Alien Archives by Robert Silverberg

Author:Robert Silverberg
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Three Rooms Press

SCHWARTZ BETWEEN THE GALAXIES

In the two years following the completion of the novel Dying Inside in the fall of 1971, I wrote nothing but short stories and the novella “Born with the Dead.” Despite the struggle that those stories, and “Born with the Dead” in particular had been, I allowed myself to take on commitments to write two more novels, which would eventually become The Stochastic Man and Shadrach in the Furnace. I also let two friends talk me into writing short stories for publications they were editing. But, even as I locked myself into these four projects, I felt an increasing certainty that I was going to give up writing science fiction once those jobs were done. My own personal fatigue was only one factor in that decision. Another was my sense of having been on the losing side in a literary revolution.

Among the many revolutions that went on in the era known as the Sixties (which actually ran from about 1967 to 1972) there was one in science fiction. A host of gifted new writers, both in England and the United States, brought all manner of advanced literary techniques to bear on the traditional matter of s-f, producing stories that were more deeply indebted to Joyce, Kafka, Faulkner, Mann, and even e.e. cummings than they were to Heinlein, Asimov, and Clarke. This period of stylistic and structural innovation, which reached its highest pitch of activity between 1966 and 1969, was a heady, exciting time for science-fiction writers, especially newer ones such as Thomas Disch, Samuel R. Delany, R.A. Lafferty, and Barry Malzberg, although some relatively well-established people like John Brunner, Harlan Ellison, and, yes, Robert Silverberg, joined in the fun. My stories grew more and more experimental in mode—and most of them were published, now, in anthologies of original stories rather than in the conventional s-f magazines.

What was fun for the writers, though, turned out to be not so much fun for the majority of the readers, who quite reasonably complained that if they wanted to read Joyce and Kafka, they’d go and read Joyce and Kafka. They didn’t want their s-f to be Joycified and Kafkaized. So they stayed away from the new fiction in droves, and by 1972 the revolution was pretty much over. We were heading into the era of Star Wars, the trilogy craze, and the return of literarily conservative action-based science fiction to the center of the stage.

One of the most powerful figures in the commercialization of science fiction at that time was the diminutive Judy-Lynn del Rey, a charming and ferociously determined woman whose private reading tastes inclined toward Ulysses but who knew, perhaps better than anyone else ever had, what the majority of s-f readers wanted to buy. As a kind of side enterprise during her dynamic remaking of the field, she started a paperback anthology series called Stellar, and—despite my recent identification with the experimental side of science fiction—asked me, in May 1973, to do a story for it.

Her stated

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