Gilgamesh in the Outback

Gilgamesh in the Outback

Author	Robert Silverberg
Genre	Science fiction novella
Publisher	Asimov's Science Fiction
Publication date	1986

Gilgamesh in the Outback is a science fiction novella by Robert Silverberg, and part of Janet Morris's shared-universe series Heroes in Hell. It won the Hugo Award for Best Novella in 1987 and was also nominated for the Nebula Award for Best Novella in 1986. Originally published in Asimov's Science Fiction, it was then printed in Rebels in Hell before being incorporated into Silverberg's novel To the Land of the Living.

Hullaballoo Wolfowitz: I want to apologize in advance for making these comments here, but there is no room to address these issues in the edit summary, so I will make them here and you can modify it. I think this comes under the WP "Ignore All Rules" rule. Anyway you keep reverting my edits and this last time you claimed my edit summary is utterly false and without credibility. I take that as an affront. I made my edits on the 23rd and you reverted them 3 times. You said my work was inaccurate based on changes YOU made to the source Gilgamesh in the Outback article on the 22nd that I had not even seen. The last time I looked at Gilgamesh in the Outback - you had not added the Plot Summary. Now that I see what you have done, I believe you have completely left the concept of NPOV behind and are actively working to skew the facts. You added the following to the Gilgamesh in the Outback article:

Robert Silverberg wrote that he was "drawn into" writing a story for for the "Heroes in Hell" project. While he remembered that the central concept of the series was "never clearly explained" to him, he noted the similarity of "Heroes in Hell" to Philip Jose Farmer's Riverworld works, and decided "to run my own variant on what Farmer had done a couple of decades earlier." After writing "Gilgamesh in the Outback," he decided that, since the story "was all so much fun," to write two sequels, "The Fascination of the Abomination" and "Gilgamesh in Uruk." In writing those stories, as Silverberg recalled, he "never read many of the other 'Heroes in Hell' stories", and had "no idea" of how consistent his work was with that of his "putative collaborators"; instead, he had "gone his own way . . . with only the most tangential links to what others had invented."

You injected nuance and insinuation with your selective choice of particular words and their quotation marks to take the true meaning out of context. What Mr. Silverberg actually wrote was this (your source - same page - the actual wording - First Paragraph): "During the heyday of the shared-world science-fiction anthologies, back in the mid-1980's, I was drawn into a project called Heroes in Hell, the general premise of which was (as far as I understood it) that everybody who had ever lived, and a good many mythical beings besides, had been resurrected in a quasi-afterlife in a place that was called, for the sake of convenience, Hell. The concept was never clearly explained to me - one of the problems with these shared-world deals - and so I never fully grasped what I was supposed to be doing. But the idea struck me as reminiscent of the great Philip Jose Farmer Riverworld concept of humanity's total resurrection in some strange place, which I had long admired, and here was my chance to run my own variant on what Farmer had done a couple of decades earlier." The second paragraph described Gilgamesh's character development and companion characters. The third paragraph - again verbatim: " It was all so much fun that I went on to write a second Gilgamesh in Hell novella, featuring the likes of Pablo Picasso and Simon Magus, and then a third. I never read very many of the other Heroes in Hell stories, so I have no idea how well my stories integrated themselves with those of my putative collaborators in the series, but I was enjoying myself and the novellas (which were also being published in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine) were popular among readers. "Gilgamesh in the Outback," in fact, won a Hugo for Best Novella in 1987, one of the few shared-world stories ever to achieve that." I am a Commissioned Officer in the United States Army. I know the various and sundry meanings of the word "Commission." What the first paragraph does do, is corroborate, directly from Robert Silverberg, that "Gilgamesh in the Outback" was commissioned for the series Heroes in Hell - the point I keep trying to make in the Heroes in Hell article. He signed a contract to produce an original story for the series. The third paragraph corroborates that - oh by the way - it was ALSO published in Asimov's - not originally published there. It was written for the book, with the magazine sale in the same month a first serial sale giving Mr. Silverberg extra income. I used a different source to talk to the pedigree of the story on the Heroes in Hell site - Silverberg's quasi-official website. Your source is better in that it tells the truth directly with his words, rather than his complicit blessing which you discount. You insinuations make it sound nefarious, that Mr. Silverberg was somehow lured into participating in this lowly endeavor, while sharing the spotlight with other Hugo winning authors who wrote in this series such as CJ Cherryh and George Alec Effinger or Hugo nominees Gregory Benford, Robert Sheckley and Robert Asprin. Silverberg even states he had so much fun he wrote two more Hell novellas. Then he goes on to make the point, proudly, that his Hugo for the work, was one of the few shared-world stories ever to achieve that distinction. Note - "shared world" - part of a series - not a standalone story written for a magazine. I am not going to belabor this any longer. I hope you see that that your objectivity has somehow been compromised. Please do the right thing and correct the misconceptions so that WP can remain a valued "accurate" encyclopedic source.

Silverberg compiled the three stories as To the Land of the Living, revising the stories to remove any references to other writers' contributions to "Heroes in Hell," and severing the novel's connection to the franchise. To the Land of the Living was published in the British market in 1989 and reprinted in an American edition in 1990.

External links

• Gilgamesh in the Outback title listing at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database