Sailing to Byzantium: Six Novellas by Silverberg Robert

Author:Silverberg, Robert [Silverberg, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Library Books, Fiction, Science Fiction, Fantasy, Anthologies
ISBN: 9781480418134
Goodreads: 17859458
Publisher: Open Road Media Sci-Fi Fantasy
Published: 1985-02-01T08:00:00+00:00

HOMEFARING

I had always had a sneaking desire to write the definitive giant-lobster story. Earlier science-fiction writers had preempted most of the other appealing monstrosities—including giant aunts (sic!), dealt with by Isaac Asimov in his classic story “Dreamworld,” which I have just ruined forever for you by giving away its punch line. But giant lobsters remained fair game. And when George Scithers, the new editor of the venerable science-fiction magazine Amazing Stories, asked me in the autumn of 1982 to do a lengthy story for him, I decided that it was time at last for me to give lobsters their due.

The obvious giant-lobster story, in which horrendous pincer-wielding monsters twenty feet long come ashore at Malibu and set about the conquest of Los Angeles by terrorizing the surfers, might work well enough in a cheap Hollywood sci-fi epic, but it wouldn’t have stood much chance of delighting a sophisticated science-fiction reader like Scithers. Nor did it have a lot of appeal for me as a writer. Therefore, following the advice of the shrewd, cantankerous editor Horace Gold, one of my early mentors, I searched for my story idea by turning the obvious upside down. Lobsters are pretty nasty things, after all. They’re tough, surly, dangerous, and ugly—surely the ugliest food objects ever to be prized by mankind. A creature so disagreeable, in so many ways, must have some redeeming feature. (Other than the flavor of its meat, that is.) And so, instead of depicting them as the savage and hideous-looking critters they really are, what if I put them through a few hundred million years of evolution and turned them into wise and thoughtful civilized beings—the dominant life-form, in fact, of a vastly altered Earth?

A challenging task, yes. And made even more challenging for me, back there in the otherwise sunny and pleasant November of 1982, by the fact that I had just made the great leap from typewriter to computer. “Homefaring” marked my initiation into the world of floppy disks and soft hyphens, of backup copies and automatic pagination. It’s all second nature to me now, of course, but in 1982 I found myself timidly stumbling around in a brave and very strange new world. Each day’s work was an adventure in terror. My words appeared in white letters on a black screen, frighteningly impermanent: one little electronic sneeze, I thought, and an entire day’s dazzling prose could vanish in a flash, like a time traveler who has just defenestrated his own grandfather. The mere making of backups didn’t lull my fears. How could I be sure that the act of backing up itself wouldn’t erase what I had just written? Pushing the button marked “Save”did that really save anything? Switching the computer off at the end of my working day was like a leap into the abyss. Would the story be there the next morning when I turned the machine on again? Warily, I printed out each day’s work when it was done, before backing up, saving, or otherwise jiggling with it digitally.

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