WHO WRITES THIS STUFF: ROBERT SILVERBERG

Robert Silverberg was the only chid of a solidly middle-class Jewish family in Brooklyn. He was born in 1935, and his CPA father and school teacher mother both encouraged and indulged his precocious intellect. But he could, at times, be a trying child. His interest in ichthyology charmed a local fishmonger into securing for him a live eel. He kept it in the family bathtub only until his mother returned home from her daily teaching stint. Silverberg saw for himself a future in science, but then, at the age of fourteen, he discovered his first science fiction magazine at the local drugstore. These opened to him new visions of future worlds and changed his life. In writing Other Spaces Other Times he has a clear sense of his audience. 

You understand. You've had the same experience or you wouldn't be reading this book.

The book he is talking about is not Other Spaces Other Times., the book where I encountered the quote. The quote is dated 1987. and the compilation of autobiographical essays is copywright 2009. Silverberg says it is not his intention to write a formal autobiography, and he doesn't. This compilation of introductions to reprints of his work, columns he wrote for Galaxy magazine, and stray autobiographical fragments can be repetitive, but it gives an excellent and entertaining insight into how this successful and innovative science fiction author made a career as a freelance writer from the time he was 19 years old until the seventh decade of his life when he composed this anthology.

Silverberg was a self-professed writing machine for the SF magazine trade of the late 1950's. He began publishing shortly before getting his degree from Columbia University, and his partnership with the older, alcoholic Randall Garrett got him into the most lucrative magazine markets of the 1950's. With Garrety he would start a story in the morning and have Garrett finish it that afternoon. The could do a 40,000 word novel in two days. Garrett established them as contract writers whose work was guaranteed to appear in publications under either their own or a stock list of pseudonyms. As a teenager, one of Silverberg's favorite writers for Imaginative Tales was Alexander Blade, an author he did not realize until he wrote for the magazine himself a decade later was a fiction. His final story forImaginative Tales appeared under the Blade name, bringing to an end both Silverberg's involvement with such publication and coinciding with the death of the publications as well.

In 1958, the SF magazine market imploded, victim to over-saturation and the rise of paperback books. Silverberg took his first retirement from the field and started writing successful nonfiction for the young adult trade. It was Fredrick Pohl, an SF writer now editor of Galaxy magazine, who brought Silverberg back into the SF fold. From the mid 1960's until 1975. Silverberg wrote some of his best novels, but by his own account the literary ambitions of writers from this period alienated their readership. Star Warsand Tolkien influenced science fantasy dominated. It attempted to suffocate the field for the next decade. It's not surprising that old hands like Silverberg began to look elsewhere. He specialized in nonfiction on exotic topics for the YA market. When he returned to SF, it seems that he had absorbed the Star Wars/Tolkien lesson. He wrote the mammoth Majippoornovels and anthologies, creating a future world with all the accoutrements of a kind of fantasy he had previously abjured. (I confess I am offering this opinion without having actually read any of these novels, but the have what look like knights on the over and they can be 600 pages long.)

Other Spaces Other Time ends with Silverberg reminsicing about past WorldComs and other good times. This is not a high note, and ranks with the publishers packaging of the book as its least desirable traits. Non Stop Press has chosen an PLC presentation. This is a slick pictorial binding that makes the book look like a stray volume from a 1970's children's science encyclopedia. The interest here lies in what Silverberg has to offer as insights into what it meant to be a freelance SF writer for five last five decades of the 20th century.

WHO WRITES THIS STUFF: JACK WILLIAMSON

I cannot imagine anyone not taking a liking to Jack Williamson. I am talking here of Jack Williamson the man, not necessarily the SF writer. Born in 1908, he wrote both before during and after the Golden Age, but the bulk of the work is from a period that increasingly requires either a historical curiosity on the part of the reader or a fondness for retro motifs and styles. I base my opinion on Jack Williamson as a person on his engaging memoir Wonder's Child, first published in 1984. (Williamson died in 2006)

In many ways, Wonder's Child is a workmanlike memoir -- then I did this, then we went, etc. But its down-to-earthness is a supple counterpoint to a man who began publishing fantastic fiction when he was 20 years old. Like all fans who became writers in his day, Williamson discovered SF as a boy in magazines kept on the newstands of the local drug or candy store. He was hooked from the start, and his memoir's title says clearly why. It was the wonder of it all. The possibilities of space flight and the seemingly miraculous future science held in the offing.

We think of many mid-twentieth-century American writers as "children of the Great Depression," but Williams was in his late twenties when the world economy tumbled. His family was by no means wealthy. His father was unsuccessful in both farming and small business, but they always got by. And Jack was receiving periodic checks in from the pulps to the tune of $100 to $500 dollars. This was very good if sporadic money, and he and his brother and the sf writer Edward Hamilton often used these paydays as the excuse for a road trip. These trips lasted till the money ran out and often involved working or bumming their way back to New Mexico. Jack spent some time in college, again until the money ran out, and when he found himself depressed during the Great Depression he relocated to Topeka, Kansas, to undergo psychoanalysis at the Menninger Clinic. He had great respect for one of the doctors he worked with there, but this episode came to end when he could no longer afford the $5 per hour sessions.

Possibly of historical interest only

After some training, he became a meteorologist for the Navy during WW II. He was in the South Pacific for only a brief period before Hiroshima ended the Pacific War. When he returned to the U.S. he felt alienated from the emerging SF scene. The wonder was gone and a darker mood of political speculation, apocalyptic scenarios, and social satire had taken its place.

...the bomb, I think, was the overriding reason. The long black shadow of the mushroom cloud had fallen over all of us in science fiction. Sooner, I think, than it touched most people, because we understood it earlier. It put a dark stop to the age of wonder as I had known it. Science, before, had been revealing total truth, or seeming to, and unlocking splendid power. Suddenly now the truth had become too terrible to tell, the power too much for us to handle.


Williamson continued to write for the next fifty years, but reading his memoir you see him constantly aware of his marginalization in the SF community despite the accolades that begin to come his way. He finally marries, settles down in New Mexico, and returns to college as an forty-two-year-old undergraduate at Eastern New Mexico State University in Portales. He graduates and remains on the faculty there until his retirement. Perhaps one his greatest legacies is the ongoing annual science fiction conference held there in his honor. A photograph from the 2002 conference pictures hims surrounded by the likes of Connie Willis, George R. R. Martin, and Fred Swannick. He never lost his interest in and appreciation of new developments in the science fiction genre.

The final chapters of the memoir recount world travels with his wife and the inevitable shrinking number of acquaintances. The current edition of Wonder's Child is not helped by an addendum written just before his death and incorporated into the text posthumously. It is repetitive and poorly edited. But this memoir, with it laconic, ambling style, is the most engaging look at the past century of science fiction I have encountered.

I have reviewed two Jack Williamson Books at the website Worlds Without End

Darker Than You Think

The Legion of Space

WHO WRITES THIS STUFF?: JACK VANCE

(In a year or more of reading SF and horror, I have found a surprising amount

 of literature relating to authors --  bios, memoirs, and letters. WHO WRITES THIS STUFF will take an occasional look at what I've found.)

I have already had to return this book to the library because I had it through 

inter-library loan, and late fees for inter-library loan are death. So I am a bit self-conscious about saying bad things about it, without being able to make specific references. But here goes.

I am currently reading the Dying Earth cycle by Vance out of a commitment to exploring Golden Age SF and a challenge issued by the website Worlds Without End to read a book by one of the Grand Masters of Science Fiction each month for the year 2012. Such fantasy fiction is not to my taste, but I looked forward to Vance's memoirs to see where this stuff came from. Vance, however, states that he is not interested in writing a nuts and bolts book about SF writing. He wants to tell his personal story, and he is doing so via dictation. An operation for glaucoma almost blinded him in the 1980's. Since then he has worked with computers, early versions of voice recognition software, and for the memoirs diction. His wife dies during the dictation of the book, but at this writing he is still alive in his mid-nineties.

So it seems churlish to say the book is not very interesting. There are many biographical tidbits a reader might want to know more of, but perhaps it's the dictation method and a natural diffidence that keeps them from print. The memoirs turn into an overlong "What I Did on my Summer Vacation" report. There is little personal insight and essentially no relationship betweenf the life, which involved periodic adventurous world travel, and the fantastic fiction it produced. It is not surprising late in the book in what passes as some personal reflection to learn that Vance prefers cozy to hard-boiled crime fiction. It is not unlike the account he gives of his own life.

I am not, or at least not yet, a Vance fan. But they are legion. I wonder what they have made of this lukewarm memoir?

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