s a youngster, Robert Silverberg wanted desperately to sell just one short story to a science-fiction magazine with the words Amazing, Astounding or Thrilling in the title. He studied, wrote and hoped for the day when he'd finally make that sale.
Nearly 50 years later, Silverberg has become one of the most prolific science-fiction writers of all time, with hundreds of short stories, novels, collections and non-fiction books to his name. Beyond that, Silverberg has won critical acclaim, winning multiple Hugos and Nebulas for his work. Now that he's achieved every goal he could ever have hoped for as a kid, he's gone on to embrace a new challenge—writing for fun.
According to the Encyclopedia for Science Fiction, Silverberg "remains one of the most imaginative and versatile writers ever to have been involved with SF. His productivity has seemed almost superhuman, and his abrupt metamorphosis from a writer of standardized pulp fiction into a prose
artist was an accomplishment unparalleled within the field."
He published his first story, "Gorgon Planet," in 1954 in Nebula Science Fiction. Other noted Silverberg publications include the novels A Time of Changes, Dying Inside, and the Majipoor series and the novellas "Sailing to Byzantium," "Passages" and "Enter a Soldier. Later: Enter Another." His novel The Longest Way Home was just released this month, and he is presently working on two short-story collections, Roma Eterna and Legends 2.
Silverberg chatted with Science Fiction Weekly about his retirements, his writing and why seeing what Hollywood might do to his work scares him.
You're a very prolific writer, with hundreds of short stories, novels, collections and non-fiction books. What drives you as a writer?
Silverberg: I want to get the job done. I start a story and I stay with it until I finish it, and since I have the natural gift, I suppose, for working very quickly, I work very quickly. I don't know any other way to do it.
Most people would take a vacation or not work so hard.
Silverberg: Oh, I take vacations. In fact, I'm on a vacation now that I hope will last me the rest of my life, although it probably won't. But when I work, I work with great discipline. I don't answer the phone. I don't doodle up my pad. I just sit there and I work. And when I'm through working,
I'm not working. So, for the last 30 years I have worked no more than five or six months out of the year.
Really. You're amazingly productive then.
Silverberg: It's a matter of compressing the job into a small amount of working time. That's some God-given knack that I have, and I don't ask how it works or why or anything like that. I just write that way.
When you're working on a new project, what's the writing process like for you?
Silverberg: Usually, a story situation or even a title will come to me out of the blue. That's another process that I don't want to understand. And I'll scribble something down on the back of the handiest piece of paper, usually an envelope from the morning mail. And if what I've scribbled down makes sense to me a day or so later, I will go to the computer and expand that into a one- or two-page outline, which eventually will become—if it's a short story, that will be the outline for the story. If it looks like a novel idea, I will then expand that one or two pages into anything from 10 to 20
pages. And that's enough for me to get started.
If I have the title and a coherent outline showing me the beginning, the ending and some notion of what the middle is supposed to be, I can then begin and plunge on through it to the end.
Have you ever started something without a title?
Silverberg: Yes, but I don't feel comfortable doing it. I have an idiosyncratic theory that if you don't know the title of the story, you don't really know what it's about. And if you don't know what it's about, how can you write it? But I've changed titles in midstream from time to time. I need
some sort of title to begin with.
In Science Fiction 101, you write about your evolution as a writer from the time you were a child and your quest to find the secret to writing and selling science fiction. Besides discovering that you wanted to be a writer, what surprised you most through this journey?
Silverberg: What surprised me most? That it worked out the way it did. You probably remember, that is, if I actually said this, that at the beginning I would have settled just to sell a story or two for the sheer glory of it.
And then you were going to quit.
Silverberg: I wanted to show everybody, you know, I can sell a story to Astounding or Amazing or any one of the magazines at the time. Well, of course, that wasn't a goal that one can sustain for a lifetime, selling one story. I did that. My next goal was to earn a living as a writer, to make that my profession. Remember, I started very young. I was still in college, so I had to find out what I was going to do with my life.
I thought, perhaps I can sell enough stories to make writing my career. Well, I found out very quickly that I could do that. My next assignment, since I had begun as a
reader, as a lover of science fiction, was to write some science fiction that didn't simply pay the rent for me, but actually could earn me the respect of my colleagues in the professional writing world. That was a harder job. But I achieved that too.
And as time went along, I discovered that in fact, whatever juvenile fantasies I had had in my mind at age 14 or 15, I had lived to bring it to reality [laughs]. And I thought, this was an amazing surprise, looking back and saying, "Hey fella, you actually did everything that your dreaming adolescent mind fantasized about." That's a very rare experience in life, I suppose.
The journey you describe in the book is a fascinating one. But the book is also a great book about writing science fiction.
Silverberg: I know more about writing science fiction, I think, than I know about anything else on this planet. I've devoted so much of my life to doing that. And I'm reliving the journey myself now. I'm putting together a book that reviews my whole career as a short-story writer, starting with "The Road to Nightfall," that I wrote in 1954, and going right on up through the decades. So the past is very much on my mind.
What's the title of the book?
Silverberg: At the moment it's called Stories of Six Decades, but that's simply because, as I said a little while ago, I need a title. I hope to come up with something a little more zingy than Stories of Six Decades.
What will the collection be about?
Silverberg: It's going to be a collection of 18 or 20 of my best-known stories, four or five from each of the decades of my career, beginning in the '50s and going on up to the year 2000, and introductions to each story putting them into the context of my life and the changes in the science-fiction world over that period.
And you have a novel that's coming out any moment now called The Longest Way Home.
Silverberg: Yeah. Well, to me, that's old news. To my publisher, it's not old news. It's already been published in Asimov's Science Fiction, and it's been published in Britain, and in fact, I've written the book that's coming after it. That's a book called Roma Eterna.
That's a collection, isn't it?
Silverberg: Yeah. It's a sequence of 10 stories that I've been working on, on and off, since about 1988 telling the story of a Roman empire that never fell. During this past winter, I wrote the three final stories, which are now starting to appear in Asimov's magazine, and then the book will appear a year from now. So to me that's the book that's fresh on my mind [laughs].
For people who don't know, tell us about The Longest Way Home.
Silverberg: The Longest Way Home, which is my newest novel so far as the world knows, is a fairly short, tight novel about an aristocratic adolescent boy who is unexpectedly marooned in the middle of a civil war on the far end of the planet where he lives, and has to get home 10,000 miles away. And he does it, but he has to take the longest way to get there. It's a novel of maturity and development and a very tight little book that I had a great pleasure in writing.
What is the one thing you haven't done yet as a writer?
Silverberg: Hummm. Hit the top of the bestseller list. Well, I say that facetiously. It's never going to happen, because very few science-fiction writers have ever hit the top of the bestseller list and I don't expect to write anything but science fiction. So I'll leave the top of the bestseller
list to Mr. King, or Mr. Koontz or Mr. Grisham. Well, more power to them.
Well, maybe if you snuck into horror for a while.
Silverberg: But I'm not going to. I'm just going to do what I do. There's very little in the way of ambition that I have left. When I talk about having fulfilled all my schoolboy fantasies, I mean it. I never had the ambition of being number one on the bestseller list. I'd of course find it a fascinating experience, but it's not going to happen. Everything else that I've wanted, the awards, the critical acclaim, the feeling in my own mind of having satisfied my own standards as a science-fiction writer, having written stuff that I approve of, all that is done. So there's very little left. That sounds sad, doesn't it?
I suspect you'll find other goals.
Silverberg: Well, there's always some challenge that you can't resist, but I don't have a long list of things to check off that I need to achieve, not at this late age. This reminds me of a friend of mine, now deceased, a science-fiction writer of the '60s, who had the ambition to write a
mainstream novel that he said would win the Pulitzer Prize for him. This is another ambition I have never had. And as he was laying forth this grandiose plan, his companion, the man he lived with, turned to him and said, "Well, why not the Nobel?" completely sarcastically, of course. So, yes, there are awards that I haven't won yet, but they don't include the Hugo and the Nebulas, thank God.
Did your stories ever compete against each other?
Silverberg: I was an extremely prolific writer. I'm not that prolific anymore. Why should I be? But in the days of 30 years ago, when I was really winging them out, sometimes I'd have too many stories in a year on the ballot and they'd compete with each other in the same category. And then I
would remove one. I remember "Sundance" and "Passengers" were both up for the Nebula one year. And I thought, "Well, these are both very good stories, but they'll knock each other out." So I removed "Sundance" and I won the Nebula with "Passengers."
Was it hard to decide which one to remove?
Silverberg: In a way. "Sundance" was a technically more complicated story and a kind of show-off piece. Look what I can do. "Passengers," I think, was a more visceral, more emotional story and would have a greater impact on the readership. That seems to have worked out correctly. I did get the award. Also, "Passengers" was later bought by Hollywood, and they plan to make what I'm sure is going to be a terrifying, ghastly, frightening movie out of it which I may not go to see, because I'm squeamish about that kind of thing [laughs].
What do you think the biggest challenge has been for you in your career?
Silverberg: The biggest challenge I have faced—has involved—putting my own—elitist tastes ahead of the reader. I speak this very slowly, because it's a complicated thing for me.
I'm now a man of some years. I'm going to be 70 in a few years. I had an old-fashioned education. I went to an
Ivy League school. My private tastes as a reader are awfully schizoid, because I grew up reading, on one hand, pulp magazines with names like Thrilling Wonder Stories, and on the other hand, Thomas Mann and James Joyce and Faulkner. And throughout my life as a writer, I've oscillated between the feeling that I'd like to write science fiction the way Faulkner or Joyce might have done it and the feeling that science fiction is in fact commercial entertainment for people just looking for a good read. So I've tried to have it both ways and this has proved very complicated for me.
It's one reason why I don't wind up number one on the bestseller list even in science fiction, because much of my work is fairly complicated and challenging, and I find I'm constantly shuttling between the desire to pull out all the literary stops and the awareness that what I'm supposed to be doing is telling a story that a lot of people are going to appreciate, people who don't necessarily have the kind of fancy education and literary tastes that I have. So it's not a matter of writing down to the audience. I've never done that. It's a matter of trying to communicate with people who don't necessarily share my fullest sense of what a novel can be.
So when you start a new novel, do you struggle with achieving this balance?
Silverberg: Well, not any more, but I certainly did in the '70s, when I was writing books like The Book of Skulls and Son of Man and Dying Inside, and stories like "Born with the Dead." There were times when I felt almost a hostility from the audience, from the readers. They were saying, "Why don't you go back to telling the good old space stories that you used to tell?"
This would leave me uncertain, at least until the moment when I sat down to write the story. Once I sat down to write the story, well, I wrote the story. I had the thing in mind and I wasn't going to adjust it to somebody else's ideas of what I should be writing. But the period before beginning always left me in conflict. Am I doing the right thing? Am I serving the reader's needs here? Am I serving my own artistic needs? Am I serving my own commercial needs? This left me so tangled up that by 1974 I decided I'd give
up writing entirely.
Was that one of the times that you retired?
Silverberg: That was the big time that I retired. That was an angry retirement. I said, "I can't figure out what I should be doing anymore. I just won't do anything. There are other things to do in life besides writing more science fiction." And I went away in a kind of huff and stayed there for four or five years.
Well, eventually, I did figure out how I wanted to do it, and so I came back in 1980 with Lord Valentine's Castle, which I think is an extremely accessible book. Everybody who reads it loves it. But it's not a stupid book. I didn't say, "Oh, I wrote Dying Inside. I wrote The
Book of Skulls. I wrote all that stuff. Now I'll write a really dumb one to make you real happy." No, that isn't what I did. But I managed to write an accessible book, and one way or another everything I've written since I returned from that angry retirement has been both creatively rewarding to me and accessible to a large audience. Apparently I did finally reach a balance in this conflict. I may retire again, but if I do, it will just be because I'm getting old, not because I'm angry and storming out slamming the door behind me.
I don't know, Jack Vance is in his 80s and still writing. Maybe it's hard to retire when writing is in your blood.
Silverberg: Well, I'll tell you a story about that earlier retirement. About 1976, '77, somewhere in there, I was midway through the four or five years of the retirement, and I went to France. I did a lot of traveling. I still do. And I was in Antibes in the museum [where] three stories of museum were filled with the work that Picasso did in the summer of 1946. He did a whole museum's worth of work. Picasso then must have been 70 years old and he went on working for another 10 or 15 years. And I had a little hallucination in there, a mild fantasy, that Picasso came through the hall and said, "You're 40 years old and you're retired. Look at me. I'm 99 years old and I'm dead and I'm still working." [Laughs.]
Yeah, sure, Jack Vance is still working and working well at the age of 84. And Jack Williamson, who is 10 years older than Vance, just won a Hugo. So I'm making no promises about the future, but I guarantee you that I'll be writing less in the future than I used to in the past. I'm not going to put
myself through that kind of exertion again in my 70s and 80s. That I know.
Well, my guess is that you're writing for yourself now.
Silverberg: Yep, yep. As I said a little while ago, I have nothing left to prove. I have no list of achievements. I'm financially very sound. It would have to be just for fun.
When you look back at your body of work, what themes do you see?
Silverberg: Well, they're the standard Silverberg themes. I know they're there, too. The man struggling to find his balance in society. The man struggling. Most of my protagonists are men, which is why I say "the man," struggling to understand his place in the universe. The spiritual mysteries around us. Are they there? Is there anything we can't see, but should know? Always the protagonist struggling to find out what he should be doing and how he should be doing it right. Everybody from David Selig, the hapless telepath of Dying Inside, to Lord Valentine, the unwilling emperor of Lord Valentine's Castle.
The other thing I've always tried to do in my science fiction, which is not a theme so much as a technical desire, is to depict things vividly that nobody else has seen, to create images, worlds, cultures even. To show people wonders, and that has been a very important goal for me,
and I think I've achieved it.
Especially with the Majipoor series.
Silverberg: Yes, Majipoor particularly. By the time I got to the sixth big Majipoor book, I think this desire had become almost pathological. I couldn't stop inventing things and I thought, "Oh, it's time to end this series now. It's become a botanic garden." [Laughs.]
Still, you're writing a new Majipoor short story for Legends 2.
Silverberg: Oh, yes, I'll be doing another Majipoor story for Legends 2, because that's incumbent on me as the editor. I'm going to put in a story from every fantasy series I like, and I like my own [laughs]. The story of 60 or 70 pages is not likely to get into the kind of dense travelogue mode that some of the bigger Majipoor books did.
Are you done with the series?
Silverberg: I think so. Majipoor is so big and has so much history that I could go on for several lifetimes writing about it, but I don't want to wear out the welcome both for me and for the reader. I've now done two trilogies set 1,000 years apart, and I think they say all that I want to say
about non-hereditary monarchies and this giant planet.
What kept drawing you back to that material?
Silverberg: A series of surprises, really. When I wrote Lord Valentine's Castle, even though I left big room for sequel, I wasn't planning to write it. Then I realized there are a lot of things about Majipoor that I never explained, even to myself, in the first book. And I started writing short stories about Majipoor, which ultimately turned into The Majipoor Chronicles. And then I saw the sequel to Lord Valentine's Castle really had to be written, because I hadn't come to terms with the problem of the Aborigines and there was a war brewing that I had brushed under the carpet while telling the story about Valentine's struggle to regain his throne. Well, what happens next? He's going to have a crisis on his hands. So I wrote that one. And then in the center of Majipoor Chronicles was a story called "The Desert of Stolen Dreams," set about a thousand years before Valentine's time, which brought up all sorts of other unexplained things about Majipoor. And looking back 10 or 15 years later at that story, I thought I should explain what's going on here. Well, that required three fat novels.
You have to watch those realizations.
Silverberg: You're absolutely right, and I may find myself drawn back in. But writing three books in the second Majipoor trilogy, the Prestimion trilogy, those are three 600-page novels. I don't have the stamina to do that again in my 70s. Williamson, Vance, these grand old men, are not writing series of 600-page books. And I'm not going to want to either. Some of the physical energy, there's physical energy required in writing such a big book, and I'm 67. If I were to start another trilogy, my God, I'd be practically 80 by the time I finished it.
Yeah, but what a trilogy it might be.
Silverberg: [Laughs.] Well, let's leave it there.
What do you think today are your strengths and weaknesses as a writer?
Silverberg: Well, the strengths. The strong storytelling ability. The ability to devise a plot that holds the reader. The characterizations, I think, and the visualizations of strange things. These are the basics that everybody who has read my work knows. The weaknesses as a writer? I don't feel that I have the common touch. I haven't lived a common life. One of the things that success as a writer will do for you that is not so good for you as a writer, is to insulate you from the real world. I, for example, have never had a job.
Well, you have a job as a science-fiction writer.
Silverberg: That has been my job, but I've worked home my entire life. I have never done that in the morning, gone out in the office. To me, that's something I have to invent intuitively, the way inventing life on Mars has to be invented. Most other people know what that experience is like. I have not, by choice, had children. I was never in the armed services, largely because of the good luck of having been born between all the wars. I was too young to be in Korea, too old to be in Vietnam and so on. So I've missed out on a lot of experiences that a lot people would just as soon not have had, but
which do shape you as a human being.
And I think that whatever weaknesses I have as a writer stem from the fact that from the age of 18 and 19 on, I followed my own career path so successfully that I've been able to withdraw almost entirely from what other people see as the real world. It's a problem. I've surmounted it by getting out there and meeting people, knowing people, asking them what their lives are like, but I don't know of anybody else in science fiction, except perhaps for Larry Niven, who's had the privilege of staying out of the working world the way I have.
I've traveled widely. I've been married a couple of times. I've interacted with plenty of human beings, but the daily grind, gee, that's as alien to me as Majipoor. John Kennedy, the whole Kennedy family, they missed the daily grind, too. And Teddy Kennedy, when he was campaigning for the Senate, pointed that out to some workman at a factory where he was making a speech and the workman said, "You know, Mr. Kennedy, you haven't missed a thing."
Of all the stuff that you've written, what's your favorite?
Silverberg: Well, I get asked that all the time, and my answer can vary with my mood, but there are three or four books that keep popping up. Dying Inside, of course, Lord Valentine's Castle, Son of Man, a very strange dreamlike novel that I wrote 35 years ago, and the novella "Sailing to Byzantium." These are the books which if I were called before the bar of judgment and asked, "Defend your decision to be a science-fiction writer." I could say, "Well, look, I wrote these."
Is there any piece you've written that you think has been overlooked?
Silverberg: Oh, all of them [laughs]. Every now and then I read some old story of mine as I'm preparing some new edition, and I think "this really didn't get the attention that it should have." The one that comes to mind most immediately is a story called "Capricorn Games" that I wrote, oh, in 1970 or so. It never pops up in anthologies. It never seems to get reprinted. I think it's a marvelous story. However, it did have one attentive reader. The protagonist in "Capricorn Games" is a woman who was born on the seventh of January. And another woman who was born on the seventh of January, possibly
even in the same year as the one in my story, read that and said, "Look, it's set on my birthday. Oh, look, the writer is making a speech in the town where I'm living. I'm going to go and see what he's like." And she did and I married her. So even though it may be an underrated story, it did get at least the right audience.
What do you find more difficult, being a writer or an editor?
Silverberg: Oh, being a writer. Being an editor simply involves maintaining a sense of what you'd like to read. We're all editors when we read. We pick up something. We read three or four paragraphs. We throw the book across the room. That's editing. But being a writer involves being an
editor every single sentence. [The editor comes out and looks at it and says] "Do I accept that sentence?" You have to. It's a big struggle. So far as the technical part of editing, looking at a manuscript and finding what's wrong with it, and telling the writer how to fix it, I've been on both sides of that. I've told writers how to fix manuscripts when I as editing New Dimensions and Universe. I've had the occasional editor make a very short suggestion to me about how to fix something. When I do that, well, it's almost like writing and it gets to be hard work. No, writing is 10 times as hard as editing.
What do you think the secret is of continuing to write well after so many years, so many stories?
Silverberg: Oh, after so many years and so many stories, the only secret that you need to know is the secret of getting yourself over to the chair and putting the seat of your pants in it. The skills are wired into the bone by that time. I can't help but write the way that Robert Silverberg writes now. I don't have to stop to think how I want to write the story. It's there. I sound like myself every time I sit down to write. The real problem is at the other end of the career, when you don't have a firm sense of what works as a story. There are some writers that do straight from the cradle. They are born storytellers. But most of us have to work out a theory. And working out that theory is the hard part. Once you do that—and everybody who comes up there for those Hugos every year has worked that theory out—once you do that, it's just a matter of discipline. Making yourself think the stories up and then write them. But I think at the beginning, mastering the fundamentals of storytelling, that's the hard part.
Are you reading a lot of manuscripts for anthologies these days?
Silverberg: Well, no, no. Legends is an invitational anthology. I'm not doing any editing anymore in the sense of having people send me stuff out of the blue.
Like Universe?
Silverberg: Yeah, I gave that up at least 10 years ago. I don't want to read other people's half-baked stories and try to explain to them how to bake the other half. Life is too short for that, life is always too short. But you get to my age and you're conscious of how little time there is left and
you don't want to spend it helping incompetent writers to become marginally less incompetent.
Who are your favorite authors to read these days?
Silverberg: Well, I don't read much science fiction anymore and when I do, it's more like rereading. I read Jack Vance, for example. Phil Dick, Theodore Sturgeon. I go back and read the stories that I loved when I was much younger and I'm often pleased to see them again. I don't read much of the
current science fiction, partly because I've read a lot of science fiction for one lifetime and there are other things to read. Partly because some of what is being written now baffles me and makes me feel like a figure out of the past.
There's a lot about modern life that I don't like. A lot of slovenly
stuff goes on in our culture and much contemporary science fiction is rooted in that very slovenly culture we live in. I don't like that. So I'd rather go back and read Ted Sturgeon than read X, Y or Z that's taking me down the back streets of some miserable slum. There's a lot of bad prose today. People are half educated and sometimes the grammar of a story will annoy me. I was reading a really magnificent novel by a youngish writer whom I won't name and suddenly he was talking about, "That's not too big of a planet," he said. And I thought, "No, you don't say that. You don't use a preposition after an adjective like that." And then I realized nobody realizes what a preposition or an adjective is anymore. Well, that kind of writing. This is one of our best who doesn't know that you don't say "too big of a planet." It drives me back to the classics.
I'm reading Ulysses now, by the way. I'm essentially putting myself through college all over again, reading the books that I read 50 years ago—the great plays, The Inferno, the whole Divine Comedy, Ulysses. I had a very fancy education. As I read these things, I wonder always, what could I have understood of this when I was 18.
It's a fascinating parallax effect bouncing back and forth between my younger self and now and I get great pleasure out of all of this reading.
Are you doing it for fun mostly?
Silverberg: Entirely for fun. I don't have to go back to college. I graduated.
You still write short fiction. What changes or developments or currents have you noticed in shorter speculative fiction since you began publishing? How has it evolved?
Silverberg: By and large it's become more complex. When I began writing, I was writing for magazines with names like Astounding and Amazing, and though a lot of great material was then being written by Fritz Leiber and Henry Kuttner and Theodore Sturgeon and Vance and all those
splendid writers of the '40s and '50s. Many of the stories were written in a simpler narrative mode than what developed later.
I think there has been a big evolution in the way science-fiction stories are told. You go back and look at the classics of John Campbell's Golden Age of 60 years ago, the early Heinlein and the Asimov and Van Vogt. You see these are terrific stories, but they're written in a very simple way. I think there has been real evolution in the craft of science fiction in the 50 years that I've been involved with it, and as I indicated a little while ago, I'm starting to get the feeling that it has evolved past me in some ways. Some of the stories I look at now, I can't understand myself. Whether this is because they are poorly told or I have begun to lose touch with the way science fiction thinking takes place, I don't know. I don't want to think about that very much.
By and large I think we have better writers today. The average level of short-story writing in science fiction today is higher than it was back then. You pick up an anthology and you find it full of stories by Kim Stanley Robinson and Walter Jon Williams and Connie Willis and Greg Bear and seven or eight other people who I would name if I weren't talking so quickly, and these would all be writers who would be revered demigods had they been writing back in the Golden Age days. They're very good writers.
What advice do you have for new writers just starting out?
Silverberg: Do a lot of reading. Do a lot writing. Do a lot of living. Certainly I did all three. When you asked me about my weaknesses as a writer, they stem from the fact that my success has allowed me to withdraw from life. But, I think, to be in the thick of things, to have things happening around you and to you and inside you is important. To write as much as you can to develop that technical fluency of facility is essential. Always to read, not just science fiction, to be reminded what good writing is. To read a story that knocks you to your knees and then because you're a writer you say, "Why did it knock me to my knees?" To analyze what that story has done to you.
You'll find that you can't analyze what the very greatest writers have done. You know you've been knocked to your knees, but you can't go through the work and find the very thing that knocks you to your knees. That's why they are the greatest writers. You can't point to a moment in Shakespeare and say this is the thing that overwhelmed me. No. No. His moving along overwhelmed me in the most subtle, sly ways and that's why he's Shakespeare and you're not. That's another of my non-ambitions, by the way. I'm not competing with Shakespeare, not even with Tolstoy. Hemingway was competing with Tolstoy and he wound up blowing his brains out.
What's one of the secret ingredients in being a successful writer?
Silverberg: You must have that confident tone or you can't get any work done. You can't say, "Oh, dear, I hope they like my next paragraph." You have to say, "This is the best paragraph that's ever been written," at least while you're writing it. You may look at it the next day and wonder how you could have ever conned yourself in ever feeling that, but that sense of almost arrogance is necessary, I think, to keep you pushing on through your work.
When you look at the marketplace today, how has it changed?
Silverberg: It's changed wildly from the marketplace that I came into 50 years ago, which was entirely magazine-driven. We had, in 1953, I think 39 different science-fiction magazines buying hundreds and hundreds of stories all the time and hardly any books been published. There were just one or two book publishers. Ballantine was just starting up. Doubleday had just begun a line. Ace was doing this line of double books. That was it.
Well, that all changed. The magazines became secondary. They're barely surviving anymore and novels proliferate to the point where it is impossible to have any real sense of the field. We used to read every book that came out. It wasn't very hard. One or two a month. Now one publisher alone will publish more books a month than everybody published all year in the '50s. It is a novel-driven field. The migration to the Internet is another very interesting phenomena. I think it's moving in zigs and zags. The big boom from a couple of years ago seems to be backing off, but electronic publishing is here to stay. And that can make it possible for anybody to get anything published. This is not necessarily a good thing. Because whether people will be able to find the great electronic books out there in the vast welter of e-stuff, I don't know.
I don't like reading things onscreen myself, but I don't have to. I'm an old guy from the old medium. Other people do read electronically. I wouldn't be talking to you if that weren't the case. And many, many books of mine have been published through the various electronic publishers and the checks that I get sent are quite real, so somebody must be reading it. I do wonder what keeps it up there, is it antigravity? [Laughs.] Sooner or later publishing companies have to show profits and I suppose the electronic publishers who are selling things online are showing profits. I know at least one is. But it does puzzle me how this works. On the other hand, I don't have to know.
How do modern times compare with what you expected the future to be when you first got into science fiction?
Silverberg: Well the future that I read about then, was the one that had the helicopter commuters and bridges high up between high-rise buildings. As we saw in a Bruce Willis movie, a very funny movie, in which Willis has a taxi ride, I believe in one of those helicopters between all the
sky bridges, It doesn't work very well. I'm glad we didn't get the helicopter commuters, thousands of them up there. We would have air rage of the worst kind dropping on my lawn all day long.
Much of the world of the future that I read about has very quietly happened. And every now and then I'm lost in
wonder at the fact that stage by stage, from the flat-screen television set to that funny little computer on my desk, these are things we didn't specifically anticipate, but we anticipated the texture of it all. A shiny Technicolor future. The world I grew up in was a black-and-white world and science fiction provided that glow, the wonderful magazine covers that Hubert Rogers painted for Astounding in the '40s. That's the future to me.
And though I certainly don't regret the absence of the hundreds of thousands of helicopters passing overhead as everybody goes to work, I like the idea that much of the world of the pulp magazines is right around me now. It's an experience that I can't readily communicate to people younger than I am. Just to date a letter July 15, 2002, and I feel certainly I'm in one of those stories that I was reading when I was 12 years old.
What do you think is the coolest invention in your lifetime? The most amazing thing you've seen?
Silverberg: Oh, I think the Internet is. I remember when color television came around, for example, the CD and the atomic bomb, that was not a cool invention at all, but it was an important one. But I think of all the changes in my life, the Internet coming out of the blue, this World Wide Web
has transformed society more profoundly in five unexpected years than everything, including atomic energy and including space travel. The way we communicate now, the ease with which we communicate. If I want to send a letter to someone in Bulgaria or China, I can do that in 10 minutes. It will be there without any cost and I'll have my answer later in the day.
If I need information, this thing called Google that suddenly jumped up on my computer and said, "Hi, I'm Google. Use me." Every day I see some miracle coming out of this communications web and I think it's the most important thing that we have
developed. We have made this planet very small. Not so small when you're flying from here to Istanbul as I did last year. But it's very small when you need to send email to Istanbul; and though certainly the age of space, whenever we get back to it, will create great transformations and the threat of atomic weaponry has transformed the politics of our time, nothing's changed us as much as those little digits, those clicks.
And from a science-fiction point of view, the most astounding thing about the Internet is that nobody really predicted it. We talked about thinking machines and we talked about dialing in for information, somewhere in the 22nd century. But meanwhile, somewhere in 1994 or '95 or whatever, suddenly it was
there.
What are your interests when you're not writing?
Silverberg: Well, I travel widely. I want to see as much of this planet as I can. I'm interested in exotic foods and wines and such. Always looking for sensory experiences which I transformed into fiction. I read a great deal, both fiction and non-fiction. I'm particularly interested in the ancient world. I've written a great deal about archaeology and visited many of the archaeological sites.
I live in California where the weather is very nice and I'm a gardener and horticulturalist. I have a garden made up entirely of things that would not be out of place on the cover of a science-fiction magazine [laughs]. I'm interested in cats. I think cats are essential parts of life. I collect antiquities of various kinds. I've got a lot of interests. That's why I said sometime back that there's more to doing life than writing science fiction. I'm glad I've written the things I wrote. They give me the luxury to enjoy the things I like to enjoy.
Also in this issue: M. Night Shyamalan and Mel Gibson of Signs.