Search Results for: Robert Silverberg

Future Treasures: Voyagers: Twelve Journeys through Space and Time by Robert Silverberg

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Robert Silverberg is a Science Fiction Grand Master, a living legend of SF, and one of the most prolific and widely respected genre writers of the 20th Century. And here he is, 21 years into the 21st Century, still producing important books that command our attention. Is Voyagers: Twelve Journeys through Space and Time an important book? Sure looks like it to me. It is, according to my count, his 50th collection, appearing almost exactly 60 years after his first,…

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Up and Down Again: Robert Silverberg’s Up the Line

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Up the Line by Robert SilverbergFirst Edition: Ballantine, August 1969. Cover art Ron Walotsky.Also shown: Fourth printing, June 1981. Cover art Murray Tinkelman. Up the Lineby Robert SilverbergBallantine (250 pages, $0.75, Paperback, August 1969)Cover art Ron Walotsky Having discussed Isaac Asimov’s The End of Eternity last time, I thought to move forward a decade or so and look back at a similarly recomplicated tale of time travel and time paradoxes: Robert Silverberg’s 1969 novel Up the Line. Silverberg has written…

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Vintage Treasures: To Open the Sky by Robert Silverberg

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To Open the Sky by Robert Silverberg (Sphere, 1977). Cover by Peter Elson I’m on something of a Robert Silverberg kick. It started when Mark Kelly reviewed Silverberg’s early novel Collision Course for us back in April, one of the first SF novels I ever read, and in a haze of nostalgia I ended up taking an extended look at all six Silverberg novels packaged up by Ace in that magical year of 1977. More recently I’ve been collecting some of his earlier…

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Vintage Treasures: The Stochastic Man by Robert Silverberg

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The Stochastic Man (Warner Books, 1987, cover art by Don Dixon) Back in May I started a Vintage Treasures post about Robert Silverberg’s 1975 novel The Stochastic Man, and it wasn’t long before I’d unearthed nearly a dozen different editions. Pretty soon I got distracted comparing the art and author branding for each, and that led me down a deep rabbit hole that ended up with a very long article titled The Art of Author Branding: The Paperback Robert Silverberg. That was fun,…

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Vintage Treasures: Dark Stars edited by Robert Silverberg

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Dark Stars (Ballantine Books, 1969). Cover by Ronald Walotsky I’ve lamented before (more than a few times, as some regular readers have wearily noted) about the death of the mass market SF anthology.  They were a fixture on bookstore shelves a generation ago, and were a great way to discover new writers. In fact, I discovered virtually all of my favorite writers — Roger Zelazny, Clifford D. Simak, Isaac Asimov, James Tiptree, Jr. — in paperback anthologies in the 70s and 80s….

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The Art of Author Branding: The Ace Robert Silverberg

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The Ace Robert Silverberg: skewed titles and unclutterd art. The Seed of Earth, The Silent Invaders, Recalled to Life, Next Stop the Stars, Collision Course and Stepsons of Terra. All from 1977. Covers by Don Punchatz If you cruised the bookstore and supermarket racks in the 70s and 80s for science fiction paperbacks, Robert Silverberg was everywhere. I mean, everywhere. It wasn’t just that he was enormously productive — that was certainly true. But his books remained in print, or were returned to…

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A Fascinating, Ordinary 1950s SF Novel: Robert Silverberg’s Collision Course

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Collision Course by Robert Silverberg. First Edition: Avalon Books, 1961. Jacket design by Ed Emshwiller (click to enlarge) Collision Course by Robert Silverberg Avalon Books (224 pages, $2.95 in hardcover, 1961) Robert Silverberg needs no introduction to readers of Black Gate, I should think — author, over six or seven decades, of dozens of novels and hundreds of short stories, editor of rows of reprint and original anthologies, winner of four Hugo Awards, five Nebula Awards, and numerous career awards…

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The Golden Age of Science Fiction: The 1973 John W. Campbell Memorial Award: Beyond Apollo, by Barry N. Malzberg (plus Special Award to Robert Silverberg for Dying Inside)

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Beyond Apollo (Random House, 1972, Pocket Books, 1979, Carrol & Graf, 1989). Covers by Roger Hane, Don Maitz, and unknown Two separate awards were established in 1973 in memory of the profoundly influential long time editor of Astounding/Analog, John W. Campbell, Jr., who had died in 1971. We have already covered the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer (which has just been renamed the Astounding Award), which went to Jerry Pournelle. The John W. Campbell Memorial Award is…

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Vintage Treasures: Conquerors from the Darkness by Robert Silverberg

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1979 Ace edition, paired with Master of Life and Death. Cover by Frazetta. Robert Silverberg’s novella “Spawn of the Deadly Sea” appeared in the April 1957 issue of Science Fiction Adventures. He expanded it to novel length in 1965, retitling it Conquerors from the Darkness in the process. It wasn’t one of Silverberg’s more successful novels, at least from a commercial standpoint. Today it’s considered a juvenile, and it was reprinted only a handful of times, including a 1979 Ace paperback in which it…

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New Treasures: First-Person Singularities by Robert Silverberg

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A new book by SF grandmaster Robert Silverberg is a cause for celebration. It took a while for the cake and balloons to arrive, but we’re now ready to celebrate his collection First-Person Singularities. It gathers stories spanning the last six decades, all told in first person singular. Here’s Kirkus Reviews. The sheer diversity of storylines is nothing short of extraordinary. In “House of Bones,” a time traveler is marooned more than 20,000 years in the past and is forced to…

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