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Robert Silverberg

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Robert Silverberg
Silverberg in 2005
Silverberg in 2005
Born (1935-01-15) January 15, 1935 (age 89)
New York City, U.S.
Pen nameVarious[a][1]
Occupation
  • Novelist
  • short-story writer
  • editor
NationalityAmerican
Alma materColumbia University (BA)
Period1955–present
GenreScience fiction, fantasy, anthologies (as editor)
SubjectGeography, history, nature
Signature
Website
robert-silverberg.com
Silverberg's novelette "Guardian of the Crystal Gate" was the cover story in the August 1956 issue of Fantastic.
Silverberg's short story "Quick Freeze" took the cover of the May 1957 issue of Science Fiction Quarterly.

Robert Silverberg (born January 15, 1935) is an American author and editor, best known for writing science fiction. He is a multiple winner of both Hugo and Nebula Awards, a member of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame, and a Grand Master of SF.[2][3][4] He has attended every Hugo Award ceremony since the inaugural event in 1953.[5]

Biography

Early years

Silverberg was born to Jewish parents in Brooklyn, New York.[6] A voracious reader since childhood, he began submitting stories to science fiction magazines during his early teenage years. He received a BA in English Literature from Columbia University, in 1956. While at Columbia, he wrote the juvenile novel Revolt on Alpha C (1955), published by Thomas Y. Crowell with the cover notice: "A gripping story of outer space".[1] He won his first Hugo in 1956 as the "best new writer".[2]

That year Silverberg was the author or co-author of four of the six stories in the August issue of Fantastic, breaking his record set in the previous issue.[7] For the next four years, by his own count, he wrote a million words a year, mostly for magazines and Ace Doubles. He used his own name as well as a range of pseudonyms during this era, and often worked in collaboration with Randall Garrett, who was a neighbor at the time.[8] (The Silverberg/Garrett collaborations also used a variety of pseudonyms, the best-known being Robert Randall.) From 1956 to 1959, Silverberg routinely averaged five published stories a month, and he had over 80 stories published in 1958 alone.

In 1959, the market for science fiction slumped due in part to changing tastes among readers, and also due to the bankruptcy of several leading magazines of the era.[9] Silverberg adapted by writing copiously to other fields,[10] from historical non-fiction to crime fiction and softcore pornography. "Bob Silverberg, a giant of science fiction... was doing two [books] a month for one publisher, another for a second publisher, and the equivalent of another book for a magazine... He was writing a quarter of a million words a month"[11] under many different pseudonyms[12] including about 200 erotic novels published as Don Elliott.[13][14] In a 2000 interview, Silverberg explained that the erotic fiction (published under the pseudonym "Don Elliott")

... was undertaken at a time when I was saddled with a huge debt, at the age of 26, for a splendid house that I had bought. There would have been no way to pay the house off by writing science fiction ... so I turned out a slew of quick sex novels. I never concealed the fact that I was doing them; it made no difference at all to me whether people knew or not. It was just a job. And it was, incidentally, a job that I did very well. I think they were outstanding erotic novels.[15]

Literary growth

In the mid-1960s, many writers in science fiction were moving away from the adventure, hard science fiction and space opera themes that often characterized the early years of the genre, and writing stories with greater literary ambitions, psychological sophistication and experimental methods (see New Wave science fiction). Frederik Pohl, then editing three science fiction magazines, offered Silverberg creative freedom in writing for them.[10] Thus inspired, Silverberg returned to the field that gave him his start, paying far more attention to depth of character development and social background than he had in the past and mixing in elements of the modernist literature he had studied at Columbia.

Silverberg continued to write rapidly—Algis Budrys reported in 1965 that he wrote and sold at least 50,000 words ("call it the equivalent of a commercial novel") weekly[12]—but the novels he wrote in this period are considered superior to his earlier work; Budrys in 1968 wrote of his surprise that "Silverberg is now writing deeply detailed, highly educated, beautifully figured books" like Thorns and The Masks of Time.[16] Perhaps the first book to indicate the new Silverberg was To Open the Sky, a fixup of stories published by Pohl in Galaxy Magazine, in which a new religion helps people reach the stars. That was followed by Downward to the Earth, a story containing echoes of material from Joseph Conrad's work,[13] in which the human former administrator of an alien world returns after the planet's inhabitants have been set free. Other acclaimed works of that time include To Live Again, in which the memories and personalities of the deceased can be transferred to other people; The World Inside, a look at an overpopulated future; and Dying Inside, a tale of a telepath losing his powers.

In the August 1967 issue of Galaxy, Silverberg published a 20,000-word novelette called "Hawksbill Station". This story earned Silverberg his first Hugo and Nebula story award nominations.[17] An expanded novel form of Hawksbill Station was published the following year. In 1969 Nightwings was awarded the Hugo for best novella. Silverberg won a Nebula award in 1970 for the short story "Passengers", two the following year for his novel A Time of Changes and the short story "Good News from the Vatican", and yet another in 1975 for his novella Born with the Dead.

Later developments

After suffering through the stresses of a major house fire[18] and a thyroid malfunction, Silverberg moved from his native New York City to the West Coast in 1972, and he announced his retirement from writing in 1975.[19] In 1980 he returned, however, with Lord Valentine's Castle,[10] a panoramic adventure set on an alien planet, which has become the basis of the Majipoor series—a cycle of stories and novels set on the vast planet Majipoor, a world much larger than Earth and inhabited by no fewer than seven different species of settlers. In a 2015 interview Silverberg said that he did not intend to write any more fiction.[20]

Silverberg received a Nebula award in 1986 for the novella Sailing to Byzantium, which takes its name from the poem by William Butler Yeats; a Hugo in 1987 for the novella Gilgamesh in the Outback, set in the Heroes in Hell universe of Bangsian Fantasy; a Hugo in 1990 for Enter a Soldier. Later: Enter Another.[2] The Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame inducted Silverberg in 1999, its fourth class of two deceased and two living writers,[3] and the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America made him its 21st SFWA Grand Master in 2005.[4]

Personal life

Silverberg has been married twice. He and Barbara Brown married in 1956, separated in 1976, and divorced a decade later. Silverberg and science fiction writer Karen Haber married in 1987.[21] They live in the San Francisco Bay Area.[8] Before the age of 30, Silverberg was independently wealthy through his investments and once owned the former mansion of New York City Mayor Fiorello La Guardia.[22][18]

Awards

Hugo Awards

  • Most Promising New Author (1956)[23]
  • Nightwings (Best Novella, 1969)[24]
  • Gilgamesh in the Outback (Best Novella, 1987)[25]
  • Enter a Soldier. Later: Enter Another (Best Novelette, 1990)[26]

Locus Award

Nebula Awards

  • Passengers (Best Short Story, 1969)[30]
  • A Time of Changes (Best Novel, 1971)[31]
  • Good News from the Vatican (Best Short Story, 1971)[31]
  • Born with the Dead (Best Novella, 1974)[32]
  • Sailing to Byzantium (Best Novella, 1985)[33]
  • Damon Knight Grand Master Award (2003)[34]

Bibliography

Main article: Robert Silverberg bibliography

See also

Notelist

  1. ^ Silverberg has used numerous pen names for his works.

References

  1. ^ a b Robert Silverberg at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database (ISFDB). Retrieved March 26, 2013.
  2. ^ a b c "Silverberg, Robert" Archived October 10, 2013, at the Wayback Machine. The Locus Index to SF Awards: Index to Literary Nominees. Locus Publications. Retrieved March 26, 2013.
  3. ^ a b "Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame". Mid American Science Fiction and Fantasy Conventions, Inc. Retrieved March 26, 2013. This was the official website of the hall of fame to 2004.
  4. ^ a b "Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master" Archived July 1, 2011, at the Wayback Machine. Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA). Retrieved March 26, 2013.
  5. ^ "Alfies Awards". Locus Online News. 2013. Retrieved February 14, 2017.
  6. ^ "Robert Silverberg". Contemporary Literary Criticism Select. Gale, Cengage Learning. 2008. Retrieved February 3, 2017.
  7. ^ Silverberg, Robert (2006). "Guardian of the Crystal Gate". In the Beginning: Tales from the Pulp Era (Introduction). Subterranean. ISBN 978-1596060432.
  8. ^ a b Horwich, About David (December 11, 2000). "Interview: Robert Silverberg". Strange Horizons. Retrieved December 24, 2016.
  9. ^ See Silverberg's afterword to the 2012 re-print of his 1959 crime novella Blood on the Mink (Hard Case Crime, ISBN 0857687689
  10. ^ a b c Latham, Rob (September 18, 2020). "Man in the Maze: A Conversation with Robert Silverberg". Los Angeles Review of Books.
  11. ^ Child, Lee (October 12, 2016). "Lee Child: Celebrating mystery fiction master MacDonald". BBC. Retrieved October 12, 2016.
  12. ^ a b Budrys, Algis (December 1965). "Galaxy Bookshelf". Galaxy Science Fiction. pp. 147–156.
  13. ^ a b "Authors: Silverberg, Robert". The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. November 4, 2016. Retrieved December 24, 2016.
  14. ^ "Don Elliott". Stark House Press. Retrieved November 22, 2019.
  15. ^ Horwich, David (December 11, 2000). "Interview: Robert Silverberg". Strange Horizons. Retrieved January 21, 2020.
  16. ^ Budrys, Algis (December 1968). "Galaxy Bookshelf". Galaxy Science Fiction. pp. 149–155.
  17. ^ Silverberg, Robert (1968). Hawksbill Station, Berkley, p. 3
  18. ^ a b "Galaxy's Stars". Galaxy Science Fiction. September 1968. p. 194.
  19. ^ "ROBERT SILVERBERG PAPERS". University of Southern Mississippi. January 15, 1935. Retrieved June 18, 2019.
  20. ^ R, Dag (July 31, 2015). "Robert Silverberg Interview". SFFWorld. Retrieved June 17, 2019.
  21. ^ "Authors : Haber, Karen : SFE : Science Fiction Encyclopedia". sf-encyclopedia.com. Retrieved June 17, 2019.
  22. ^ Dirda, Michael (November 8, 2016). "Robert Silverberg: The Philip Roth of the science fiction world". The Washington Post. Retrieved November 14, 2016.
  23. ^ "1956 Hugo Awards". The Hugo Awards. July 26, 2007. Retrieved February 13, 2017.
  24. ^ "1969 Hugo Awards". The Hugo Awards. July 26, 2007. Retrieved February 13, 2017.
  25. ^ "1987 Hugo Awards". The Hugo Awards. July 24, 2015. Retrieved February 13, 2017.
  26. ^ "1990 Hugo Awards". The Hugo Awards. July 26, 2007. Retrieved February 13, 2017.
  27. ^ "Locus Awards 1975". Science Fiction Awards Database. Retrieved February 13, 2017.
  28. ^ "Locus Awards 1981". Science Fiction Awards Database. Retrieved February 13, 2017.
  29. ^ "Locus Awards 1988". Science Fiction Awards Database. Retrieved February 13, 2017.
  30. ^ "1969 Nebula Awards". Nebula Awards. Retrieved February 13, 2017.
  31. ^ a b "1971 Nebula Awards". Nebula Awards. Retrieved February 13, 2017.
  32. ^ "1974 Nebula Awards". Nebula Awards. Retrieved February 13, 2017.
  33. ^ "1985 Nebula Awards". Nebula Awards. Retrieved February 13, 2017.
  34. ^ "2003 Nebula Awards". Nebula Awards. Retrieved February 13, 2017.

Further reading

  • Sandra Miesel, "Dreams Within Dreams" in Darrell Schweitzer (ed.). Exploring Fantasy Worlds: Essays on Fantastic Literature. San Bernardino, CA: Borgo Press, April 1985, pp. 35–42. (On the novel Son of Man.)
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