Robert Silverberg won the Hugo for Most Promising New Author in 1956 at age 21, published more than 80 stories in 1958 alone, and turned 91 this January as a Grand Master of the genre he has worked in since 1955. A complete bibliography of his work would run past 500 books, and a large share of them are anthologies he edited rather than novels he wrote.
And yet despite his storied history, he’s still not a household name that his talent level deserves. We go over just how important to the genre he really is.
Five Stories a Month
Silverberg was born January 15, 1935, in Brooklyn, and was submitting stories to the magazines in his early teens. He took an English degree at Columbia in 1956. By then he had a juvenile novel, Revolt on Alpha C, a Hugo, and a production schedule that would not fit on a calendar.
From 1956 through 1959 he averaged five published stories a month. He worked under his own name and a rotating set of pseudonyms, and often wrote with his neighbor Randall Garrett, a partnership that produced the byline Robert Randall. The field he was feeding collapsed in 1959. Silverberg pointed the same output at other markets, including carefully researched historical nonfiction and softcore paperbacks for Nightstand Books. In the 1960s he was still averaging close to two million words a year.
That pace ended in the late 1960s with a hyperactive thyroid and a house fire. The slowdown changed the work reather than lessening it.
Carte Blanche From Frederik Pohl
Frederik Pohl was editing three science fiction magazines in the mid-1960s and offered Silverberg creative freedom in all of them. Silverberg came back to the field writing with more attention to character and social texture, and with the modernist reading he had done at Columbia worked into it.
The results arrived quickly. “Hawksbill Station,” a 20,000-word novelette in the August 1967 Galaxy, earned his first Hugo and Nebula story nominations, and a novel version followed the next year. Thorns was a Hugo and Nebula novel nominee. “Nightwings” won the 1969 Hugo for best novella. “Passengers” took the 1970 Nebula for short story. A Time of Changes won the Nebula for best novel, and “Good News from the Vatican,” a story in which the cardinals elect a robot pope, took the Nebula for short story the same year. “Born with the Dead” won the Nebula for best novella.
Around those wins sit Downward to the Earth, Tower of Glass, Son of Man, The Book of Skulls, and Dying Inside, the last a novel about a telepath losing his power, set around Columbia. From 1967 through 1973 his work drew thirteen Nebula nominations and at least eleven Hugo nominations, with four wins between the two awards.
The books sold less than the nominations suggested. Poor sales on his newer, bolder work drove an announced retirement from science fiction in 1975, three years after he moved from New York to California.
The Anthologies
Editing ran alongside the fiction for the whole decade, retirement included.
In 1970 he edited The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume One, a reprint anthology covering 1929 to 1964. The Science Fiction Writers of America voted on what went in. Fifteen stories came directly from the top of the ballot, with Arthur C. Clarke’s “The Star” bumped so no writer appeared twice and “Arena” moved up in its place. Silverberg chose eleven more from the next fifteen finishers by his own judgment, for 26 stories total. The book opens with Stanley Weinbaum’s “A Martian Odyssey” and carries Asimov’s “Nightfall.” A second volume of novellas followed in 1973.
His larger contribution was New Dimensions, an original anthology series that debuted in 1971, the same year as Terry Carr’s Universe. Silverberg edited the first ten volumes alone and the last two with Marta Randall. The first volume placed second in the Locus poll for best original anthology, and Theodore Sturgeon said of it, “His writers shine in the dark.”
The third volume, published in October 1973, contains Ursula K. Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” which won the 1974 Hugo for best short story. It also contains James Tiptree Jr.’s “The Girl Who Was Plugged In,” which won the 1974 Hugo for best novella. Damon Knight, R. A. Lafferty, Barry Malzberg, Gardner Dozois, and Terry Carr filled out the same table of contents. Silverberg drew Hugo nominations for Professional Editor in 1974, 1975, and 1976 for volumes three, four, and five.
Later work extended the pattern: the Alpha reprint series, The Arbor House Treasury of Great Science Fiction Short Novels, The Fantasy Hall of Fame with Martin H. Greenberg, and Universe, which he edited with his wife, Karen Haber.
Legends
In 1998 Silverberg assembled Legends, an anthology built on a single instruction: eleven fantasy authors each wrote a new novella set in their most famous world.
The lineup was Stephen King with a Dark Tower story, Robert Jordan with The Wheel of Time prequel “New Spring,” and Ursula K. Le Guin with an Earthsea novella called “Dragonfly.” Tad Williams, Anne McCaffrey, Raymond E. Feist, Orson Scott Card, Terry Goodkind, Terry Pratchett, and Silverberg himself filled out the book. George R. R. Martin contributed “The Hedge Knight,” the first of the Dunk and Egg stories, set a generation before A Song of Ice and Fire. The Dunk and Egg stories began in an anthology Silverberg put together. This is one of the most famed anthologies of all time for good reason.
Legends II followed in 2003.
The Return and Majipoor
Silverberg’s early retirement from writing lasted until 1979. Lord Valentine’s Castle ran in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction across four issues from November 1979 to February 1980, then appeared as a book in 1980. It won the Locus Award for best fantasy novel and was nominated for the Hugo. Majipoor became the most commercial project of his career.
Valentine wakes outside the city of Pidruid with money in his pockets and no memory. He joins a troupe of jugglers and travels the planet of Majipoor, a world far larger than Earth with a population in the billions and several species living under dream-based politics. Dreams on Majipoor are a regulated service, run by the Lady of the Isle and the King of Dreams. They tell Valentine he is the deposed Coronal, his body taken from him. He raises an army, crosses the continent, and marches on Castle Mount.
The planet carried more than one book. Majipoor Chronicles followed in 1982 and Valentine Pontifex in 1983. The Mountains of Majipoor arrived in 1995, Sorcerers of Majipoor in 1997, Lord Prestimion in 1999, and King of Dreams in 2001. Silverberg returned in 2013 with Tales of Majipoor, which collected seven stories, among them the novella “The Book of Changes” from Legends II. His own contribution to the original Legends, “The Seventh Shrine,” is a Majipoor story too.
The books blend planetary romance with heroic fantasy, and the Locus Award for best fantasy novel went to the first one.
The Short Fiction Keeps Winning
The new career after 1980 kept producing award work in shorter lengths. “Sailing to Byzantium,” named for the Yeats poem, took the Nebula for novella. “Gilgamesh in the Outback,” set in the Heroes in Hell shared universe, won the 1987 Hugo. “Enter a Soldier. Later: Enter Another.” won the Hugo in 1990.
The Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame inducted him in 1999. SFWA named him a Grand Master in 2004. As of 2015 he had attended every Hugo Award ceremony since the first in 1953. That same year he said in an interview that he did not intend to write any more fiction. Subterranean Press collected his stories across nine volumes, with the first beginning at To Be Continued and the last titled The Millennium Express.
Why the Editing Gets Missed
Anthologists are credited in a way fiction writers are not. A short story gets reprinted under its author’s name for decades, and the table of contents that first carried it falls out of the footnotes. Le Guin’s “Omelas” has been anthologized in collections edited by Asimov, Card, and many others. The line that connects it to New Dimensions 3 shows up mainly in publication notes.
That is the argument for this piece. A writer who drew award nominations in seven straight years, then spent the same decade deciding which other writers got room to publish, and then returned with a bestselling fantasy series, has more than one body of work to track. Most of the credit lands on the first and the last. The middle is the part that put Le Guin and Tiptree in the same book.
Le Guin’s Hugo-winning story and Tiptree’s Hugo-winning novella both debuted in the same 1973 volume. How many other award winners from that era first appeared in anthologies whose editors have dropped out of the conversation?
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