Reflections and Refractions

by Robert Silverberg

Genres: Science Fiction

Synopsis

Nearly twenty years ago Robert Silverberg began writing a monthly column of opinion and commentary, for Galileo Magazine, Amazing Stories, and then for Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine. Now he has chosen the liveliest and most relevant of his hundreds of magazine columns for the present collection. They constitute a vivid chronicle of events both in science fiction and the world in general over the past two decades. Robert Silverberg is one of the great veterans of fantasy and science fiction. During the course of a career that has now stretched across more than forty years, he has written dozens of novels and hundreds of short stories, many of them considered classics of the genre. He has won more major award nominations than any other writer in his field, and no less than nine Hugo and Nebula awards, the key s-f/fantasy trophies. His books have been translated into some eighteen languages and his short stories have appeared in every science-fiction and fantasy magazine in the world, as well as in Omni, Playboy, and Penthouse.

Release date: November 28, 2013

Publisher: Orion Publishing Group

Print pages: 425

Sample

The Latin word for “bridge” is pons and a builder of bridges, in Latin, is a pontifex. Pontifex also was the term for a member of the college of Roman priests whose original responsibility was to see that the bridges were in good repair, and the chief priest of that group was known as the Pontifex Maximus. When Augustus, the first Roman emperor, consolidated all power into his hands by a process of having himself named to all the important governmental offices, he became, among many other things, the Pontifex Maximus; and all his successors on the imperial throne held that post after him.

Eventually the Empire was gone, but Rome itself, of course, remained, now under the control of the Bishop of Rome as head of the Catholic Church. During the Renaissance, amid a general revival of interest in classical antiquity, the old word pontifex began to come back into use as a way of referring to the local high priest, who by this time was, of course, the Catholic Bishop of Rome—that is, the Pope. Out of this usage comes our English word “pontiff” as a synonym for Pope; and, in the early nineteenth century, came by secondary derivation the word “pontificate,” meaning “to issue dogmatic decrees.” Anyone could pontificate, not just a Pope; all that was required was the possession of a few strongly held opinions and the willingness to speak out emphatically about them. That brings us a long way from bridge-building, but that’s how languages operate.

We have, of course, plenty of such pontificators amongst us now. I am, I suppose, one of them, and I’m about to present you with an entire thick volume of my pontifications.

A little private joke is involved here, because I have on various occasions since about 1957 voiced a willingness to be named the actual Pope of Christendom whenever a vacancy has developed in the post. This irreverent fantasy of mine stems, I think, from my reading during my college days of Frederic Rolfe’s famous novel Hadrian the Seventh, which is about an obscure English clergyman who through an astonishing sequence of unlikely but strangely plausible events does get to be Pope and sets about launching a furious campaign of ecclesiastical reform.

My own claim to the papacy is more tenuous even than that of Rolfe’s Hadrian, since I am neither a Roman Catholic clergyman nor in fact a Christian at all (and am married, besides). But I did envision a process of investiture that would begin with my baptism at dawn, followed by my entry into Holy Orders and swift rise all morning through the ranks to the College of Cardinals, and my selection as Pope by nightfall, after which I would abolish priestly celibacy, welcome the Church of England and other separated groups back into the fold, appoint various science-fiction writers as Cardinals, and otherwise turn the venerable Catholic Church topsy-turvy. I would also have the pleasure of choosing my own regnal name. For a time I toyed with the notion of becoming Peter the Second, not just for the grandeur of the idea but because I was, like the original Peter, born a Jew; but then I decided that taking so lofty a name would be an act of hybris, or at least overweening chutzpah, and so I fixed on the idea of calling myself Sixtus the Sixth, there having been five previous Popes named Sixtus. (The fifth of them is the one responsible for the Sistine Chapel.)

Well, I never did become Pope, though I managed to have a robot Pope choose the name Sixtus VI in a story called “Good News from the Vatican,” and I tipped my tiara to my old blasphemous ambition in my novel Lord Valentine’s Castle by giving the title of Pontifex to the Emperor of Majipoor. But one thing I have done in my time is plenty of pontificating in the larger, metaphorical sense—spraying opinions far and wide on the subject I know best, which is science fiction.

Science-fiction readers, by and large, are ferocious pontificators. These days, I guess, most of them disseminate their views by electronic means, but long before the Internet was a reality, as far back, indeed, as the early 1930s, there was a network of low-circulation privately published little magazines—“fanzines”—in which any s-f aficionado who happened to own a typewriter felt empowered to cut loose with uninhibited blasts of opinion on all matters having to do with their favorite kind of reading matter. A few of these magazines, particularly at the beginning of the fanzine movement, were elegantly printed from hand-set type; but most were crudely produced items reproduced by such methods, largely obsolete today, as mimeography, hektography, and dittography. I know. I published one of them myself, an effusion called Spaceship, between 1949 and 1955, abandoning it only when I moved over from the pontificating side of things to the productive side and became a professional science-fiction writer.

The vehemence with which I expressed my pontifical opinions, in my days as a science-fiction fan, sometimes proved a little embarrassing later on. For example, I have here the Fall-Winter 1952 issue of Fantastic Worlds, one of the more attractive fanzines of its era (it was produced by the relatively costly photo-offset process) in which I hold forth about a new professional science-fiction magazine called Fantastic and its editor, Howard Browne. My piece begins:

“How Howard Browne has been able to reconcile his career-long ambition to edit a top-quality science-fiction magazine, one which will rank with the best in tone, format, and content, with his career-long profession of editing the two poorest (and admitted so by Browne himself) professional magazines of the field, will long remain one of publishing’s greatest mysteries.”

After flaming Browne up and down and sideways for his poor editorial performance, I go on to discuss his new magazine Fantastic and I express my astonishment that this time he had actually done something worthwhile. I end my little essay with the magnanimous hope that Fantastic would prosper and thrive, but since the whole thrust of my remarks was surprise that Browne had turned out to be capable of producing a magazine that intelligent adults would want to read (I was 17 at the time), he was hardly likely to have been flattered by my appended praise and good wishes.

Nor was he. In that very same issue of Fantastic Worlds appeared Browne’s reply to my strictures. He began by quoting a Mid-western newspaper editor who, when under attack, replied, “These jackals grow too bold.” Point by point he refuted my various impugnings of his prior editorial performance. Then he added, “Mr. Silverberg’s almost ecstatic reaction to the first two issues of Fantastic, our new digest-sized publication, is gratifying. But I have no illusions because of it. That segment of fandom which writes most of the letters to editors, puts out fanzines, and joins fan clubs is famous for building heroes one day and tearing them down the next—both with little justification. When this group discovers that the second issue of Fantastic contains a long suspense story containing not one bit of fantasy or science, I shall probably be damned as a traitor to the field.” And so on, in a good-humored way that made it clear that Browne didn’t give a damn what science-fiction fandom in general, or Bob Silverberg in particular, thought of any of his magazines: his goal was simply to find a format that would sell a lot of copies each month.

Well, so be it, I thought, flattered that my little article had elicited Browne’s attention, and went on with my life. It never occurred to me that he might actually have been stung, at least for a moment or two, by my words.

Three years later—an endless span of time, for the adolescent that I was—I made the transition from fan to writer, partly as a result of a scathing review of a science-fiction novel that I did for my high-school newspaper, which brought me to the attention of the publisher of that novel and led to my getting a book contract from that publisher. One sale led to another and before long I was getting my stories published all over the place; and one of the people with whom I found myself doing business, eventually, was Howard Browne, the editor of Fantastic and its companion magazine, Amazing Stories. I had forgotten all about my denunciation of Browne by that time. But Browne hadn’t.

He had known all along, from the first moment that I came to him with my stories, that I was the kid who had written that brash 1952 fanzine article. But he bided his time, while over a period of six months or so I sold him story after story. Then, one day early in 1956 when I showed up at Browne’s Manhattan office to deliver my latest mediocre-but-acceptable offering, he had that copy of Fantastic Worlds on his desk. He grinned and pushed it across to me while I reddened in chagrin. “Remember this?” he said. He wondered if I still thought so little of his editorial abilities, now that he was buying material so frequently from me.

I stammered something about the impetuousness of youth, and he forgave me for my adolescent indiscretion and went on buying stories from me, quite a few, for the rest of his editorial career. A less magnanimous man would have tossed me out of his office the first time I dared to turn up there; but Howard was a gentleman and a pro. He didn’t quite cure me of pontificating, of course. But he did teach me to be a little less exuberant in my self-righteous belligerence, and thus helped me to become the mild-mannered man I am today.

During the first decade of my career as a professional writer I wrote, as a sideline activity, a fair number of reviews of my colleagues’ new books—not for fanzines, any more, but for such professional magazines of the time as Infinity and Science Fiction Stories. In the main I was more generous to them than I had been earlier to Howard Browne, because I knew that my colleagues were, like me, hapless mortal beings struggling to do their best. I preferred to praise books rather than slam them, and even when I did slam one I tried to find something to praise (“But yet one live, quivering story right in the middle of all this pretentious claptrap and pastiche bears witness to the fact that X can write, and write superbly. …”) Eventually, though, I came to feel uncomfortable about the whole process of passing judgment on the work of my peers, and stopped doing book reviews altogether, with just a few rare exceptions, somewhere about 1970.

But that doesn’t mean I ceased to have opinions—about the books I was reading, about the most effective methods of telling a story, about literary style, about the policies of publishers, about political leaders, about society in general. Instead of expressing them in cogent little pieces for mimeographed fanzines or second-rank newsstand magazines, though, I uttered them to my wife, my friends, my cat, my houseplants, or any other reasonably willing auditor; and so a lot of really dogmatic Silverbergian pontification was forever lost to the world in the years between, approximately, 1965 and 1978.

Charlie Ryan put a stop to that.

He was the editor, then, of a sprightly science-fiction magazine called Galileo, which then was making a game attempt to establish itself in competition with much more securely financed publications. In May, 1978 he wrote to me and said, “I’d like to tempt you. … I’d like you to consider writing a column for us, on a regular basis, on s-f, its strengths and weaknesses.” And suggested a few topics for me to deal with: “Is the fact many authors are writing one, two, and in many cases more books on contract resulting in lesser quality? … Is there too much s-f being written for anyone to read it all? How do you balance a literary s-f story with the expected sense of adventure and wonder?”

At that time I had been absent from the science-fiction world for about four years, going through what was (I’m still not sure) either an extended vacation or a long period of writer’s block or a virulent midlife crisis. But in the spring of 1978 I resolved to return—that was when I agreed to write Lord Valentine’s Castle—and Charlie Ryan’s offer of a bi-monthly column struck me as a good way to re-establish my visibility in the field. I was eager to re-establish my connection with the field of fiction that had been the center of my imaginative experience since my boyhood. The truth was that I missed science fiction and the conspicuous role that I had since the mid-1960s in shaping it. So I accepted Galileo’s invitation to do a regular commentary piece gladly and eagerly, and indeed with some relief; and for the next couple of years held forth with might and main in Galileo’s pages on this subject and that, to the edification and, I hope, delight of Charlie’s unfortunately rather modest number of readers.

The realities of publishing economics did Galileo in with its sixteenth issue, which was dated January, 1980. By then I had done six columns for it—you will find some of them reprinted here—and I was definitely back in harness with the bit between my teeth. Scarcely had Galileo been laid to rest but I had an offer from Elinor Mavor, then the editor, at several levels of succession from Howard Browne, of the venerable Amazing Stories, to move my column to her magazine. Which I did, beginning with the May, 1981 Amazing; and there I held forth for thirteen years, through one change of publisher, three changes of editor (Mavor to George Scithers to Pat Price to Kim Mohan), one change in the column’s name (from “Opinion” to “Reflections”) and a total transformation of the magazine’s physical appearance. There I was, spouting off on any topic that happened to interest me that month, for more than a hundred columns.

Amazing too went the way of all magazines in 1994, two years short of its seventieth birthday. Caught without a podium for my orations and thoroughly accustomed now to orating, I adroitly transferred the site of my column to the monthly magazine Asimov’s Science Fiction, which had emerged in the 1980s as the dominant s-f publication of its era and now, under the inspired editorship of Gardner Dozois, was essential reading for anyone interested in the state of the science-fiction art. Isaac Asimov, the guiding spirit of the magazine, had written its editorial column every issue since the magazine’s inception, but his death in June, 1992 had left the slot for that column vacant, and editor Dozois was troubled by the loss of continuity and personality that the end of Isaac’s column had caused. So I was gladly welcomed to fill those gigantic shoes; and I was glad enough to do it. Asimov’s, which everybody in the field read with care, was the perfect place to pontificate from, and I have happily contributed dozens of essays to its pages over the past three years, with, I hope, many more to come.

The present fat book, then, has been in the making, essentially, for nearly fifty years—from my first smartass comments on science fiction in the smudgy mimeographed fanzines of the late 1940s to last month’s column in Asimov’s. What I have brought together here is most of my columns from Galileo, Amazing Stories, and Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, along with occasional pieces written for other publications and some essays originally intended as introductions to new editions of my own books. They cover a span of thirty years or so of my life. The tone of my essay-writing has changed, somewhat, during my five-decade evolution from wiseacre brat to somber and weary eminence grise. But certain positions remain consistent.

From start to finish, for example, these essays are grounded in my belief that the world we inhabit and the universe that contains it are intensely interesting places full of wonders and miracles, and that one way we can bring ourselves closer to an appreciation, if not an understanding, of those wonders and miracles is through reading science fiction. There is also—consistently—the recognition that not all science fiction is equally valuable for that purpose, that in fact a lot of it is woeful junk; and I can be seen, again and again, expressing the same kind of displeasure with mediocre, cynical, or debased science fiction that I was voicing when I sounded off at Howard Browne in 1952.

Which is not to say that I haven’t written plenty of stories myself over those forty years that fail to live up to my own lofty standards of execution, some because my skills have not been equal to my vision, and some because circumstances (like the need to pay the rent) led me to knock out some quick piece of formula prose instead of taking the time to turn out another award-winning classic. I am as human as the next guy, after all.

But my own literary sins, and they are numerous, haven’t kept me from crying out in the public square against those who, for the sake of a dollar or two, would transform science fiction into something less than it can be. I know how the finest s-f can pry open the walls of the universe for an intelligent and inquisitive reader, for it has done that for me since I was ten or eleven years old, and it angers me to see writers and editors and publishers refusing even to make the attempt. In my own best fiction I have tried to achieve for other readers what H.G. Wells and Jules Verne and Robert A. Heinlein and Isaac Asimov and Jack Vance and A.E. van Vogt and Theodore Sturgeon and fifty other wonderful writers achieved for me ever since the time I first stumbled, wide-eyed and awe-struck, into the world of science fiction. And in many of the essays in this book I try, perhaps with the same naive idealism that I aimed at poor Howard Browne in 1952, to advocate the creation of more science fiction of that high kind and to urge the spurning the drab simple-minded stuff that leads us away from the real exaltation that an intense encounter with the fabric of space and time can provide.

There are also some essays here examining the foibles and oddities of the present-day world. I have to confess that even the best of science-fiction writers have no more access to the secret recesses of space and time than you do; the sources of their fiction lie in part in their own souls, in part in the reading and studying that they do, and in part in their observation of the world around them. I do plenty of observing, and plenty of rueful shaking of my head; and because I am a man of profound common sense (or, as some might say, a man of increasingly crotchety prejudices) I deplore a lot of what I see. Since I have a thousand words a month at my disposal in which to express my thoughts, I often tell my readers about those deplorable things, perhaps with some hope of winning allies in my lifelong crusade against idiocy and irrationality, or—perhaps—just to get some things off my chest.

My basic attitude in these essays, I suppose, can be called libertarian/conservative, though a lot of people nowadays who call themselves libertarians or conservatives often say things that appall me. (I am not such a doctrinaire libertarian that I favor the abolition of government inspection of food products or an end to government regulation of the manufacturers of medicines; I am not such a doctrinaire conservative that I look kindly on governmental attempts to legislate personal morality, or favor mandatory religious instruction in state schools. And so forth.)

Very likely you will find me advocating a number of positions with which you disagree. It would surprise me if you didn’t. If we all held the same set of beliefs on everything, the world would be a dreary thing indeed, and so would this book. Grant me, as a minimum, that in all my thinking I am trying to grope my way toward sane answers to crazy problems, and if I come to conclusions that you don’t share, it’s not because I’m a black-hearted villain or an eager oppressor of the unfortunate but because—having spent a lot of my life imagining myself living a million light-years from Earth or a million chronological years from the present day—I’ve come to feel that a lot of what goes on all around me in the actual world I inhabit doesn’t make a lot of sense, and, because I have the privilege of saying so in print, I do say so, with the small and faint hope that I am thereby nudging the world a little closer to rationality.

And, finally, there are some pieces in here that deal with my long career as a science-fiction writer: editors I have dealt with, writers I have known, events in my writing life, commentary on my own books and stories. Whatever else the life of a professional writer can sometimes be—exhausting, frustrating, bewildering, even frightening—it is rarely dull; and it has been my great good luck to spend nearly half of this rapidly expiring twentieth century right in the midst of that strange and wonderful literary microcosm called science-fiction publishing. I’ve known almost everyone involved in it, and experienced just about everything that an s-f writer can experience, and I have a lot of tales to tell about those experiences, some of which—just a few—I tell here. It’s as close to a formal autobiography as I’ll ever write, I suspect.

I offer these reminiscences and self-referential essays without apology, not only because I enjoyed writing them but also because I think you’ll find them of interest. (Modesty is not a trait widely found among writers. The successful ones are those who are convinced, at least while they’re actually at work, that what they’re writing, whatever it may be, is inherently interesting to other people and will find an immediate, eager, happy audience. Without that conviction, I imagine it would be very hard for writers to push themselves all the way from the first page of a story to the last.)

So, then. Herewith a bunch of essays on science-fiction, science, and various other matters, written by someone who has very gradually grown old and gray dreaming about far galaxies and other dimensions and somehow still keeps at it, writing stories about people and places who never existed. Being a professional science-fiction writer is, I have to admit, a very peculiar way to have spent your whole adult life. But so be it; that is the choice I made, unhesitatingly, a long time ago; and here are some of the thoughts that have occurred to me along the way.

—Robert SilverbergOakland, CaliforniaApril, 1996

Enwonderment.

It’s an awful word. It’s mine. I literally dreamed it up.

One night I was addressing some congregation of teachers in my sleep—the keynote speaker at an imaginary academic hoedown that I must have conjured out of too much Nepalese lamb curry, or was it the appetizer of baked spleen at that Lebanese restaurant that did it to me?—and I heard myself telling the assembled educators that it was important for them to foster a state of “enwonderment” in their pupils. It was, I suppose, some sort of cockeyed linguistic analogy with “empowerment,” which everybody is talking about these days, or perhaps the root word was “enrichment,” which I gather is still one of the big academic buzzwords.

You know how a dream can be so horrible that it wakes you up? You’re in a natural history museum, say, and suddenly the fossil dinosaurs start snorting and snuffling and chasing you through the halls like a bunch of velociraptors out of Jurassic Park. Or you’re arriving at the hotel where the World Science Fiction Convention is about to take place and just as you enter the crowded lobby you notice that you’ve forgotten to put your clothes on that morning. The alarms go off in your dreaming mind, and you find yourself wide awake, sweating and muttering, reassuring yourself as best you can that whatever it was you dreamed is in fact not happening to you at all.

That’s how it was with me and “enwonderment.” A really gross linguistic construction upsets me the way getting chased around a museum by velociraptors would upset most other people. And so I awakened with the nasty sound of that word still ringing in my mind, and the recollection that it was I, the urbane and literate Robert Silverberg, who had uttered it in front of an audience of professional educators.

[Asimov’s Science Fiction, September 1994]

And yet—and yet—

Forget about what a klutzy-sounding word it is. Indigestion or not, I think my dreaming mind may have been on to something. For is it not true that one of the primary things we science-fiction writers try to accomplish is to bring a note of, well, enwonderment to our readers’ minds—to startle and delight and astonish them with miraculous and magical visions of wondrous things?

I say one of the primary things because there are many sorts of science fiction, and many different things that people look for in the particular kind of s-f they read. Some like to read about clever gadgets and their applications to tough problems. Some are after sociological or technological or political speculations about the near future. Some are turned on by social satire (which usually means that they like reading stories that make fun of things they don’t like.) Some have an inexhaustible appetite for grand epics of future galactic empires built on analogies with Rome and Byzantium, and others prefer trips back to Rome or Byzantium themselves. Some want to get embroiled in a futuristic mystery; some like tales of heroic Schwarzeneggeresque action involving lots of splashy weapons; some—

Different folks, different strokes. There’s enough s-f around for everyone’s tastes.

My own s-f reading over the past five decades has embodied some of all of the above. The names of the magazines I read in my youth indicate the range: Astounding Science Fiction one day, for the gadgetry and sociological speculations; Planet Stories the next for the ray-gun and spaceship stuff; Famous Fantastic Mysteries for the trips back in time to lost empires. But what I was really searching for most of the time, and what I have tried to embody above all else in my own writing since I made the big shift from consumer of science fiction to creator of it about forty years ago, is passages that give me the verbal equivalent of what I feel when I stare up at the stars in the night sky, or peer into the eyepiece of a microscope at a drop of water teeming with protozoa, or walk the columned aisles of a Roman or Egyptian temple thousands of years old. Passages like these:

“When at last the time for migration was approaching, a specially designed vegetation was shipped to Neptune and established in the warm area to fit it for man’s use. Animals, it was decided, would be unnecessary. Subsequently a specially designed human species, the Ninth Men, was transported to man’s new home. The giant Eighth Men could not themselves inhabit Neptune. The trouble was not merely that they could scarcely support their own weight, let alone walk, but that the atmospheric pressure on Neptune was unendurable. For the great planet bore a gaseous envelope thousands of miles deep. The solid globe was scarcely more than the yolk of a huge egg. …”

“In my mundane consciousness I could never have imagined the existence, anywhere in this universe, of this thousand-peaked range of glistening black and bloodred rock, bordering a steaming sea of dull silver under a sky that was not blue but that consisted of unbearably blinding mother-of-pearl and opal fish scales, behind which lurked the blackness of space.”

“It had not been fear of physical menace that had shaken his reason, nor the appearance of the creature—he could recall nothing of how it looked. It had been a feeling of sadness infinitely compounded which had flooded through him at the instant, a sense of tragedy, of grief insupportable and unescapable, of infinite weariness. He had been flicked with emotions many times too strong for his spiritual fiber and which he was no more fitted to experience than an oyster is to play a violin.

“He felt that he had learned all about the High Ones a man could learn and still endure. He was no longer curious. The shadow of that vicarious emotion ruined his sleep, brought him sweating out of dreams.”

“I cannot convey the sense of abominable desolation that hung over the world. The red eastern sky, the northward blackness, the salt Dead Sea, the stony beach crawling with these foul, slow-stirring monsters, the uniform poisonous-looking green of the lichenous plants, the thin air that hurts one’s lungs; all contributed to an appalling effect. I moved on a hundred years, and there was the same red sun—a little larger, a little duller—the same dying sea, the same chill air, and the same crowd of earthy crustacea creeping in and out among the green weed and the red rocks. And in the westward sky I saw a curved pale line like a vast new moon.”

“Worlds young. … warm. … volcanic and steaming. … the single cell emerging from the slime of warm oceans to propagate on primordial continents. … other worlds, innumerable. … life divergent in all branches from the single cell. … amorphous globules. … amphibian. … crustacean. … reptilian. … plant. … insect. … bird. … mammal. … all possible variations of combinations. … crystalline beings sentient and reasoning. … great shimmering columnar forms, seemingly liquid, defying gravity by some strange power of cohesion. …”

“I talked with the mind of Yiang-Li, a philosopher from the cruel empire of Tsan-Chan, which is to come in 5,000 AD; with that of a general of the great-headed brown people who held South Africa in 50,000 B.C.; with that of a twelfth-century Florentine monk named Bartolomeo Corsi; with that of a king of Loma