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The Stochastic Writer
(Robert Silverberg)

Here was the idea: write science fiction, yes, rigorous, well-plotted, logically extrapolative science fiction but bring to it the full range of modern literary technique. Write it as Nabokov or Phillip Roth, Malamud or John Cheever would have written science fiction, as if Fred Pohl had come to them at a Milford Conference and had whispered, "I'll guarantee acceptance at our highest word rate, just do the best you can." As if Betty Ballantine or Lawrence Ashmead had sent an open appeal to the faculty at Iowa and Stanford Creative Writing Workshops: "I don't care how you write or what you write as long as I don't have to argue with the Board about it being science fiction." This was sometime around 1960. "I just got bored with being a hack," Robert Silverberg told me a decade later, "I just wanted to try something different." So he tried something different. Up the Line. Thorns. "The Feast of St. Dionysius." Born with the Dead. "Good News from the Vatican." Oh boy, those were different.

Well, okay. Alfred Bester, another Grand Master (1987), was trying the same thing in the 1970s, so was Theodore Sturgeon in that decade (no Grand Master for Sturgeon, he died in 1985, a few years too soon), and the Kuttners, Catherine and Henry, were lighting it up in the 1940s all the way through John Campbell's Astounding. (No Grand Master for the Kuttners either, Henry was dead in 1958 before the SFWA was born and Catherine never published a line of science fiction after his death.) Sturgeon, Bester, the Kuttners: fierce and in the fire long before our New Wave. But Silverberg's work in its grace, deliberativeness and great aggregation was not so much their successor as proof of a proposal: You really could do this stuff to the highest level of literary intent and it would be better science fiction precisely because of that.

A revelation! Of course there were others who started at about the same time (whereas Silverberg had already had one career) who were doing this as well. Ballard, Aldiss, Gene Wolfe, Ursula K. Le Guin, and maybe the merciless Raphael Aloysius Lafferty. But no one this prolific. The man was not only at the front of a movement, he was through fecundity virtually a movement himself.

So then and not a year too soon (a few years too late in fact) a celebration. Like Wallace Shawn's Designated Mourner I perch as Designated Celebrant. This had better cajole humility, for our newest Grand Master is indeed his own celebration. He needs no sounding brass, tinkling cymbal, not from me anyway.

But let me, as Allan Tate said of an Emily Dickinson poem, consider the situation.

An essay about our Grand Master, not about me, of course. But let me nonetheless note that I wrote Silverberg's profile for the Special Issue (4/74) of Fantasy & Science Fiction dedicated to him and a year later the introduction to the Pocket Books collection The Best of Robert Silverberg. Nice rounding effect, surely. In the magazine essay I proclaimed the author's height to be five feet seven inches and his condition as the best living writer in English. Both judgments discombobulated their ever-poised subject and so in the Introduction to the collection I had another go, estimating his height at a fraction under six feet (he has subsequently informed me that he is actually five feet ten inches tall) and adding less grandiloquently that Silverberg could be termed one of the ten best living writers in the language, thus grouping him with the aforementioned Malamud, Roth, Nabokov, etc. This latter correction made him blush only a shade less brightly but I have nonetheless always regretted; my first judgment was closer to correct. Nabokov published Transparent Things that year and Malamud's Dubin's Lives lay ahead of him but neither was worth a Mass. Born with the Dead is worth a Mass. (Roth did become indisputably great but that took another twenty years.)

And another personal note: in 1984 our Grand Master introduced me in Brooklyn to his mother, Helen. She was—like my own mother, two years deceased then—a retired schoolteacher who over a period of at least twenty years had coincidentally lived less than a mile from my own dear Mom. I said to Helen in the most bemused fashion, "Your son has always been ahead of me and I don't mean just chronologically. He is in fact the Stations of my Cross. I am a science fiction writer from Brooklyn, he is the science fiction writer from Brooklyn. My first science fiction story was a 1,200-word squib in the August 1967 Galaxy, your son had the lead novella ("Hawksbill Station") in that issue. I through luck and circumstance sell a couple of novels to Random House, he sells Random House Born with the Dead. I sell a 1,000-word story to the gorgeous new Omni and two months later he sells them a novelette and then another and then another and then another. I publish a few okay science fiction novels, he publishes twenty masterpieces. I take my mother into a backdate magazine store on Nostrand Avenue in 1980 and she says to the proprietor 'My son writes science fiction' and the proprietor says, 'The mother of another science fiction writer comes in here for his magazines all the time. She is so proud of him.' (My mother was not proud of me.) I might say that this was kind of humiliating except that he gives me honor by being my friend. He is not only ahead of me, he is ahead of us all."

Certainly true in 1984 and had already been so for almost twenty years. The accomplishment is so astonishing that the Grand Master conveyed is obiter dicta. Had he not gotten his right soon, right quick, the award would have been an embarrassment to any other recipient.

The acclaimed masterpieces—Dying Inside, The Book of Skulls, Tower of Glass—are indisputable of course but—ah, Fast Eddie Felsen, patron saint of the circumstantially challenged!—my deepest caritas is for the Silverberg novels at least as good which, because of his sheer prolificacy, never attracted the attention they deserved. The Second Trip (Bester's Demolished Man turned another way and ignited), The Stochastic Man, probably the best of all science fiction novels of politics, and the fierce and riotous Up the Line—the time travel novel about the man who pursued, won and bedded his remote ancestress—is as stylistically poised, rococo, savagely baroque as anything by Bester and also over-the-top humorous, a comic novel to stand with Voltaire's or those of Peter de Vries. Grand Masters get their due but not necessarily all of their works.

Silverberg himself has dated the true beginning of his more intense and literary work to 1962 with the short story "To See the Invisible Man," a riff out of Borges which was the first story written for Fred Pohl's magazines under an unusual contractual arrangement which gave Silverberg, story by story, utter creative freedom. (The arrangement: Pohl would buy the story submitted although he could then terminate the agreement. Silverberg found this to be utterly liberating, he could write to stylistic or subjectual limit, absolved of rejection.) "To See the Invisible Man," a narrative of social cruelty and alienation unusual for its elegance and restraint in the penumbra of a brutal theme, was more than commendable but its skill and force are in fact well foreshadowed in some of the earlier work. What Silverberg called his yard-goods period in the 1955-1960 period was yard goods only to him. "Birds of a Feather" (carnival time in the spaceways), "Warm Man" (more alienation), "The Iron Chancellor" (a house which could have been wired by Gallegher and locked by Kuttner), are considerable. Yard goods there were also, assigned space-filler for the Ziff-Davis magazines, but the early Ace Doubles show real craft and are better than most of the work surrounding them. (In an introduction written in 1978 for a reissue of those Ace Doubles Silverberg noted without inflection how many readers there were who felt that these were his best work, work before he had gone into the valleys of pretension, and he dedicated one of those reissues to such readers.)

Conventional wisdom, an oxymoron if one ever existed, gives us an "early" (pre-1967), transcendent "middle" (1967-1978) and somewhat lesser "late" (to the present) Silverberg but conventional wisdom is like payback. Conventional wisdom with its glass eye, cane, and small, blurry features stumbles through the servants' entrance and falls down the stairs. From that "late" period came the novellas "In Another Country," "The Secret Sharer," "Sailing to Byzantium," came "Hot Sky at Midnight," came "Blindsight," which was one of the brilliant dozen stories done for Playboy, and these are not only at the level of "middle" Silverberg but in some cases ("Another Country" in the 3/89 Asimov and published by Tor the most serious culprit) perhaps beyond. Unlike so many of us our Grand Master got larger as he went on.

An early (1974) collection of mine is dedicated to "Robert Silverberg, the best one." He's the best two and three as well. All the dozens, all the variegate colors, all of the fire. I wrote when he was writing, I published in some of the places he published contemporaneously. These are my greatest accomplishment by proxy.

 

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