perhaps
not much of a readership.

No, no, no, the only autobiography anyone is ever going to get out of
me is the fragmentary one that I've been serializing through all my
myriad short-story collections, plus the one lengthy essay that was
in the Brian Aldiss book of thirty years ago and its expanded version
in SF 101. I do like setting down my reminiscences of my pulp-
writing days, but I can't see any cathartic value of the Asimovian
kind in doing a formal autobiography. I've even discouraged one
potential biographer, mainly on the ground that I would probably want
to get involved in the project and it would chew up a lot of my
time. Posthumous biographers are a different story, since guarding
my time will no longer be an issue for me. But, please, no
applications just yet. I still feel pretty pre-posthumous.

Now it can be told: THE LONGEST WAY HOME was explicitly conceived in
reaction to a Coetzee novel. (Can you guess which one?)

WAITING FOR THE BARBARIANS is, of course, fundamentally about the
situation in South Africa at the time, but I think it can easily be
read as a science-fiction novel, and a very fine one.

RS

Amazing how many jobs you folks can find for me. Write my
autobiography...teach at a university...how about a new novel? I'll
keep them all in mind. And that's where I'm going to keep them, you
betcha.

RS

My problem is that I'm just getting too old, and find myself very
much out of the loop. What's all this hullabaloo about comics and
graphic novels? I don't want to insult anyone's intelligence, but
why do you need badly drawn pictures, when you can read actual words
on a page? One of the greatest things about RS is his masterful
ability to create vivid images in one's mind, and characters that
grab hold of you with the creative use of language. Please! No
comics adaptations! When I was 12 years old, I used to read a long-
forgotten series called "Classics illustrated" but when I got older,
I put away childish things. However, I still have a tattered
old "Classics illustrated" copy of Jules Verne's "From the Earth to
the Moon." I wonder if it is a collector's item, and how much it is
worth.

Hey, the old opposition between comics and book !

Sorry but I had a good laugh reading your mail, as it reminded me
closely some of my litterature teachers (who be the way didn't consider
science-fiction and any genre books as real litterature, including
Jules Verne)

As a adult reading comics since her tender age, and reading more than
my share of regular books too, I don't see this as the same activity.
Both are really two ways to tell a story : one using only word, and the
other one using word AND pictures. In the greatest comics (or manga),
both add to the storytelling, and the pictures are not just only
"subtitles" to the text.
You can enjoy both as you can enjoy painting and sculptures (which
aren't just painting in 3D ;-) )

Now for book adapted in comics, it's like books adapted in movies,
sometimes the result is great, sometimes it's terrible. But it's never
the strict adaptation of the book.

Stéphanie

PS : Who's the illustrator of your Jules Verne's book ?

--- In theworldsofrobertsilverberg@yahoogroups.com, "Tom Burk"
<opt_net_2000@...> wrote:
>Welcome to the group, and thanks for remining us (not that we
needed reminding) of how diverse RS's talents are. Unfortunately,
because he is so well-known as an SF writer, some of his other
accomplishments have been neglected. As I have said before on this
forum, he wrote one of the best historical novels ever ("The Lord of
Darkness") and his non fiction books are not only classics, but
fascinating. Many of them have provided research material for some
of his SF stories ("Sailing to Byzantium" is one of the best
examples). I recently read "The Realm of Prester John," which is by
far the most exhaustive study of a strange medieval character who is
part mythical and part real. No one knows for sure, but RS manages
to present all the options to us in a very readable but erudite
format.

Welcome Aaron :)
What do you mean by Vancian? I searched a bit the web and couldn't find
something specific.
Monica.

--- In theworldsofrobertsilverberg@yahoogroups.com, "Monica Fuchs"
<notvirtual@...> wrote:
>Aaron was taking advantage of one of the unique characteristics of
The English language - the ability to make up words that carry
significant meaning. Therefore, "Vancian" is derived from Vance.
An equivalent usage would be to refer to a writer as "Silverbergian"
in his style. You won't find these words in a dictionary.
> Welcome Aaron :)
> What do you mean by Vancian? I searched a bit the web and couldn't
find
> something specific.
> Monica.
>

--- In theworldsofrobertsilverberg@yahoogroups.com, agberg
<no_reply@...> wrote:
>I have never read "Shadrach" and this discussion has encouraged me to
find a copy. However, for anyone who has a spare $3,500.00 burning a
hole in their pocket, I'd like to draw your attention to a listing
on "Bookfinder.com" for the "Manuscript archive" of this work.
Apparently a book dealer in Studio City, California, has the "author's
manuscript archive" of this work, which consists of the original 3 page
outline, a cover letter to Scribner's dated JULY 13 1970, a request for
an advance of $3,000.00, a thick stack of handwritten notes, numerous
typewritten false starts, rough drafts, caustic exchanges between
Silverberg and the copy editor, etc., signed letters from Harlan
Ellison, Judy-Lynn del Rey, etc. as well as many other fascinating
notes and comments that could provide research material for the
proposed new University of Nebraska edition. This work was, of
course, first published by Bobbs-Merril in 1976, and not by
Scribner's. Mr. Silverberg, do you know how this file came into the
possession of a book dealer, and what is the background story, as I
should imagine that it is the sort of thing that would be found in your
personal archives, or in the archives of the publisher. As a retired
librarian, archivist and literary researcher, this is the sort of
find, if genuine, that really turns me on.

> Tor's Orb trade paperback line has just agreed to do a reissue of
DYING INSIDE. I'm talking
> with them about adding other books of mine to the series.
>
> I've signed with University of Nebraska Press for a new edition of
SHADRACH IN THE
> FURNACE.
>
>
> RS

From time to time I've sold manuscripts of my novels and stories, since they
amounted to
a huge mountain of paper in my office and I figured that they would be of more
interest to
scholars or collectors than they would be to me, whereas the cash I got for them
might be
turned to some interesting purpose. I don't remember who I sold SHADRACH to,
but I
suspect it was some Los Angeles collector who is now taking the same attitude
toward the
accumulated manuscripts that I did. Why Harlan and Judy-Lynn are involved in
the
SHADRACH archive I have no idea. Perhaps I wrote fragments of the book on the
backs of
letters from them!

RS

I should warn you, Monica, that LORD OF DARKNESS is written in a kind of
modernized
sixteenth-century English, and you will encounter some words that very few
people today
understand, and some ways of phrasing sentences that are different from modern
ways.
On the other hand, I think it's one of my best and most important books. Not
s-f in any
way, not fantasy either.

RS

I agree with Conrad that Arthur C. Clarke is one of the giants of
science fiction. Personally, I became interested in the genre
reading "Childhood's End" many years ago. A little later came Robert
Silverberg with "to Live Again".

Guillermo.

--- In theworldsofrobertsilverberg@yahoogroups.com, "Alistair"
<ali_scott@...> wrote:
>

Ali, By an amazing coincidence, I have just finished reading another
A.E. van Vogt story, "The Weapon Shops of Isher" (first published in
1953.) It is a convoluted time-travel story about travelling to the
ultimate ends and beginnings of time and space, and the creation of the
cosmos. The method of travel is a pendulum, in which the fulcrum is
the present, and at one end of the swing, three months into the future,
is a buildling, and trillions of years in the past is a man. Their
differences in mass account for the different time spans. Sounds
logical to me. The themes and concepts are similar to the themes and
methods in Robert Silverberg's not-well-known, but fascinating 1987
novella, "Project pendulum." which also deals with the ends and the
beginnings of time and space, and features two identical twins
travelling through time on a pendulum. Other than that, the stories are
quite different, but both should be read side-by-side. Mr. Silverberg,
did you have van Vogt's story in mind when you wrote "Project pendulum?"

Thanks everyone,

I didn't have vV's story in mind, though I had of course read it long before --
before he
incorporated it into the novel, it was a separate short story called, I think,
"Pendulum,"
with a tremendous punchline. I don't remember how "Project Pendulum" got
started but
the idea may well have been suggested to me by my publisher, Byron Preiss, who
commissioned the book fifteen or twenty years ago. Maybe Byron had vV in mind,
but I
didn't.

RS