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Science Fiction: 101: Exploring the Craft of Science Fiction
Before Robert Silverberg won multiple Hugo and Nebula awards and became Grand Master of science fiction, he was a young man learning the art and craft of writing the genre. In Science Fiction: 101, Silverberg reveals the roots of modern science fiction with thought-provoking essays about some of the field’s most groundbreaking stories—included in this volume—which inspired him and taught him to write. These insightful analyses, along with the skills and strategies Silverberg developed to build his successful career, make this an indispensable volume for readers interested in science fiction history.
Featuring Thirteen Classic Stories by Brian W. Aldiss, Alfred Bester, James Blish, Philip K. Dick, Damon Knight, C. M. Kornbluth, Henry Kuttner, C. L. Moore, Frederik Pohl, Bob Shaw, Robert Sheckley, Cordwainer Smith, and Jack Vance
Featuring Thirteen Classic Stories by Brian W. Aldiss, Alfred Bester, James Blish, Philip K. Dick, Damon Knight, C. M. Kornbluth, Henry Kuttner, C. L. Moore, Frederik Pohl, Bob Shaw, Robert Sheckley, Cordwainer Smith, and Jack Vance
512 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1987
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362 people want to read
About the author
Robert Silverberg
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Robert Silverberg is a highly celebrated American science fiction author and editor known for his prolific output and literary range. Over a career spanning decades, he has won multiple Hugo and Nebula Awards and was named a Grand Master by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America in 2004. Inducted into the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame in 1999, Silverberg is recognized for both his immense productivity and his contributions to the genre's evolution.
Born in Brooklyn, he began writing in his teens and won his first Hugo Award in 1956 as the best new writer. Throughout the 1950s, he produced vast amounts of fiction, often under pseudonyms, and was known for writing up to a million words a year. When the market declined, he diversified into other genres, including historical nonfiction and erotica.
Silverberg’s return to science fiction in the 1960s marked a shift toward deeper psychological and literary themes, contributing significantly to the New Wave movement. Acclaimed works from this period include Downward to the Earth, Dying Inside, Nightwings, and The World Inside. In the 1980s, he launched the Majipoor series with Lord Valentine’s Castle, creating one of the most imaginative planetary settings in science fiction.
Though he announced his retirement from writing in the mid-1970s, Silverberg returned with renewed vigor and continued to publish acclaimed fiction into the 1990s. He received further recognition with the Nebula-winning Sailing to Byzantium and the Hugo-winning Gilgamesh in the Outback.
Silverberg has also played a significant role as an editor and anthologist, shaping science fiction literature through both his own work and his influence on others. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with his wife, author Karen Haber.
Robert Silverberg is a highly celebrated American science fiction author and editor known for his prolific output and literary range. Over a career spanning decades, he has won multiple Hugo and Nebula Awards and was named a Grand Master by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America in 2004. Inducted into the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame in 1999, Silverberg is recognized for both his immense productivity and his contributions to the genre's evolution.
Born in Brooklyn, he began writing in his teens and won his first Hugo Award in 1956 as the best new writer. Throughout the 1950s, he produced vast amounts of fiction, often under pseudonyms, and was known for writing up to a million words a year. When the market declined, he diversified into other genres, including historical nonfiction and erotica.
Silverberg’s return to science fiction in the 1960s marked a shift toward deeper psychological and literary themes, contributing significantly to the New Wave movement. Acclaimed works from this period include Downward to the Earth, Dying Inside, Nightwings, and The World Inside. In the 1980s, he launched the Majipoor series with Lord Valentine’s Castle, creating one of the most imaginative planetary settings in science fiction.
Though he announced his retirement from writing in the mid-1970s, Silverberg returned with renewed vigor and continued to publish acclaimed fiction into the 1990s. He received further recognition with the Nebula-winning Sailing to Byzantium and the Hugo-winning Gilgamesh in the Outback.
Silverberg has also played a significant role as an editor and anthologist, shaping science fiction literature through both his own work and his influence on others. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with his wife, author Karen Haber.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 39 reviews
March 13, 2012
This book was recommended to me by a science fiction writer as having useful essays dissecting why science fiction works. They are useful. Robert Silverberg is one of my favorite authors, so I was happy to listen to anything he said.
However, some of the stories are real gems that I would not have otherwise come across. Silverberg culled the period from the mid-40s through early 60s--the "Pulp Era"--and found some that stand out as exceptional for that time period. My favorite was Alfred Bester's "Fondly Farenheit". The purposely confused point of view was wonderful--it really created a fantastic vision of the mindset the author was trying to convey (I can't say any more without spoiling a great story). Robert Sheckley's "The Monsters" was also a fabulous blend of horror tropes with science fiction tropes and absurdist humor.
I don't usually read this period of science fiction--my favorites are the 60s/70s New Wave, the 80s Cyberpunk, and the neat fusion of styles that has characterized the 90s through the present. So for others who are similarly 1950s-deficient in their reading, get this for the great stories. For those learning to write, the essays are quite useful.
However, some of the stories are real gems that I would not have otherwise come across. Silverberg culled the period from the mid-40s through early 60s--the "Pulp Era"--and found some that stand out as exceptional for that time period. My favorite was Alfred Bester's "Fondly Farenheit". The purposely confused point of view was wonderful--it really created a fantastic vision of the mindset the author was trying to convey (I can't say any more without spoiling a great story). Robert Sheckley's "The Monsters" was also a fabulous blend of horror tropes with science fiction tropes and absurdist humor.
I don't usually read this period of science fiction--my favorites are the 60s/70s New Wave, the 80s Cyberpunk, and the neat fusion of styles that has characterized the 90s through the present. So for others who are similarly 1950s-deficient in their reading, get this for the great stories. For those learning to write, the essays are quite useful.
June 26, 2024
Mandatory reading for spec fic writers. Full review/notes:
https://lanceschaubert.org/2024/06/26...
https://lanceschaubert.org/2024/06/26...
January 19, 2015
The premise of this collection is, to someone like me who aspires to sell stories to SFF magazines, a compelling one. Much-awarded writer Silverberg collects stories that were influential on him as a young writer, that he learned from, along with essays on each story analysing what he learned from it, and an overall essay about the start of his career in general.
The main drawback is that this is an almost-30-year-old book in which a writer whose fiction I've never really liked analyses stories that were, at the time, more than 30 years old and are now about 60 years old. Studying them might therefore not help a great deal with selling stories in the current market.
Now, there are some things that Silverberg says in the main introductory essay that I think are still useful. He talks about what he learned in his university studies about story in general, from studying Greek tragedy and storytelling theory, and he formulates it well. For example, he talks about how a story is built around conflict, the inevitable clash of powerful forces, and how the protagonist comes to participate in that conflict because of something he or she cares about; struggles against obstacles; and is permanently changed as a result. Reading this helped give me ideas for how to improve my stories: intensify the conflict or make it more interesting, increase the protagonist's investment in it, show more of their struggle, think about how they are changed by it. All of this is good stuff.
The analysis of the individual stories I found less useful. A lot of the stories of the 1950s, most of them, in fact, featured thin characterisation; Silverberg mentions this a couple of times, only in order to dismiss it as unimportant, because the science-fictional idea was what mattered. Perhaps this is one reason I've never loved his stories, because to me a character with some depth is important (it's why I can't abide Scalzi's work, which retains that 1950s flaw of indistinguishable characters who are more or less talking furniture).
I got my copy from the library, and an aggrieved feminist has written in it (in pencil) critiques of a couple of the stories, in particular Robert Sheckley's "The Monsters", in which casual wife-murder is used to make a cheap, glib point about moral relativity. She has a point. Along with thin characterisation, violence against women treated as a source of humour isn't going to play well in the current short story market, and quite rightly.
For that matter, a classical approach to story and plot won't necessarily help you to be published in some venues (Clarkesworld comes to mind), but I happen to agree with Silverberg on that aspect of the craft. And there are plenty of markets which do require a beginning, middle and end to a story, not just a lot of pretty jazzing about until you decide to stop.
In summary, then, I did learn something useful from this book, but most of it was early on. I did enjoy some of the stories (Frederick Pohl's "Day Million", for example, which closes the book, and which is an obvious inspiration for Harry Turtledove's 2013 story "It's the End of the World as We Know It, and We Feel Fine"), and it's a good idea to know the classics, if only, as Silverberg points out, so you can avoid rewriting them from ignorance. The idea of the book is a good one, and I'd really like to see the same thing done again by another writer with more recent stories. Maybe I'll even attempt it myself, drawing on the many stories that are free to read online these days.
The main drawback is that this is an almost-30-year-old book in which a writer whose fiction I've never really liked analyses stories that were, at the time, more than 30 years old and are now about 60 years old. Studying them might therefore not help a great deal with selling stories in the current market.
Now, there are some things that Silverberg says in the main introductory essay that I think are still useful. He talks about what he learned in his university studies about story in general, from studying Greek tragedy and storytelling theory, and he formulates it well. For example, he talks about how a story is built around conflict, the inevitable clash of powerful forces, and how the protagonist comes to participate in that conflict because of something he or she cares about; struggles against obstacles; and is permanently changed as a result. Reading this helped give me ideas for how to improve my stories: intensify the conflict or make it more interesting, increase the protagonist's investment in it, show more of their struggle, think about how they are changed by it. All of this is good stuff.
The analysis of the individual stories I found less useful. A lot of the stories of the 1950s, most of them, in fact, featured thin characterisation; Silverberg mentions this a couple of times, only in order to dismiss it as unimportant, because the science-fictional idea was what mattered. Perhaps this is one reason I've never loved his stories, because to me a character with some depth is important (it's why I can't abide Scalzi's work, which retains that 1950s flaw of indistinguishable characters who are more or less talking furniture).
I got my copy from the library, and an aggrieved feminist has written in it (in pencil) critiques of a couple of the stories, in particular Robert Sheckley's "The Monsters", in which casual wife-murder is used to make a cheap, glib point about moral relativity. She has a point. Along with thin characterisation, violence against women treated as a source of humour isn't going to play well in the current short story market, and quite rightly.
For that matter, a classical approach to story and plot won't necessarily help you to be published in some venues (Clarkesworld comes to mind), but I happen to agree with Silverberg on that aspect of the craft. And there are plenty of markets which do require a beginning, middle and end to a story, not just a lot of pretty jazzing about until you decide to stop.
In summary, then, I did learn something useful from this book, but most of it was early on. I did enjoy some of the stories (Frederick Pohl's "Day Million", for example, which closes the book, and which is an obvious inspiration for Harry Turtledove's 2013 story "It's the End of the World as We Know It, and We Feel Fine"), and it's a good idea to know the classics, if only, as Silverberg points out, so you can avoid rewriting them from ignorance. The idea of the book is a good one, and I'd really like to see the same thing done again by another writer with more recent stories. Maybe I'll even attempt it myself, drawing on the many stories that are free to read online these days.
April 11, 2024
9 “Four in One” by Damon Knight
A recon party get ingested by an amoeba-like organism. Their brains and nervous systems remain intact in a symbiotic state with the amoeba. The narrator, an unflappable scientist, is the first ingested and the first to begin to work out their predicament. One of others is a political officer who orders them to return to camp. The scientist understands this will be suicide, and a power struggle begins. The four minds compete for dominance of the amoeba organism. The narrator and a female scientist both survive. They adapt to their new amoeboid bodies and perhaps will be better for it.
7 “Fondly Fahrenheit” by Alfred Bester
A man’s android turns homicidal when the temperature exceeds 90 degrees. The android is his cash cow, so he refuses to get rid of it. He and the android begin to merge identities. Was the man originally insane and imposed it on the android or the other way around? The android is destroyed in a fire. The man gets a robot. The robot wanders off with a young woman and the temperature falls below 40 degrees. The cycle continues. All reet!
7 “No Woman Born” by C.L. Moore
A popular actress/singer/dancer named Deidre is badly burned in a fire. A scientist puts her brain into a sophisticated robotic body. After her recovery, Deidre wishes to return to performing. The scientist fears that the audience will reject her. He wonders if he has created a monster; he knows that the longer her mind lives in the robot body, the more removed she will become from human experience and understanding. Her return to the stage is triumphant. Nevertheless, the scientist tries to kill himself. Deidre prevents his suicide, demonstrating superhuman powers. She still has compassion, but her robot body is already changing her.
7 “Home is the Hunter” by Henry Kuttner
Futuristic society divided into two castes: the populi, and an elite group of aristocratic head hunters who fight for sport and wealth. The pressure to kill and amass more heads is constant and unbearable for the narrator. When one of his friends is killed, he seeks revenge. In the process he wins more heads than any other hunter. He throws a party and, greeting his guests, drinks poison and kills himself. Metaphor for competition.
9 “The Monsters” by Robert Sheckley
Narrated from the POV of aliens who must kill their wives every 25 days to reduce the disproportionate female population. The men debate, take wives regularly, and kill each other without compunction or consequence. Humans arrive in a spaceship. The aliens wonder if the humans are moral beings. They fear the humans, but make an attempt to communicate. When the humans have been on the planet 25 days, one of the aliens decides to kill one of the female humans as a favor to the males. Appalled, the humans kill the alien and order the rest to kill no more females. The aliens respond with outrage; the female aliens lead the assault on the human spaceship.
9 “Scanners Live in Vain” by Cordwainer Smith
Space travel is unbearably painful to anyone not in hypersleep. So spaceships are crewed by humans who have their consciousness projected from earth to space. The neural blocks required to do this render the men cripples, robbed of their senses and incapable of normal human contact without “cranching.” The Scanners monitor the crews and ensure the safety of all aboard the ships. The narrator “cranchs” back to earth to spend some time with his wife. He expresses frustration with his life as a scanner. He is summoned to an emergency meeting of scanners. He is the only cranched scanner at the meeting. Their leader announces that a scientist has discovered a cure for the pain of space travel, rendering scanners obsolete, their sacrifices in vain. The scanners decide to assassinate the scientist. The narrator foils the assassination, and all the scanners are returned to normal life. Groundbreaking for its bleak view of the future and for its vision of how technology can destroy our humanity.
9 “Hothouse” by Brian Aldiss
Countless years into the future, Earth has been overgrown with vicious, aggressive, carnivorous vegetation. Humans have been reduced to scavengers hiding in the tree tops. The tropical nightmare is totally immersive: hot, humid, oppressive, with death lurking behind every leaf and branch. Village elders prepare to ascend to heaven. They place themselves in cocoons atop the forest ceiling. The cocoons stick to the bodies of giant spider-like plants called traversers, like pollen sticks to bees. The traversers spend most of their time in "outspace", soaking up raw radiation from the sun. They frequently stop on the moon on the way out, and, as a result, have unwittingly seeded the moon with plant and animal life. The trip through space mutates the humans into winged “flymen.” The flymen elders have hatched a plan to return to Earth.
6 “Common Time” by James Blish
Test pilot attempts faster than light travel. The time distortion effects slow time by a factor of 6,000. The oscillations of the engine then accelerate time beyond the pilot’s ability to process stimuli, and he enters a coma. During this coma he experiences an encounter with an alien intelligence that soothes and comforts him. Did he dream or hallucinate this meeting? He has no way of knowing for sure. When the test ends, he longs to return to space again, but learns he must undergo extensive testing and will never fly again.
7 “The New Prime” by Jack Vance
Five apparently unrelated episodes dovetail. They have been tests conducted in virtual reality to measure the personality of the candidate. The man who devised the test is the incumbent “Prime” – the executive leader of the galactic government. The tests evaluate the candidates social skills, aggressiveness, imagination, loyalty, and ability to withstand torture. The senators observing the test will decide who will be the new Prime. The senior senator points out that the incumbent’s test is designed to suit his personality traits, so it was inevitable that he should score the highest. He notes that the test does not evaluate characteristics that the incumbent lacks, and the senate believes are most important: compassion, sympathy, tolerance. One candidate has been driven insane by the torture test. He is the man the senators choose to be the new prime.
8 “Colony” by Phillip K. Dick
Explorers analyzing a planet being considered for colonization are unable to find any dangerous organisms, not even microbes. Then one of the scientists is attacked by his microscope. The planet is filled with alien beings that are capable of perfectly imitating the shape of any inanimate object. Dick mixes horror and farce as human crew members are attacked and killed by towels, belts, welcome mats, clothes, vehicles, and other mundane items. A scientist releases some poison gas into the laboratory to see how many aliens there are. The lab is filled, half of the objects in the room are actually aliens. The crew decides to strip naked and call in an evacuation. In her rush, the captain neglects to explain the nature of the aliens to the rescue dispatch. The panicked crew crowds into the rescue shuttle. The shuttle turns out to be a giant alien. The real shuttle lands. No one is left to save.
9 “Little Black Bag” by C.M. Kornbluth
The explosive birth rate among the poor and uneducated creates a massive pool of idiots, lead by a small minority of elite intelligentsia. But because the elite caste is so small, many important, complex jobs must be performed by the moron pool. So the elite group creates technology that does the thinking for the morons. In this case, the technology is a doctor’s black bag. Accidentally, one of the black bags is sent back to the 20th century to the home of a disgraced, alcoholic doctor. The doctor plans to sell it for booze, but an emergency pops up and he uses the bag to heal a seriously injured girl. The girl’s sister threatens to expose the doctor unless he shares the money from the sale of the black bag. But no pawn broker will buy the bag, so the two devise a scheme to open a medical practice with the bag. When the old doctor decides to turn the bag over to science for the betterment of humankind, the girl kills him. In the future, they detect that the bag has been used to kill, and they deactivate it. At that precise moment the girl is demonstrating the safety of one of the knives to a patient, and unwittingly slashes her own throat. The girl gets poetic justice, but now there will be no betterment of humankind. Kornbluth the pessimist.
7 “Light of Other Days” by Bob Shaw
Brief story with surprising emotional depth. “Slow glass” greatly impedes the speed of light rays passing through it. In some cases, light may take ten years or more to pass through a sheet of slow glass. The narrator is having marital problems complicated by an unwanted pregnancy. He and his wife stop during a drive in the country to buy slow glass from an old man. The old man looks at his house, seeing images of his family through the windows. After the narrator buys some slow glass, the wife inadvertently enters the old man’s house to find there is no family. His wife and child died many years ago. The slow glass windows allow him occasional ghostly glimpses of them. The narrator and his wife are shaken by this revelation of loss, and walk away clinging to one another. Perhaps better conceived than told.
7 “Day Million” by Frederick Pohl
Future shock leavened with a healthy dose of authorial sassiness. The story itself is utterly rote boy meets girl. The uniqueness of the story is all in the shocking, otherworldly details of the futuristic world and the narrator’s cranky, taunting intrusions into the text of the story.
A recon party get ingested by an amoeba-like organism. Their brains and nervous systems remain intact in a symbiotic state with the amoeba. The narrator, an unflappable scientist, is the first ingested and the first to begin to work out their predicament. One of others is a political officer who orders them to return to camp. The scientist understands this will be suicide, and a power struggle begins. The four minds compete for dominance of the amoeba organism. The narrator and a female scientist both survive. They adapt to their new amoeboid bodies and perhaps will be better for it.
7 “Fondly Fahrenheit” by Alfred Bester
A man’s android turns homicidal when the temperature exceeds 90 degrees. The android is his cash cow, so he refuses to get rid of it. He and the android begin to merge identities. Was the man originally insane and imposed it on the android or the other way around? The android is destroyed in a fire. The man gets a robot. The robot wanders off with a young woman and the temperature falls below 40 degrees. The cycle continues. All reet!
7 “No Woman Born” by C.L. Moore
A popular actress/singer/dancer named Deidre is badly burned in a fire. A scientist puts her brain into a sophisticated robotic body. After her recovery, Deidre wishes to return to performing. The scientist fears that the audience will reject her. He wonders if he has created a monster; he knows that the longer her mind lives in the robot body, the more removed she will become from human experience and understanding. Her return to the stage is triumphant. Nevertheless, the scientist tries to kill himself. Deidre prevents his suicide, demonstrating superhuman powers. She still has compassion, but her robot body is already changing her.
7 “Home is the Hunter” by Henry Kuttner
Futuristic society divided into two castes: the populi, and an elite group of aristocratic head hunters who fight for sport and wealth. The pressure to kill and amass more heads is constant and unbearable for the narrator. When one of his friends is killed, he seeks revenge. In the process he wins more heads than any other hunter. He throws a party and, greeting his guests, drinks poison and kills himself. Metaphor for competition.
9 “The Monsters” by Robert Sheckley
Narrated from the POV of aliens who must kill their wives every 25 days to reduce the disproportionate female population. The men debate, take wives regularly, and kill each other without compunction or consequence. Humans arrive in a spaceship. The aliens wonder if the humans are moral beings. They fear the humans, but make an attempt to communicate. When the humans have been on the planet 25 days, one of the aliens decides to kill one of the female humans as a favor to the males. Appalled, the humans kill the alien and order the rest to kill no more females. The aliens respond with outrage; the female aliens lead the assault on the human spaceship.
9 “Scanners Live in Vain” by Cordwainer Smith
Space travel is unbearably painful to anyone not in hypersleep. So spaceships are crewed by humans who have their consciousness projected from earth to space. The neural blocks required to do this render the men cripples, robbed of their senses and incapable of normal human contact without “cranching.” The Scanners monitor the crews and ensure the safety of all aboard the ships. The narrator “cranchs” back to earth to spend some time with his wife. He expresses frustration with his life as a scanner. He is summoned to an emergency meeting of scanners. He is the only cranched scanner at the meeting. Their leader announces that a scientist has discovered a cure for the pain of space travel, rendering scanners obsolete, their sacrifices in vain. The scanners decide to assassinate the scientist. The narrator foils the assassination, and all the scanners are returned to normal life. Groundbreaking for its bleak view of the future and for its vision of how technology can destroy our humanity.
9 “Hothouse” by Brian Aldiss
Countless years into the future, Earth has been overgrown with vicious, aggressive, carnivorous vegetation. Humans have been reduced to scavengers hiding in the tree tops. The tropical nightmare is totally immersive: hot, humid, oppressive, with death lurking behind every leaf and branch. Village elders prepare to ascend to heaven. They place themselves in cocoons atop the forest ceiling. The cocoons stick to the bodies of giant spider-like plants called traversers, like pollen sticks to bees. The traversers spend most of their time in "outspace", soaking up raw radiation from the sun. They frequently stop on the moon on the way out, and, as a result, have unwittingly seeded the moon with plant and animal life. The trip through space mutates the humans into winged “flymen.” The flymen elders have hatched a plan to return to Earth.
6 “Common Time” by James Blish
Test pilot attempts faster than light travel. The time distortion effects slow time by a factor of 6,000. The oscillations of the engine then accelerate time beyond the pilot’s ability to process stimuli, and he enters a coma. During this coma he experiences an encounter with an alien intelligence that soothes and comforts him. Did he dream or hallucinate this meeting? He has no way of knowing for sure. When the test ends, he longs to return to space again, but learns he must undergo extensive testing and will never fly again.
7 “The New Prime” by Jack Vance
Five apparently unrelated episodes dovetail. They have been tests conducted in virtual reality to measure the personality of the candidate. The man who devised the test is the incumbent “Prime” – the executive leader of the galactic government. The tests evaluate the candidates social skills, aggressiveness, imagination, loyalty, and ability to withstand torture. The senators observing the test will decide who will be the new Prime. The senior senator points out that the incumbent’s test is designed to suit his personality traits, so it was inevitable that he should score the highest. He notes that the test does not evaluate characteristics that the incumbent lacks, and the senate believes are most important: compassion, sympathy, tolerance. One candidate has been driven insane by the torture test. He is the man the senators choose to be the new prime.
8 “Colony” by Phillip K. Dick
Explorers analyzing a planet being considered for colonization are unable to find any dangerous organisms, not even microbes. Then one of the scientists is attacked by his microscope. The planet is filled with alien beings that are capable of perfectly imitating the shape of any inanimate object. Dick mixes horror and farce as human crew members are attacked and killed by towels, belts, welcome mats, clothes, vehicles, and other mundane items. A scientist releases some poison gas into the laboratory to see how many aliens there are. The lab is filled, half of the objects in the room are actually aliens. The crew decides to strip naked and call in an evacuation. In her rush, the captain neglects to explain the nature of the aliens to the rescue dispatch. The panicked crew crowds into the rescue shuttle. The shuttle turns out to be a giant alien. The real shuttle lands. No one is left to save.
9 “Little Black Bag” by C.M. Kornbluth
The explosive birth rate among the poor and uneducated creates a massive pool of idiots, lead by a small minority of elite intelligentsia. But because the elite caste is so small, many important, complex jobs must be performed by the moron pool. So the elite group creates technology that does the thinking for the morons. In this case, the technology is a doctor’s black bag. Accidentally, one of the black bags is sent back to the 20th century to the home of a disgraced, alcoholic doctor. The doctor plans to sell it for booze, but an emergency pops up and he uses the bag to heal a seriously injured girl. The girl’s sister threatens to expose the doctor unless he shares the money from the sale of the black bag. But no pawn broker will buy the bag, so the two devise a scheme to open a medical practice with the bag. When the old doctor decides to turn the bag over to science for the betterment of humankind, the girl kills him. In the future, they detect that the bag has been used to kill, and they deactivate it. At that precise moment the girl is demonstrating the safety of one of the knives to a patient, and unwittingly slashes her own throat. The girl gets poetic justice, but now there will be no betterment of humankind. Kornbluth the pessimist.
7 “Light of Other Days” by Bob Shaw
Brief story with surprising emotional depth. “Slow glass” greatly impedes the speed of light rays passing through it. In some cases, light may take ten years or more to pass through a sheet of slow glass. The narrator is having marital problems complicated by an unwanted pregnancy. He and his wife stop during a drive in the country to buy slow glass from an old man. The old man looks at his house, seeing images of his family through the windows. After the narrator buys some slow glass, the wife inadvertently enters the old man’s house to find there is no family. His wife and child died many years ago. The slow glass windows allow him occasional ghostly glimpses of them. The narrator and his wife are shaken by this revelation of loss, and walk away clinging to one another. Perhaps better conceived than told.
7 “Day Million” by Frederick Pohl
Future shock leavened with a healthy dose of authorial sassiness. The story itself is utterly rote boy meets girl. The uniqueness of the story is all in the shocking, otherworldly details of the futuristic world and the narrator’s cranky, taunting intrusions into the text of the story.
May 15, 2012
Published as Worlds of Wonder in 1987, Science Fiction 101 still works on several levels: as an autobiography of "one of the most honored Masters in the history of the field" (and you thought Asimov immodest), as an introduction to classic SF short stories mostly from the 1950s, and as entertaining and insightful essays on just what SF is and how it works.
Unlike many current authorities, Silverberg places SF inside the fantasy genre. In fact, ignoring the obvious vampires, elves and magic, he argues that it precisely the possibility--however improbably--of SF which distinguishes it from fantasy. And demonstrates his point using several stories which have no overt SF characteristics.
Some of the stories are excellent; some less so, and a few irritating poor, but Science Fiction 101 is far better than most SF anthologies you'll find these days.
A good read.
Unlike many current authorities, Silverberg places SF inside the fantasy genre. In fact, ignoring the obvious vampires, elves and magic, he argues that it precisely the possibility--however improbably--of SF which distinguishes it from fantasy. And demonstrates his point using several stories which have no overt SF characteristics.
Some of the stories are excellent; some less so, and a few irritating poor, but Science Fiction 101 is far better than most SF anthologies you'll find these days.
A good read.
March 29, 2020
This starts with an introductory, autobiographical essay by Robert Silverberg. This essay was interesting, and it held my attention, but it's full of a lot of garbage. There's a lot of elitism about learning the Proper way to write a Good story. For instance he recalls learning, as a young man, that all good stories have conflict; this is a very western notion. I've read enough fanfiction where the entire plot involves hanging out in coffee shops, falling in love, or taking a bath, or some other totally conflict-free scenario, to know that the best stories often have no conflict at all. But I like the voice Silverberg uses as he relates his knowledge and experiences. That's probably why I picked this one up, along with a desire to read more classic sci fi.
Four in One by Damon Knight - The premise of this one contains a fair amount of body horror; the protagonist has been consumed and subsumed into some kind of gel-based alien. It was a fairly medicore story, I thought; it didn't really seem plausible to me that characters would, upon finding themselves in this situation, behave the way these four did. At least it was short.
Fondly Fahrenheit by Alfred Bester - Starts with a rather grisly death. I didn't understand the POV; it kept switching between first and third person. I couldn't tell who was telling the story, who was "I." And yes I get that this was deliberate, that theme dictates form, etc etc. It was still confusing and inaccessible.
No Woman Born by C.L. Moore - Gave off these fake deep vibes. Maybe the question it poses is somehow outdated; the idea of "can a person lose their humanity by having their body replaced by machinery" feels like a conceit of a time before mechanical prosthesis were as developed as they now are. At any rate, the story is mostly a series of descriptions of subtle gestures. Another mediocre story.
Home is the Hunter by Henry Kuttner - Possibly a critique of toxic masculinity? Features a male protagonist in a very eat-or-be-eaten world. I didn't like the writing style. It was kind of hard to follow. This is about when I started to suspect this book wasn't working for me.
The Monsters by Robert Sheckley - Well, this is a story where the males of a species habitually kill their wives, to keep the female population down. It's played as humorous. I don't think I need to say any more than that.
Common Time by James Blish - An interesting premise, with space travel, aliens, time dilation. Unfortunately the writing style was completely unintelligible at times. I did appreciate Silverberg's technical essay about this one; it revealed some interesting secrets.
Scanners Live in Vain by Cordwainer Smith - DNF at page 192, just a couple pages into the story. I just didn't have the patience to step past the deluge of worldbuilding, the unexplained elements. I did read Silverberg's technical essay though and I appreciated the points he made. I'm sure this was a perfectly good story if you have a lot of patience for puzzling out what "cranching" means.
Hothouse by Brian W. Aldiss - This one had some serious gender problems. A society where men are precious and brave. Unecessary talk of the female's protagonist's breasts. But the setting (a jungle) interested me, so I kept reading. The setting was so cool, I kept wishing for more description. Definitely had that same "dense, unexplained worldbuilding" problem. Warning for gorey violence. DNF at page 245, thinking to myself, "this writing is just very bad."
The New Prime by Jack Vance - I liked the structure of this one. Warning for torture. Also pretty sure this story had exactly zero female characters. Oh no wait, there is one, for a brief moment: a temptress who serves as a test for the male protagonist as she tries to lure him off his path.
Colony by Philip K. Dick - A horror story about creatures that mimic household objects and attack people. It's interesting, because they're an indigenous species of a planet that's being colonized, so you kind of root for the creatures against the humans. Although I don't think the author really explored that perspective. I liked the clear, lucid writing style, and was tempted to look into the author's novels, but in the technical essay Silverberg points out that Dick's novels are usually more abstract and profound.
The Little Black Bag by C.M. Kornbluth - TW for alcohol and alcoholism. I might be wrong, but I got mild eugenics vibes from this one? But they weren't central to the plot. A somewhat dull story about a medical bag from the future.
Light of Other Days by Bob Shaw - Fundamentally a story about a couple who goes shopping. Boring and painfully heterosexual. At least the third story in a row with no relatable characters.
Day Million by Frederik Pohl - The first and only story in the book that really impressed me. If you squint, the protagonist is queer. I like the voice, the meta-writing style. A love story creatively imagined.
Four in One by Damon Knight - The premise of this one contains a fair amount of body horror; the protagonist has been consumed and subsumed into some kind of gel-based alien. It was a fairly medicore story, I thought; it didn't really seem plausible to me that characters would, upon finding themselves in this situation, behave the way these four did. At least it was short.
Fondly Fahrenheit by Alfred Bester - Starts with a rather grisly death. I didn't understand the POV; it kept switching between first and third person. I couldn't tell who was telling the story, who was "I." And yes I get that this was deliberate, that theme dictates form, etc etc. It was still confusing and inaccessible.
No Woman Born by C.L. Moore - Gave off these fake deep vibes. Maybe the question it poses is somehow outdated; the idea of "can a person lose their humanity by having their body replaced by machinery" feels like a conceit of a time before mechanical prosthesis were as developed as they now are. At any rate, the story is mostly a series of descriptions of subtle gestures. Another mediocre story.
Home is the Hunter by Henry Kuttner - Possibly a critique of toxic masculinity? Features a male protagonist in a very eat-or-be-eaten world. I didn't like the writing style. It was kind of hard to follow. This is about when I started to suspect this book wasn't working for me.
The Monsters by Robert Sheckley - Well, this is a story where the males of a species habitually kill their wives, to keep the female population down. It's played as humorous. I don't think I need to say any more than that.
Common Time by James Blish - An interesting premise, with space travel, aliens, time dilation. Unfortunately the writing style was completely unintelligible at times. I did appreciate Silverberg's technical essay about this one; it revealed some interesting secrets.
Scanners Live in Vain by Cordwainer Smith - DNF at page 192, just a couple pages into the story. I just didn't have the patience to step past the deluge of worldbuilding, the unexplained elements. I did read Silverberg's technical essay though and I appreciated the points he made. I'm sure this was a perfectly good story if you have a lot of patience for puzzling out what "cranching" means.
Hothouse by Brian W. Aldiss - This one had some serious gender problems. A society where men are precious and brave. Unecessary talk of the female's protagonist's breasts. But the setting (a jungle) interested me, so I kept reading. The setting was so cool, I kept wishing for more description. Definitely had that same "dense, unexplained worldbuilding" problem. Warning for gorey violence. DNF at page 245, thinking to myself, "this writing is just very bad."
The New Prime by Jack Vance - I liked the structure of this one. Warning for torture. Also pretty sure this story had exactly zero female characters. Oh no wait, there is one, for a brief moment: a temptress who serves as a test for the male protagonist as she tries to lure him off his path.
Colony by Philip K. Dick - A horror story about creatures that mimic household objects and attack people. It's interesting, because they're an indigenous species of a planet that's being colonized, so you kind of root for the creatures against the humans. Although I don't think the author really explored that perspective. I liked the clear, lucid writing style, and was tempted to look into the author's novels, but in the technical essay Silverberg points out that Dick's novels are usually more abstract and profound.
The Little Black Bag by C.M. Kornbluth - TW for alcohol and alcoholism. I might be wrong, but I got mild eugenics vibes from this one? But they weren't central to the plot. A somewhat dull story about a medical bag from the future.
Light of Other Days by Bob Shaw - Fundamentally a story about a couple who goes shopping. Boring and painfully heterosexual. At least the third story in a row with no relatable characters.
Day Million by Frederik Pohl - The first and only story in the book that really impressed me. If you squint, the protagonist is queer. I like the voice, the meta-writing style. A love story creatively imagined.
April 12, 2018
Robert Silverberg is one of the grand masters of science-fiction, with a distinguished career as an author and editor behind him. But in the early 1950s, he was an ambitious student at Columbia, teaching himself the craft with a stack of pump magazines in one hand, and books of structural criticism and classic rhetoric in the others. This is grand master Silverberg's letter in a bottle to uncertain fledgling writer Bob, thirteen stories with brief appreciative/critical essays.
What you have are writer's stories, mostly published around 1953. You may recognize the names (Dick, Pohl, Blish, Vance, Cordwainer Smith), but I had read only a few of these stories prior, (and I love classic scifi). Every story is solid, some of them amazing, and the essays provide pointers for how each author used his or her personal style to advance some fictive technique in pursuit of telling a wonderful story. And yes, her, as Sivlerberg elevates forgotten female scifi pioneer C.L. Moore.
Every scifi fan owes it to themselves to read this book. And someone should do an update for stories published since 1980 and 2000. We just need to find our enfante terrible.
What you have are writer's stories, mostly published around 1953. You may recognize the names (Dick, Pohl, Blish, Vance, Cordwainer Smith), but I had read only a few of these stories prior, (and I love classic scifi). Every story is solid, some of them amazing, and the essays provide pointers for how each author used his or her personal style to advance some fictive technique in pursuit of telling a wonderful story. And yes, her, as Sivlerberg elevates forgotten female scifi pioneer C.L. Moore.
Every scifi fan owes it to themselves to read this book. And someone should do an update for stories published since 1980 and 2000. We just need to find our enfante terrible.
January 6, 2020
I wasn't quite as enamored with at least some of the stories as Silverberg was, and certainly some of it seems a little dated at this point, but the observations on the stories were for the most part interesting, and there were a few I truly enjoyed.
July 14, 2022
I picked this up ostensibly as a manual on writing, as seen through Silverberg’s experience and what he considered some of the stories formative for his own work. In general, it succeeds as both that and as a condensed history of a certain period of SF, roughly the mid-1950s to the early 1970s. While not every story here works as well for me as they did for Silverberg, part of that might be reading them upon their first appearance (particularly the Kuttner and the Blish). The Sheckley is a particularly difficult one given its subject matter; strangely enough, the taboo nature of that made even more so in today’s world would have qualified it for a Dangerous Visions anthology. But several stories here are ones that every SF reader should be aware of—“Scanners Live in Vain,” “Fondly Fahrenheit,” “No Woman Born,” and “Light of Other Days”—while every story is worth reading. Recommended for budding SF writers and those interested in the field’s past.
“Four in One,” Damon Knight — There’s a bit of info dump early on in this story that almost throws you out. Almost. The 1950s SF was filled with infodump, but, as Silverberg points out in his afterword, some writers could get away with it—as long as they had sufficiently hooked you before going into it. Knight does this fairly well, as the beginning sets up a pretty horrific idea of a man falling into a gelatinous alien creature that has basically consumed his entire body, but leaving his brain, ganglia, and eyes—things that the man can use to control the alien. As Silverberg mentioned early, it’s a classic SF plot—the shapeshifting alien—but it works again because Knight approaches it from a new angle. But even more amazing is how the story ends, basically, in one of the hoariest of SF clichés, and instead of feeling duped or tricked or groaning, in this story, it makes sense and is well-earned. The other three characters are a bit cardboardish, while the main scientist character is amazingly calm and even-headed, but, as Silverberg notes, the story works and works well.
“Fondly Fahrenheit,” Alfred Bester — One of the best Bester stories, and most of his stories are great as it is, so this is like the Best of the Best(er). Like much of his work, there’s more going on here than just the plot—Bester plays with narrative structure here, confounding the use of first person, second person, third person in order to help you get into the mindset of the two main characters here. And, like the advertising man he was, he also weaves in a little jingle into the mix. Most critics talk about Bester’s prose being pyrotechnic—if you want to understand what that means, this is your story to find out. Highly recommended.
“No Woman Born,” C. L. Moore — Spoiler alert for what’s to come in case you haven’t read this classic SF story. The premise is simple: beloved dancer, singer, actress Deirdre is caught in a theater fire and dies—but they get to her before braindeath and preserve it, then craft a new body for it to live in. What hubris! What horror! Can the mechanical body get anywhere close to the Deirdre of old? But this is the future, and she was so beloved hundreds of geniuses and artists work to do so, and then there she is. But not quite. Instead of a face, she has something that reminds people of a face, an abstraction of a face. Instead of flesh, she has a metal body that moves with grace and fluidity, but is obviously metal. But instead that, her brain is there, and that’s Deirdre. But will it always remain Deirdre, cut off from humanity, able to see and hear, but not to taste, or smell, or feel? That’s the story in a nutshell, and I encourage you to read it to find out Moore’s conclusion. It’s a rework of the uber-SF story of them all, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, except the creature isn’t one that the world fears, but born from someone they loved, even though this creature’s creator, the artist who led all those others in the assemblage of this body for this brain, fears that they will come to fear and hate her. It’s been some time since I read Frankenstein, and of course the book competes in our memories with the movies and countless poor derivations thereof, but what Moore captures here better than Shelley is the question of what is humanity, years before Philip K. Dick made it his lifework and scores of SF writers pondered the question for the future of AI. While it shows its age somewhat—it probably could have been cut by a few thousand words—it still retains its power a half decade longer, just as Shelley’s work does. Highly recommended.
“Home is the Hunter,” Henry Kuttner — This one didn’t work for me as well as for Robert Silverberg. It’s not that it didn’t work at all, and the reason this story is told in first person makes sense, but the voice of Bellamy, the Hunter, didn’t come across for me. There’s multiple reasons for that, one of them being the mental state that Bellamy is in (answered by the end), but it’s a bit much to get through, even in this short of a story.
“The Monsters,” Robert Sheckley — This story likely wouldn’t get published today based on part of its premise, even though it makes sense in the context, i.e., these are aliens, and what aliens see as right and moral and natural will not be what we see as the same. In fact, what we view as right and moral and natural isn’t the same as what people 100 or 200 years thought. But I suspect an editor today would have Sheckley go for something a bit less misogynistic for his differentiation point. As social satire, this is outstanding even if it is a bit hard to take with our current sensibilities.
“Common Time,” James Blish — A bit long—and long in the tooth—for modern readers. Blish posits what might happen in a faster-than-light instance, where the time for the ship and the pilot might not be equivalent. I’m not sure I bought the premise entirely from a physics point of view, but that wasn’t entirely what Blish was going for, as that was only the journey part, and he was as interested in what the spaceship found once it reached Alpha Centauri.
“Scanners Live in Vain,” Cordwainer Smith — A classic about a group of workers who are being downsized. Unions and management today might take a look at this one. Part of how this story works is that Smith was able to use his main character to empathize with both the workers and how upset they are about their plight being changed by the discovery that would make them obsolete and the non-changed humans and how they would react to the solution voted upon by the Scanners. The funny thing is that I do feel sorry for the oysters, though.
“Hothouse,” Brian W. Aldiss — There are some stories that are simply sui generis, amazing achievements in and of themselves. This is one. The endless inventiveness of this world is astounding, and yet with each new vegetation that Aldiss names, you aren’t lost, but get an idea immediately of what danger it poses. And this is a world of danger, incredibly hostile to those last humans striving to live among a plantlife that has taken over everything. A story set in such a far future like this is possibly less realistic and belies its pulp origins at times (I mean, really, traveling from the Earth to the Moon on gossamer threads—that’s a Jules Verne or earlier concept, and yet Aldiss makes it work), it obtains its force by the sheer imagination that holds everything in check. Highly recommended.
“The New Prime,” Jack Vance — While this might have worked for Silverberg, I was less than impressed. I’ve bounced off Vance before; he uses more description that I normally care for, and that description can be ornate and flowery, to an amount that just causes my eyes to gloss over. The structure of this story, with its five separate story lines that only come together at the end, frustrated me rather than incited my imagination and curiosity. That said, I did appreciate the ending, although even then, I felt it fairly heavy-handed. And such are the vagaries of taste.
“Colony,” Philip K. Dick — I’m a fan of PKD, so it doesn’t come as a surprise that I enjoyed this story. It’s a bit darker than some of his other stuff—as Silverberg rightly ascribes, this is SF horror, not just SF—but it contains the same underlying theme of how we distinguish reality from unreality. In this case, that unreality has an SF expression: a new lifeform that can mimic inanimate objects perfectly…well, perfectly until it tries to kill you, like the microscope where the lens pieces grab the researcher’s throat, or the run that wraps around the feet of the person on it. That said, I do think the ending wasn’t perfect: I can see how the mimic is good, but to mimic the last thing it does is a bit more unrealistic, even if it had been foreshadowed in the mimic of the automobile-like item.
“The Little Black Bag,” C. M. Kornbluth — For what is a classic story — and a very interesting and fun one, for some definitions of fun — the construction of it is somewhat crude and wouldn’t hold up in today’s market, for it relies too much on coincident in its timings. The bag just happens to appear in a doctor’s apartment, for example, someone who could understand, if only somewhat, how it can be used. Similarly, at the end, the technologist turns off the bag just at the moment of its being used in a particular manner. That said, the depiction of these characters—from the alcoholic Dr. Full to the guttersnape blonde who befriends him and his bag—is what really drives the story, as well as provides the motivation that brings it to its conclusion. Read it for what it was, in the 50s, rather than compare it to today’s stories.
“Light of Other Days,” Bob Shaw — This is a lovely story that both introduces a great SF concept and then goes directly to the heart of showing what it could mean to people. While not as surprising today, the emotional arc of the story for the protagonist begins in a very negative space: a couple is unhappy in general and with each other because of an unwanted pregnancy. But that simply sets up the end, however, where their unhappiness is contrasted to the unhappiness of the slow glass seller. The story is simple, but that’s also part of its power. It doesn’t need to be adorned. Anything more would take away from its gut punch.
“Day Million,” Frederik Pohl — There are many stories from SF’s early days that don’t age well, but there are a few stories that get better with age, like this one. Yes, there’s some elements that reflect the time it was written, but the concept, the idea itself? So extremely relevant today. It’s not so much a story, although there’s the most basic story of the world in there, as a thought piece, a challenge, to the reader to consider the changes that have occurred in the 2000 years since the start of the Christian era, not to mention thousands of years before that, and what might change by Day Million. Just one example, Pohl begins the story by saying it’s about a boy, a girl, and a love story, then he says the boy is not a boy, since he is 187-years-old, and the girl is not a girl, because while she’s got XY chromosomes, she also has all the accoutrements we assume someone female would have. “If we find a child with an aptitude for music we give him a scholarship to Juilliard. If they found a child whose aptitudes were for being a woman, they made him one.” Pohl was one of those authors who could imagine the possibilities for change, albeit he had to set it thousands of years in the future, rather than just in the next century. Worthwhile reading.
“Four in One,” Damon Knight — There’s a bit of info dump early on in this story that almost throws you out. Almost. The 1950s SF was filled with infodump, but, as Silverberg points out in his afterword, some writers could get away with it—as long as they had sufficiently hooked you before going into it. Knight does this fairly well, as the beginning sets up a pretty horrific idea of a man falling into a gelatinous alien creature that has basically consumed his entire body, but leaving his brain, ganglia, and eyes—things that the man can use to control the alien. As Silverberg mentioned early, it’s a classic SF plot—the shapeshifting alien—but it works again because Knight approaches it from a new angle. But even more amazing is how the story ends, basically, in one of the hoariest of SF clichés, and instead of feeling duped or tricked or groaning, in this story, it makes sense and is well-earned. The other three characters are a bit cardboardish, while the main scientist character is amazingly calm and even-headed, but, as Silverberg notes, the story works and works well.
“Fondly Fahrenheit,” Alfred Bester — One of the best Bester stories, and most of his stories are great as it is, so this is like the Best of the Best(er). Like much of his work, there’s more going on here than just the plot—Bester plays with narrative structure here, confounding the use of first person, second person, third person in order to help you get into the mindset of the two main characters here. And, like the advertising man he was, he also weaves in a little jingle into the mix. Most critics talk about Bester’s prose being pyrotechnic—if you want to understand what that means, this is your story to find out. Highly recommended.
“No Woman Born,” C. L. Moore — Spoiler alert for what’s to come in case you haven’t read this classic SF story. The premise is simple: beloved dancer, singer, actress Deirdre is caught in a theater fire and dies—but they get to her before braindeath and preserve it, then craft a new body for it to live in. What hubris! What horror! Can the mechanical body get anywhere close to the Deirdre of old? But this is the future, and she was so beloved hundreds of geniuses and artists work to do so, and then there she is. But not quite. Instead of a face, she has something that reminds people of a face, an abstraction of a face. Instead of flesh, she has a metal body that moves with grace and fluidity, but is obviously metal. But instead that, her brain is there, and that’s Deirdre. But will it always remain Deirdre, cut off from humanity, able to see and hear, but not to taste, or smell, or feel? That’s the story in a nutshell, and I encourage you to read it to find out Moore’s conclusion. It’s a rework of the uber-SF story of them all, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, except the creature isn’t one that the world fears, but born from someone they loved, even though this creature’s creator, the artist who led all those others in the assemblage of this body for this brain, fears that they will come to fear and hate her. It’s been some time since I read Frankenstein, and of course the book competes in our memories with the movies and countless poor derivations thereof, but what Moore captures here better than Shelley is the question of what is humanity, years before Philip K. Dick made it his lifework and scores of SF writers pondered the question for the future of AI. While it shows its age somewhat—it probably could have been cut by a few thousand words—it still retains its power a half decade longer, just as Shelley’s work does. Highly recommended.
“Home is the Hunter,” Henry Kuttner — This one didn’t work for me as well as for Robert Silverberg. It’s not that it didn’t work at all, and the reason this story is told in first person makes sense, but the voice of Bellamy, the Hunter, didn’t come across for me. There’s multiple reasons for that, one of them being the mental state that Bellamy is in (answered by the end), but it’s a bit much to get through, even in this short of a story.
“The Monsters,” Robert Sheckley — This story likely wouldn’t get published today based on part of its premise, even though it makes sense in the context, i.e., these are aliens, and what aliens see as right and moral and natural will not be what we see as the same. In fact, what we view as right and moral and natural isn’t the same as what people 100 or 200 years thought. But I suspect an editor today would have Sheckley go for something a bit less misogynistic for his differentiation point. As social satire, this is outstanding even if it is a bit hard to take with our current sensibilities.
“Common Time,” James Blish — A bit long—and long in the tooth—for modern readers. Blish posits what might happen in a faster-than-light instance, where the time for the ship and the pilot might not be equivalent. I’m not sure I bought the premise entirely from a physics point of view, but that wasn’t entirely what Blish was going for, as that was only the journey part, and he was as interested in what the spaceship found once it reached Alpha Centauri.
“Scanners Live in Vain,” Cordwainer Smith — A classic about a group of workers who are being downsized. Unions and management today might take a look at this one. Part of how this story works is that Smith was able to use his main character to empathize with both the workers and how upset they are about their plight being changed by the discovery that would make them obsolete and the non-changed humans and how they would react to the solution voted upon by the Scanners. The funny thing is that I do feel sorry for the oysters, though.
“Hothouse,” Brian W. Aldiss — There are some stories that are simply sui generis, amazing achievements in and of themselves. This is one. The endless inventiveness of this world is astounding, and yet with each new vegetation that Aldiss names, you aren’t lost, but get an idea immediately of what danger it poses. And this is a world of danger, incredibly hostile to those last humans striving to live among a plantlife that has taken over everything. A story set in such a far future like this is possibly less realistic and belies its pulp origins at times (I mean, really, traveling from the Earth to the Moon on gossamer threads—that’s a Jules Verne or earlier concept, and yet Aldiss makes it work), it obtains its force by the sheer imagination that holds everything in check. Highly recommended.
“The New Prime,” Jack Vance — While this might have worked for Silverberg, I was less than impressed. I’ve bounced off Vance before; he uses more description that I normally care for, and that description can be ornate and flowery, to an amount that just causes my eyes to gloss over. The structure of this story, with its five separate story lines that only come together at the end, frustrated me rather than incited my imagination and curiosity. That said, I did appreciate the ending, although even then, I felt it fairly heavy-handed. And such are the vagaries of taste.
“Colony,” Philip K. Dick — I’m a fan of PKD, so it doesn’t come as a surprise that I enjoyed this story. It’s a bit darker than some of his other stuff—as Silverberg rightly ascribes, this is SF horror, not just SF—but it contains the same underlying theme of how we distinguish reality from unreality. In this case, that unreality has an SF expression: a new lifeform that can mimic inanimate objects perfectly…well, perfectly until it tries to kill you, like the microscope where the lens pieces grab the researcher’s throat, or the run that wraps around the feet of the person on it. That said, I do think the ending wasn’t perfect: I can see how the mimic is good, but to mimic the last thing it does is a bit more unrealistic, even if it had been foreshadowed in the mimic of the automobile-like item.
“The Little Black Bag,” C. M. Kornbluth — For what is a classic story — and a very interesting and fun one, for some definitions of fun — the construction of it is somewhat crude and wouldn’t hold up in today’s market, for it relies too much on coincident in its timings. The bag just happens to appear in a doctor’s apartment, for example, someone who could understand, if only somewhat, how it can be used. Similarly, at the end, the technologist turns off the bag just at the moment of its being used in a particular manner. That said, the depiction of these characters—from the alcoholic Dr. Full to the guttersnape blonde who befriends him and his bag—is what really drives the story, as well as provides the motivation that brings it to its conclusion. Read it for what it was, in the 50s, rather than compare it to today’s stories.
“Light of Other Days,” Bob Shaw — This is a lovely story that both introduces a great SF concept and then goes directly to the heart of showing what it could mean to people. While not as surprising today, the emotional arc of the story for the protagonist begins in a very negative space: a couple is unhappy in general and with each other because of an unwanted pregnancy. But that simply sets up the end, however, where their unhappiness is contrasted to the unhappiness of the slow glass seller. The story is simple, but that’s also part of its power. It doesn’t need to be adorned. Anything more would take away from its gut punch.
“Day Million,” Frederik Pohl — There are many stories from SF’s early days that don’t age well, but there are a few stories that get better with age, like this one. Yes, there’s some elements that reflect the time it was written, but the concept, the idea itself? So extremely relevant today. It’s not so much a story, although there’s the most basic story of the world in there, as a thought piece, a challenge, to the reader to consider the changes that have occurred in the 2000 years since the start of the Christian era, not to mention thousands of years before that, and what might change by Day Million. Just one example, Pohl begins the story by saying it’s about a boy, a girl, and a love story, then he says the boy is not a boy, since he is 187-years-old, and the girl is not a girl, because while she’s got XY chromosomes, she also has all the accoutrements we assume someone female would have. “If we find a child with an aptitude for music we give him a scholarship to Juilliard. If they found a child whose aptitudes were for being a woman, they made him one.” Pohl was one of those authors who could imagine the possibilities for change, albeit he had to set it thousands of years in the future, rather than just in the next century. Worthwhile reading.
September 17, 2016
I'd give this a 3.5 were it an option. Not perfect but Silverberg is a craftsmanlike writer who shows a surprising amount of humility in this volume. If nothing else he's an excellent anthologist and the majority of these stories are very enjoyable to read and fairly diverse in their style. Most date from the 50s and 60s so while its hard to fault Silverberg personally for it, as a contemporary guide to the form this may not be the most helpful. That said, Silverberg goes over the basics pretty well and the topics in this volume are diverse enough that any reader not already deeply versed in Sci-fi already should find a lot of stories to enjoy. The volume opens with an extended personal writing biography detailing Silverbergs own early years as a writer. Silverberg may not be the absolute most inspired of sci-fi writers but he was certainly one of the hardest working and prolific writers in his heyday. He details all the essential elements even a basic writer needs to develop an effective story and doesn't pull punches for his own work. This is not the story of an instant genius of the field but of a writer that put in a lot of hard work to develop good stories. For that reason it might be a lot more useful than a guide written by somebody with an instinctive skill at storytelling as Silverberg was clearly a far more attentive writer. Each story (which I repeat are well-chosen if somewhat old)
is followed by an essay highlighting the character, structure, or stylistic elements that make it work well and stay engaging. Silverberg does take time to differentiate the elements he thinks are unique to sci-fi and that sci-fi can accomplish that other types of fiction may not, and on occassion why those elements sometimes effectively compensate for something like limited characterization that would cripple other more "conventional" styles of fiction. Admittedly the organization of this book was a little jarring at first, but even if you only read the stories themselves and dont care about the biographical material its still a good read. This isnt a "how to" guide strictly speaking, but it does select stories as exemplars of some particular quality elements, world building, characterization, narrative style, etcetera. A good volume for someone wanting some basic tips on writing, somebody looking for quality stories of early sci-fi or somebody interested thats a fan of Mr. Silverberg and is curious about his early days as a writer.
is followed by an essay highlighting the character, structure, or stylistic elements that make it work well and stay engaging. Silverberg does take time to differentiate the elements he thinks are unique to sci-fi and that sci-fi can accomplish that other types of fiction may not, and on occassion why those elements sometimes effectively compensate for something like limited characterization that would cripple other more "conventional" styles of fiction. Admittedly the organization of this book was a little jarring at first, but even if you only read the stories themselves and dont care about the biographical material its still a good read. This isnt a "how to" guide strictly speaking, but it does select stories as exemplars of some particular quality elements, world building, characterization, narrative style, etcetera. A good volume for someone wanting some basic tips on writing, somebody looking for quality stories of early sci-fi or somebody interested thats a fan of Mr. Silverberg and is curious about his early days as a writer.
December 1, 2021
Originally published as Robert Silverberg's Worlds Of Wonder in 1987, this is part anthology, part autobiography, and part how-to. As a repurposed textbook it succeeds well. Silverberg writes extensive and detailed notes about each story, describing what works and what doesn't work. Any aspiring writer, especially of science fiction, would do well to study Silverberg's notes. Caution must be applied, however, since the science fiction field has evolved since the stories in this volume were originally published (just as they are superior to those from the 1930s and 40s). Many of the stories here are still effective, but many will seem clunky by today's standards. For those wishing to learn more about Silverberg himself, I recommend Traveler of Worlds: Conversations with Robert Silverberg (2016). Here are some highlights of the fiction in this book.
"Fondly Fahrenheit" by Alfred Bester (The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, August 1954 - novelette)
3 Stars
A robot under the direction of its psychotic owner kills several people, despite the robot's prime directive to not hurt humans. We finally learn what enables this detachment, but there's nothing much for the reader to empathize with. It's more of a problem story popular during this period than the character driven stories of today.
"No Woman Born" by C.L. Moore (Astounding, December 1944 - novelette)
2020 Retro Hugo Award finalist
5 Stars
This story examines the psychological and ethical effects of transferring the brain of a dead human into a mechanical body. It raises lots of questions with which we will probably someday have to contend.
"Scanners Live in Vain" by Cordwainer Smith (Fantasy Book, January 1950 - novelette)
2001 Retro Hugo Award finalist
3 Stars
Smith throws out a lot of technobabble without much in the way of explanation, so you have to work at it to understand what's going on. Smith is working very hard to sound futuristic but eventually, most of the terms are defined. The story is a clear influence on subsequent sf writers. The idea of turning men into electromechanical servants can be seen as recently as the Murderbot Diaries series by Martha Wells. The only female character is no more than a plot device.
"Hothouse" by Brian W. Aldiss (The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, February 1961 - novelette)
1962 Hugo Award winner, Best Short Fiction (as part of a series of four additional stories published in F&SF in 1961 that were published together in 1962 as the fix-up novel The Long Afternoon of Earth (U.S. title) (the Hugo Award rules were a bit loose in those days))
4 Stars
In the far future, Earth is covered with a vast carnivorous forest. The few remaining humans fight a losing battle against strange plants and animals. When the adults get too old, they make way for their children by climbing to the top of the forest and get inside seed casings to be carried off by giant spider-like creatures, their version of burial. But the latest group to do this find themselves taken to the Moon, metamorphosed into strange flying beings. The story ends with a promise of more to come, as it did in the subsequent stories in the series. Aldiss creates a very imaginative universe with many unusual plant and animal species with odd names that are surprisingly not hard to understand.
"Colony" by Philip K. Dick (Galaxy Science Fiction, June 1953 - novelette)
3 Stars
This early story by Dick is a fairly minor piece, with the ending clearly telegraphed to a modern reader, anyway. It's a horror story about an alien that can assume any shape, better done by John W. Campbell in 1938's Who Goes There?, but clearly foreshadowing Dick's lifelong obsession with stories about the nature of reality.
"The Little Black Bag" by C. M. Kornbluth (Astounding, July 1950 - novelette)
2001 Retro Hugo Award winner
3 Stars
This is a quaint story by today's standards. A bag full of futuristic medical devices and medicines travels back in time (without much explanation) and falls into the hands of an alcoholic doctor (what a coincidence!) who uses it to good benefit until his unscrupulous assistant wants to use it for unnecessary cosmetic procedures that bring in big money. The ending is filled with dark irony, as the villain gets their justice in a contrived set of circumstances.
"Light of Other Days" by Bob Shaw (Analog, August 1966 - short story)
1967 Hugo Award finalist and 1967 Nebula Award finalist
4 Stars
The concept of this story is one that seems obvious in hindsight, but Shaw was brilliantly able to come up with it first. A new type of glass, with essentially an extremely high refractive index, records and stores the events seen through it, only to be revealed months or years later. A couple who are experiencing marital difficulties stops at a roadside vendor of slow glass. The vendor turns out to have his own emotional problems, but are they ameliorated or exacerbated by the slow glass? Shaw incorporated this story into Other Days, Other Eyes (1972).
"Day Million" by Frederik Pohl (Rogue, Feb/March 1966 - short story)
4 Stars
This story is heavily influenced by the New Wave movement, being more of a stylistic thought experiment than an actual story. The lesson is that time will evolve our physicalities and mentalities in ways we cannot imagine. This story has what is certainly one of the earliest depictions of transexual humans, presented in a matter-of-fact, no-big-deal manner.
"Fondly Fahrenheit" by Alfred Bester (The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, August 1954 - novelette)
3 Stars
A robot under the direction of its psychotic owner kills several people, despite the robot's prime directive to not hurt humans. We finally learn what enables this detachment, but there's nothing much for the reader to empathize with. It's more of a problem story popular during this period than the character driven stories of today.
"No Woman Born" by C.L. Moore (Astounding, December 1944 - novelette)
2020 Retro Hugo Award finalist
5 Stars
This story examines the psychological and ethical effects of transferring the brain of a dead human into a mechanical body. It raises lots of questions with which we will probably someday have to contend.
"Scanners Live in Vain" by Cordwainer Smith (Fantasy Book, January 1950 - novelette)
2001 Retro Hugo Award finalist
3 Stars
Smith throws out a lot of technobabble without much in the way of explanation, so you have to work at it to understand what's going on. Smith is working very hard to sound futuristic but eventually, most of the terms are defined. The story is a clear influence on subsequent sf writers. The idea of turning men into electromechanical servants can be seen as recently as the Murderbot Diaries series by Martha Wells. The only female character is no more than a plot device.
"Hothouse" by Brian W. Aldiss (The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, February 1961 - novelette)
1962 Hugo Award winner, Best Short Fiction (as part of a series of four additional stories published in F&SF in 1961 that were published together in 1962 as the fix-up novel The Long Afternoon of Earth (U.S. title) (the Hugo Award rules were a bit loose in those days))
4 Stars
In the far future, Earth is covered with a vast carnivorous forest. The few remaining humans fight a losing battle against strange plants and animals. When the adults get too old, they make way for their children by climbing to the top of the forest and get inside seed casings to be carried off by giant spider-like creatures, their version of burial. But the latest group to do this find themselves taken to the Moon, metamorphosed into strange flying beings. The story ends with a promise of more to come, as it did in the subsequent stories in the series. Aldiss creates a very imaginative universe with many unusual plant and animal species with odd names that are surprisingly not hard to understand.
"Colony" by Philip K. Dick (Galaxy Science Fiction, June 1953 - novelette)
3 Stars
This early story by Dick is a fairly minor piece, with the ending clearly telegraphed to a modern reader, anyway. It's a horror story about an alien that can assume any shape, better done by John W. Campbell in 1938's Who Goes There?, but clearly foreshadowing Dick's lifelong obsession with stories about the nature of reality.
"The Little Black Bag" by C. M. Kornbluth (Astounding, July 1950 - novelette)
2001 Retro Hugo Award winner
3 Stars
This is a quaint story by today's standards. A bag full of futuristic medical devices and medicines travels back in time (without much explanation) and falls into the hands of an alcoholic doctor (what a coincidence!) who uses it to good benefit until his unscrupulous assistant wants to use it for unnecessary cosmetic procedures that bring in big money. The ending is filled with dark irony, as the villain gets their justice in a contrived set of circumstances.
"Light of Other Days" by Bob Shaw (Analog, August 1966 - short story)
1967 Hugo Award finalist and 1967 Nebula Award finalist
4 Stars
The concept of this story is one that seems obvious in hindsight, but Shaw was brilliantly able to come up with it first. A new type of glass, with essentially an extremely high refractive index, records and stores the events seen through it, only to be revealed months or years later. A couple who are experiencing marital difficulties stops at a roadside vendor of slow glass. The vendor turns out to have his own emotional problems, but are they ameliorated or exacerbated by the slow glass? Shaw incorporated this story into Other Days, Other Eyes (1972).
"Day Million" by Frederik Pohl (Rogue, Feb/March 1966 - short story)
4 Stars
This story is heavily influenced by the New Wave movement, being more of a stylistic thought experiment than an actual story. The lesson is that time will evolve our physicalities and mentalities in ways we cannot imagine. This story has what is certainly one of the earliest depictions of transexual humans, presented in a matter-of-fact, no-big-deal manner.
October 21, 2010
I read this b/c one of the short stories was recommended by Connie Willis - now I don't even remember which one ;) Robert Silverberg takes you through his genesis as a sci fi writer and critically praises 13 stories that came out around the time (1950-53 or so) that he was beginning to have some success getting stories into magazines.
It was OK for me - the stories are (for the most part) REALLY good - I think there were only two that I just plain old didn't like. As for his commentary - I disagreed with much of it, but it was entertaining to argue with him in my head. And I can never get enough anecdotes about the golden age of SF! My continued nostalgia for times ere I was even born surfaces again!
It was OK for me - the stories are (for the most part) REALLY good - I think there were only two that I just plain old didn't like. As for his commentary - I disagreed with much of it, but it was entertaining to argue with him in my head. And I can never get enough anecdotes about the golden age of SF! My continued nostalgia for times ere I was even born surfaces again!
September 11, 2018
Silverberg has read a lot of SF and here gets to pick the creme de la creme from stories he read and learned from during his journeyman years. It's a very good selection - even casual fans who have dipped into stories from the 1940s through the 1960s are likely to have read more than one before. But even for the familiar stories, Silverberg's added commentary adds a new dimension to the encounter.
Silverberg mainly looks at how the mechanics of story-telling is handled by each author and doesn't attempt to explicate subtext beyond an occasional aside (such as the use of the name "McCarty" in Damon Knight's 1953 "Four in One"). Since these are stories he admires, most of the analysis looks at how the author did things right, but he will point out weaknesses where he perceives them, such as the tied-with-a-bow resolution of Cordwainer Smith's "Scanners Live in Vain".
Silverberg seriously disappointed me only in one instance where I was hoping for some critical insight, Alfred Bester's "Fondly Fahrenheit". This is my second encounter with this story, and in both cases I finished it dissatisfied. Silverberg considers the story almost perfect; the single flaw he notes is the way in which the opening paragraph is disconnected from the second paragraph and thus from the entire story that follows. I disagree with this - in this case Silverberg is being too dogmatically prescriptive of what constitutes "good writing":
Silverberg mainly looks at how the mechanics of story-telling is handled by each author and doesn't attempt to explicate subtext beyond an occasional aside (such as the use of the name "McCarty" in Damon Knight's 1953 "Four in One"). Since these are stories he admires, most of the analysis looks at how the author did things right, but he will point out weaknesses where he perceives them, such as the tied-with-a-bow resolution of Cordwainer Smith's "Scanners Live in Vain".
Silverberg seriously disappointed me only in one instance where I was hoping for some critical insight, Alfred Bester's "Fondly Fahrenheit". This is my second encounter with this story, and in both cases I finished it dissatisfied. Silverberg considers the story almost perfect; the single flaw he notes is the way in which the opening paragraph is disconnected from the second paragraph and thus from the entire story that follows. I disagree with this - in this case Silverberg is being too dogmatically prescriptive of what constitutes "good writing":
I work on the theory - which I picked up somewhere along the way from Ernest Hemingway - that every paragraph of a story ought to be firmly and welded to the one that precedes it, except where a scene break is used to create a deliberate discontinuity.Bester's opening here serves as a kind of "motto theme" which has great relevance to the entire story if not to what immediately follows it - think of the opening of Bartok's Sixth Quartet for instance.
Want to read
April 30, 20229 “Four in One” by Damon Knight
Recon party get ingested by an amoeba-like organism. Their brains and nervous systems remain intact in a symbiotic state with the amoeba. .
7 “Fondly Fahrenheit” by Alfred Bester
A man’s android turns homicidal when the temperature exceeds 90 degrees.
7 “No Woman Born” by C.L. Moore
A popular actress/singer/dancer named Deidre is badly burned in a fire.
7 “Home is the Hunter” by Henry Kuttner
Futuristic society divided into two castes: the populi, and an elite group of aristocratic head hunters who fight for sport and wealth. .
9 “The Monsters” by Robert Sheckley
Narrated from the POV of aliens who must kill their wives every 25 days to reduce the disproportionate female population.
9 “Scanners Live in Vain” by Cordwainer Smith
Space travel is unbearably painful to anyone not in hypersleep. So spaceships are crewed by humans who have their consciousness projected from earth to space.
9 “Hothouse” by Brian Aldiss
Countless years into the future, Earth has been overgrown with vicious, aggressive, carnivorous vegetation. Humans have been reduced to scavengers hiding in the tree tops. The tropical nightmare is totally immersive: hot, humid, oppressive, with death lurking behind every leaf and branch. Village elders prepare to ascend to heaven. They place themselves in cocoons atop the forest ceiling. The cocoons stick to the bodies of giant spider-like plants called traversers,
6 “Common Time” by James Blish
Test pilot attempts faster than light travel. The time distortion effects slow time by a factor of 6,000.
7 “The New Prime” by Jack Vance MEHHH
Five apparently unrelated episodes dovetail. They have been tests conducted in virtual reality to measure the personality of the candidate.
9 “Little Black Bag” by C.M. Kornbluth
The explosive birth rate among the poor and uneducated creates a massive pool of idiots, lead by a small minority of elite intelligentsia. But because the elite caste is so small, many important, complex jobs must be performed by the moron pool. So the elite group creates technology that does the thinking for the morons. In this case, the technology is a doctor’s black bag.
7 “Light of Other Days” by Bob Shaw , MEHHH
Brief story with surprising emotional depth. “Slow glass” greatly impedes the speed of light rays passing through it.
7 “Day Million” by Frederick Pohl
Future shock leavened with a healthy dose of authorial sassiness. The story itself is utterly rote boy meets girl. The uniqueness of the story is all in the shocking, otherworldly details of the futuristic world
Recon party get ingested by an amoeba-like organism. Their brains and nervous systems remain intact in a symbiotic state with the amoeba. .
7 “Fondly Fahrenheit” by Alfred Bester
A man’s android turns homicidal when the temperature exceeds 90 degrees.
7 “No Woman Born” by C.L. Moore
A popular actress/singer/dancer named Deidre is badly burned in a fire.
7 “Home is the Hunter” by Henry Kuttner
Futuristic society divided into two castes: the populi, and an elite group of aristocratic head hunters who fight for sport and wealth. .
9 “The Monsters” by Robert Sheckley
Narrated from the POV of aliens who must kill their wives every 25 days to reduce the disproportionate female population.
9 “Scanners Live in Vain” by Cordwainer Smith
Space travel is unbearably painful to anyone not in hypersleep. So spaceships are crewed by humans who have their consciousness projected from earth to space.
9 “Hothouse” by Brian Aldiss
Countless years into the future, Earth has been overgrown with vicious, aggressive, carnivorous vegetation. Humans have been reduced to scavengers hiding in the tree tops. The tropical nightmare is totally immersive: hot, humid, oppressive, with death lurking behind every leaf and branch. Village elders prepare to ascend to heaven. They place themselves in cocoons atop the forest ceiling. The cocoons stick to the bodies of giant spider-like plants called traversers,
6 “Common Time” by James Blish
Test pilot attempts faster than light travel. The time distortion effects slow time by a factor of 6,000.
7 “The New Prime” by Jack Vance MEHHH
Five apparently unrelated episodes dovetail. They have been tests conducted in virtual reality to measure the personality of the candidate.
9 “Little Black Bag” by C.M. Kornbluth
The explosive birth rate among the poor and uneducated creates a massive pool of idiots, lead by a small minority of elite intelligentsia. But because the elite caste is so small, many important, complex jobs must be performed by the moron pool. So the elite group creates technology that does the thinking for the morons. In this case, the technology is a doctor’s black bag.
7 “Light of Other Days” by Bob Shaw , MEHHH
Brief story with surprising emotional depth. “Slow glass” greatly impedes the speed of light rays passing through it.
7 “Day Million” by Frederick Pohl
Future shock leavened with a healthy dose of authorial sassiness. The story itself is utterly rote boy meets girl. The uniqueness of the story is all in the shocking, otherworldly details of the futuristic world
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
May 20, 2019
This came into my posession through an anonymous benefactor who donated their copy to a local library book sale, and I feel their selfless genersoity is worth noting here.
I had the benefit of Mr. Silverberg's editing not long after this was published, and while The Arbor House Treasury of Great Science Fiction Short Novels was one of the more interesting "textbooks" I read in college, I wish the good professor had chosen this one instead. Perhaps I would be much further along in my own writing had I read this back in 1988.
"Worlds'" stories can be found in other anthologies, but Silverberg's essays offer detailed insights into what makes each classic SF. The book's introduction is part glimpse into the diffucult journey every writer must take, part very personal biography. Writers have been known to admit "my writing was pretty bad in the beginning but I got better." but Silverberg had the courage to put it in print. with the added "this is how I got better" and the unwritten encouragement "you can too."
Thank you Mr. Silverberg, I'm taking your advice to heart and I hope to keep getting better. I may be attending my first Hugo ceremony in my 70's, but I know I'll get there.
I had the benefit of Mr. Silverberg's editing not long after this was published, and while The Arbor House Treasury of Great Science Fiction Short Novels was one of the more interesting "textbooks" I read in college, I wish the good professor had chosen this one instead. Perhaps I would be much further along in my own writing had I read this back in 1988.
"Worlds'" stories can be found in other anthologies, but Silverberg's essays offer detailed insights into what makes each classic SF. The book's introduction is part glimpse into the diffucult journey every writer must take, part very personal biography. Writers have been known to admit "my writing was pretty bad in the beginning but I got better." but Silverberg had the courage to put it in print. with the added "this is how I got better" and the unwritten encouragement "you can too."
Thank you Mr. Silverberg, I'm taking your advice to heart and I hope to keep getting better. I may be attending my first Hugo ceremony in my 70's, but I know I'll get there.
xx-dnf-skim-reference
April 16, 2021I don't like Silverberg's stories (and am not interested in his memoirs nor in writing SF), so am not excited to read his favorite stories by others. But my brother gave this five stars....
---
2/3 done:
Yup, these are clearly exemplary of what has influenced Silverberg. I do agree with him that they are very well written. In my very own personal opinion, they are only mildly interesting, though, and mostly they are a bit too show-offy for me, also. Some I've most def. seen before but didn't remember and so had to reread (albeit at a faster pace)... but does not that lack of memorability serve as a negative impression? I say it does, and before my mind and my own writing style are further corrupted, let me finish this and get it out of my house and forward to paperbackswap.
---
Otoh, now that I'm done, I do highly recommend this book, or at least the stories in it, to anyone new to, but interested in, classic SF short stories.
April 2021
---
2/3 done:
Yup, these are clearly exemplary of what has influenced Silverberg. I do agree with him that they are very well written. In my very own personal opinion, they are only mildly interesting, though, and mostly they are a bit too show-offy for me, also. Some I've most def. seen before but didn't remember and so had to reread (albeit at a faster pace)... but does not that lack of memorability serve as a negative impression? I say it does, and before my mind and my own writing style are further corrupted, let me finish this and get it out of my house and forward to paperbackswap.
---
Otoh, now that I'm done, I do highly recommend this book, or at least the stories in it, to anyone new to, but interested in, classic SF short stories.
April 2021
September 12, 2020
I picked this up as a remainder, and was pleasantly surprised to find an unparalleled informal text about the craft of writing science fiction short stories. Silverberg returns to his youth with 13 stories that influenced his own developing craft. The stories are great, and the commentary is incisive and practical. Any writer would find his theories about storytelling inspiring, and his description of competing in the now-gone SF world of pulp magazines entertaining and illuminating. What a treasure!
June 24, 2023
not just an exemplary collection of good sci-fi stories, but also accompanied by a most brilliant series of analytical essays by silverberg which analyse the stories and what makes them work.
useful for not just the sci-fi reader, but also for those who write or wish to write themselves.
one of those books that bring home to you the reasons why the author is such a legend...
highly recommended...
useful for not just the sci-fi reader, but also for those who write or wish to write themselves.
one of those books that bring home to you the reasons why the author is such a legend...
highly recommended...
August 3, 2021
It took me longer than I like to admit to hack my way through this mighty tome, but I made it. Minus one star for the drudgery. My pokiness aside, the book was well worth the read. The stories were a mixed bag of first dates, as all short story compilations are. The essays that followed were insightful. I have no idea if this made me a better writer but I do feel like a better daydreamer.
November 30, 2022
Apart from two stories there were no duds in this collection. My favorite has to be Bob Shaw which really hot the heart strings. Brilliant selection, they dont write these type of stories anymore, mores the pity. Do yourself a favor and grab a copy
July 8, 2017
There were some nuggets in here that made reading it worthwhile. Mostly the value came from the selection of stories rather than the commentary itself.
August 18, 2021
These stories are a little dated but the explanation and critique of them is invaluable.
September 14, 2025
A good insight into the world of Robert Silverberg and his thoughts of science fiction. Some of the stories he includes for analysis were eccentric but gave a broad depth of examples for the reader.
November 5, 2025
In the foreword, science fiction grand master Robert Silverberg writes:
That sums up the book better than I can. Having just finished reading it, I'd say it accomplishes everything Silverberg intended. You can read it for the stories, the essays, the reminiscences, or all three. Silverberg is an intelligent, insightful, and entertaining guide.
The book is a reissue of an anthology that Silverberg published in 1987 called Worlds of Wonder. I like that original title, but I think the new title better conveys that second purpose of the book, to explain the craft of writing science fiction.
Apropos of the book's original title, the stories are indeed wonderful, and they allowed me to identify the elements I love about science fiction. Here are my favorite stories from the book:
"Four in One" by Damon Knight
"The Monsters" by Robert Sheckley
"Hothouse" by Brian W. Aldiss
"Colony" by Philip K. Dick
"The Little Black Book" by C.M. Kornbluth
"Light of Other Days" by Bob Shaw
Of course, there are also stories by Alfred Bester, C.L. Moore, Henry Kuttner, James Blish, Cordwainer Smith, Jack Vance, and Frederick Pohl. What an all-star lineup! Any book with stories by these great writers is one you must read, particularly if Silverberg is the editor.
The stories don’t represent all science fiction subgenres. For instance, dystopian science fiction, military science fiction, steampunk, and cyberpunk aren’t represented. I assume this is due to Silverberg’s tastes and author preferences, but it might also be due to timing.
Unfortunately, only one woman (C.L. Moore) is represented in the collection, but that doesn’t detract from the book’s objectives. It’s a shame Silverberg didn’t include a story from Andre Norton, Kate Wilhelm, Joanna Russ, Ursula LeGuin, Connie Willis, or Octavia E. Butler, female science fiction writers who were prominent in the late Eighties. No worries, Silverberg provides a helpful reading list for readers to continue their science fiction education.
After you finish this book, you'll have learned a tremendous amount not just about science fiction but about writing. Like any great instructor, Silverberg perceptively points out the strengths and weaknesses of each story, and he highlights narrative techniques that demonstrate the authors' skills, such as perspective (for example, first-person or third-person limited), dialogue and free indirect discourse, plotting (and subplotting), mood and atmosphere, psychological insight, prose style, and character development.
"What you have here is actually three books in one. It's an anthology of some of the finest short stories in the history of science fiction; it's a series of essays intended to constitute a textbook of sorts on the art and craft of writing science fiction; and it's a collection of personal reminiscences by someone who has spent—or misspent, some might argue—more than forty years of his life reading the stuff and nearly as much time writing it."
That sums up the book better than I can. Having just finished reading it, I'd say it accomplishes everything Silverberg intended. You can read it for the stories, the essays, the reminiscences, or all three. Silverberg is an intelligent, insightful, and entertaining guide.
The book is a reissue of an anthology that Silverberg published in 1987 called Worlds of Wonder. I like that original title, but I think the new title better conveys that second purpose of the book, to explain the craft of writing science fiction.
Apropos of the book's original title, the stories are indeed wonderful, and they allowed me to identify the elements I love about science fiction. Here are my favorite stories from the book:
"Four in One" by Damon Knight
"The Monsters" by Robert Sheckley
"Hothouse" by Brian W. Aldiss
"Colony" by Philip K. Dick
"The Little Black Book" by C.M. Kornbluth
"Light of Other Days" by Bob Shaw
Of course, there are also stories by Alfred Bester, C.L. Moore, Henry Kuttner, James Blish, Cordwainer Smith, Jack Vance, and Frederick Pohl. What an all-star lineup! Any book with stories by these great writers is one you must read, particularly if Silverberg is the editor.
The stories don’t represent all science fiction subgenres. For instance, dystopian science fiction, military science fiction, steampunk, and cyberpunk aren’t represented. I assume this is due to Silverberg’s tastes and author preferences, but it might also be due to timing.
Unfortunately, only one woman (C.L. Moore) is represented in the collection, but that doesn’t detract from the book’s objectives. It’s a shame Silverberg didn’t include a story from Andre Norton, Kate Wilhelm, Joanna Russ, Ursula LeGuin, Connie Willis, or Octavia E. Butler, female science fiction writers who were prominent in the late Eighties. No worries, Silverberg provides a helpful reading list for readers to continue their science fiction education.
After you finish this book, you'll have learned a tremendous amount not just about science fiction but about writing. Like any great instructor, Silverberg perceptively points out the strengths and weaknesses of each story, and he highlights narrative techniques that demonstrate the authors' skills, such as perspective (for example, first-person or third-person limited), dialogue and free indirect discourse, plotting (and subplotting), mood and atmosphere, psychological insight, prose style, and character development.
June 14, 2012
Collection of good to excellent sf stories, framed in an interesting way: Silverberg's goal is to explore the craft of science fiction writing through the chosen stories. In the intro he gives a brief bio of how he became a sf writer (especially good for the sketches it gives of the editors who shaped him), and then follows each story with an analysis of what makes the story work. There's some decent variety in the stories, too - some lean more towards 'cool exploration of scientific idea', others towards a looser 'sense of wonder above all', others more towards character study, etc. - and Silverberg does a solid job of picking apart how these varying effects are achieved. Good read for any aspiring sf writers.
August 25, 2016
3. Read a collection of essays (2016 read harder challenge)
1. A book you meant to read in 2015, but didn't (Around the year in 52 books: 2016)
'Four in one' Damon Knight, 4.5 stars
'Fondly Fahrenheit' Alfred Bester, 4.5 stars
'No Woman born' C. L. Moore, 1.5 stars
'Home is the hunter' Henry Kuttner, 4.5 stars
'The Monsters' Robert Sheckley, 5 stars
'Common Time' James Blish, 3 stars
'Scanners live in vain' Cordwainer Smith, 4 stars
'Hothouse' Brian W. Albiss, 1 star
'The New Prime' Jack Vance, 5 stars
'Colony' Philip K. Dick, 5 stars
'The Little Black Bag' C. M. Kornbluth, 4.5 stars
'Light of other days' Bob Shaw, 1.5 stars
'Day Million' Frederik Pohl, 3 stars
1. A book you meant to read in 2015, but didn't (Around the year in 52 books: 2016)
'Four in one' Damon Knight, 4.5 stars
'Fondly Fahrenheit' Alfred Bester, 4.5 stars
'No Woman born' C. L. Moore, 1.5 stars
'Home is the hunter' Henry Kuttner, 4.5 stars
'The Monsters' Robert Sheckley, 5 stars
'Common Time' James Blish, 3 stars
'Scanners live in vain' Cordwainer Smith, 4 stars
'Hothouse' Brian W. Albiss, 1 star
'The New Prime' Jack Vance, 5 stars
'Colony' Philip K. Dick, 5 stars
'The Little Black Bag' C. M. Kornbluth, 4.5 stars
'Light of other days' Bob Shaw, 1.5 stars
'Day Million' Frederik Pohl, 3 stars
January 4, 2024
As a Silverberg fan, I found it a true pleasure to read a collection of stories that deeply affected him paired with his nuts-and-bolts analysis of why they work. The title gives the unfortunate impression that it's a writing workshop, but it’s actually a science fiction anthology, and every story is solid, from the slow-creep body-horrifying opening of Damon Knight's "Four in One," then a great adventure yarn by the always-dazzling Alfred Bester, "Fondly Fahrenheit," and C.L. Moore's odd yet compelling robot tale, "No Woman Born,". . . and on and on. If you love sci fi, it’s worthy of your attention; read it!
January 21, 2013
This was an awesome collection of short stories, even if it had just been a collection. It was added to a great deal, I think, by Silverberg's commentary and breakdown of each story, and some of the things he has to say about writing are very good to know.
I was a little disappointed that there wasn't more about writing techniques in the book, but it was still an awesome book, and I think that several of the stories are now among my top ten favorite short stories of all time.
Specifically Slow Glass, by Bob Shaw, and Day Million by Frederick Pohl. Both great stories that I really enjoyed.
I was a little disappointed that there wasn't more about writing techniques in the book, but it was still an awesome book, and I think that several of the stories are now among my top ten favorite short stories of all time.
Specifically Slow Glass, by Bob Shaw, and Day Million by Frederick Pohl. Both great stories that I really enjoyed.
December 2, 2016
This is a very interesting concept - one of the great scifi writers has put together a combination memoir, anthology of the best short stories in science fiction and then a commentary on each story. My only quibble with it is that it is so old - all the stories in it were written in the 50s and 60s -which is hardly the fault of the author! So if you enjoy science fiction, if you would like to know how to write it, or if you just want to know how someone of the standing of Robert Silverberg became a scifi author, you will enjoy this book.
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