The Best Time Travel Stories of the 20th Century by Harry Turtledove

Author:Harry Turtledove
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9780345481900
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2004-12-28T06:00:00+00:00

ROBERT SILVERBERG

Robert Silverberg won the Hugo Award for most promising new author in 1956, less than two years after his first professional sale. After an apprenticeship that lasted nearly ten years and yielded millions of words, Silverberg emerged in the 1960s as one of the most articulate and conscientious writers of the time. Works from this period of his career are memorable for their psychologically complex character studies, morally trenchant themes, and vivid depictions of oppressive and limiting environments that the individual must try to transcend. “To See the Invisible Man,” “Hawksbill Station,” and Thorns are futuristic studies of the individual alienated through a variety of means: social ostracism, penal exile, and exploitative victimization. Silverberg’s crowning achievement in this vein is Dying Inside, the poignant tale of a telepath alienated by his uniqueness who is further isolated by the loss of his powers and thus his only means of relating to normal humanity.

Both Nightwings and Downward to Earth present contact with alien species as potentially rejuvenating experiences with religious overtones of resurrection and redemption. The World Inside chronicles the dehumanizing potential of overpopulation on a society in which privacy and intimacy are virtually impossible.

At the dramatic core of Silverberg’s strongest stories are individuals confronted with mortality. “Born with the Dead” details the difficulties of life in a world that is shared by mortals and the revived dead. The Second Trip centers on the idea of the death of identity; a man discovers that he is a former criminal punished with obliteration of his true personality, a spark of which is reignited and threatens to overwhelm his new persona. The quest for immortality is a sounding board for ruminations on mortality in The Book of Skulls, about the pursuit of an occult sect that has supposedly found the secret of eternal life, and the impact of the quest on the individuals who seek it.

Since the late 1970s Silverberg has concentrated on the development of his Majipoor saga, an epic science fantasy series that includes the novels Lord Valentine’s Castle, The Majipoor Chronicles, and Valentine Pontifex. He has also written two fantasy novels, Gilgamesh the King and To the Land of the Living, based on Sumerian mythology. His many short fiction collections include Next Stop the Stars, To Worlds Beyond, Dimension Thirteen, Born with the Dead, and The Secret Sharer. He has written many novels and works of nonfiction for children, and edited more than seventy anthologies.

“Sailing to Byzantium” is another story that, like Joe Haldeman’s, deals with the far, far future, and it takes place in a world that Silverberg has made at once vaguely familiar through his use of history, and utterly alien by virtue of its population. A winner of the Nebula Award in 1985, it is a look at what it means to be human, now and forever.

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