Robert Silverberg | |
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 Silverberg in 2005 | |
| Born | (1935-01-15)January 15, 1935 (age 90) New York City, U.S. |
| Pen name | Various[a][1] |
| Occupation |
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| Nationality | American |
| Alma mater | Columbia University (BA) |
| Period | 1955–present |
| Genre | Science fiction,fantasy,anthologies (as editor) |
| Subject | Geography, history, nature |
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| Website | |
| robert-silverberg | |
Robert Silverberg (born January 15, 1935) is a prolific Americanscience fiction author and editor. He is a multiple winner of bothHugo andNebula Awards, a member of theScience Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame, and aGrand Master of SF since 2004.[2][3][4]
Especially noted Silverberg works include the novellaNightwings (1969) and the novelsDownward to the Earth (1970),The World Inside (1971),Dying Inside (1972), andLord Valentine's Castle (1980; the first of theMajipoor series).
Silverberg has attended everyHugo Award ceremony since the inaugural event in 1953.[5]
Silverberg was born on January 15, 1935,[6] toJewish parents inBrooklyn, New York.[7] A voracious reader since childhood, he began submitting stories to science fiction magazines during his early teenage years. He received a BA inEnglish Literature fromColumbia University, in 1956. While at Columbia he wrote the juvenile novelRevolt on Alpha C (1955), published byThomas Y. Crowell with the cover notice: "A gripping story of outer space".[1] He won his first Hugo in 1956 as the "best new writer".[2]
In that year Silverberg was the author or co-author of four of the six stories in the August issue ofFantastic, breaking his record set in the previous issue.[8] For the next four years, by his own count, he wrote a million words a year, mostly for magazines andAce Doubles. He used his own name as well as a range ofpseudonyms during this era, and often worked in collaboration withRandall Garrett, who was a neighbor at the time.[9] (The Silverberg/Garrett collaborations too were published under a variety of pseudonyms, the best-known being Robert Randall.) From 1956 to 1959, Silverberg routinely averaged five published stories a month, and he had over 80 stories published in 1958 alone.
In 1959, the market for science fiction slumped due in part to changing tastes among readers, and also due to the bankruptcy of several leading magazines of the era.[10] Silverberg adapted by writing copiously in other fields,[11] from historical non-fiction tocrime fiction andsoftcore pornography. "Bob Silverberg, a giant of science fiction... was doing two [books] a month for one publisher, another for a second publisher, and the equivalent of another book for a magazine... He was writing a quarter of a million words a month"[12] under many different pseudonyms[13] including about 200 erotic novels published as Don Elliott.[14][15] In a 2000 interview, Silverberg explained that the erotic fiction "... was undertaken at a time when I was saddled with a huge debt, at the age of 26, for a splendid house that I had bought. There would have been no way to pay the house off by writing science fiction ... so I turned out a slew of quick sex novels. I never concealed the fact that I was doing them; it made no difference at all to me whether people knew or not. It was just a job. And it was, incidentally, a job that I did very well. I think they were outstanding erotic novels."[16]
In the mid-1960s, many writers in science fiction were moving away from the adventure,hard science fiction andspace opera themes that often characterized the early years of the genre, and writing stories with greater literary ambitions, psychological sophistication and experimental methods (seeNew Wave science fiction).Frederik Pohl, then editing three science fiction magazines, offered Silverberg creative freedom in writing for them.[11] Thus inspired, Silverberg returned to the field that gave him his start, paying far more attention to depth of character development and social background than he had in the past and mixing in elements of themodernist literature he had studied at Columbia.
Silverberg continued to write rapidly—Algis Budrys reported in 1965 that he wrote and sold at least 50,000 words ("call it the equivalent of a commercial novel") weekly[13]—but the novels he wrote in this period are considered superior to his earlier work; Budrys in 1968 wrote of his surprise that "Silverberg is now writing deeply detailed, highly educated, beautifully figured books" likeThorns andThe Masks of Time.[17] Perhaps the first book to indicate the new Silverberg wasTo Open the Sky, afixup of stories published by Pohl inGalaxy Magazine, in which a new religion helps people reach the stars. That was followed byDownward to the Earth, a story containing echoes of material fromJoseph Conrad's work,[14] in which the human former administrator of an alien world returns after the planet's inhabitants have been set free. Other acclaimed works of that time includeTo Live Again, in which the memories and personalities of the deceased can be transferred to other people;The World Inside, a look at an overpopulated future; andDying Inside, a tale of a telepath losing his powers.
In the August 1967 issue ofGalaxy, Silverberg published a 20,000-word novelette called "Hawksbill Station". This story earned Silverberg his first Hugo and Nebula story award nominations.[18] An expanded novel form ofHawksbill Station was published the following year. In 1969Nightwings was awarded the Hugo for best novella. Silverberg won a Nebula award in 1970 for the short story "Passengers", two the following year for his novelA Time of Changes and the short story "Good News from the Vatican", and yet another in 1975 for his novellaBorn with the Dead.
After suffering through the stresses of a major house fire[19] and athyroid malfunction, Silverberg moved from his native New York City to theWest Coast in 1972, and he announced his retirement from writing in 1975.[20] In 1980 he returned, however, withLord Valentine's Castle,[11] a panoramic adventure set on an alien planet, which has become the basis of theMajipoor series—a cycle of stories and novels set on the vast planet Majipoor, a world much larger than Earth and inhabited by no fewer than seven different species of settlers. In a 2015 interview Silverberg said that he did not intend to write any more fiction.[21]
Silverberg received a Nebula award in 1986 for the novellaSailing to Byzantium, which takes its name fromthe poem by William Butler Yeats; a Hugo in 1987 for the novellaGilgamesh in the Outback, set in theHeroes in Hell universe ofBangsian Fantasy; a Hugo in 1990 forEnter a Soldier. Later: Enter Another.[2] TheScience Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame inducted Silverberg in 1999, its fourth class of two deceased and two living writers,[3] and theScience Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America made him its 21stSFWA Grand Master in 2005.[4]
Silverberg has been married twice. He and Barbara Brown married in 1956, separated in 1976 and divorced a decade later. Silverberg and science fiction writerKaren Haber married in 1987.[22] They live in the San Francisco Bay Area.[9] Before the age of 30, Silverberg was independently wealthy through his investments, and once owned the former mansion of New York City MayorFiorello La Guardia.[23][19]
Hugo Awards
Locus Award
Nebula Awards
