Feeling a tad full of myself for no accountable reason of late, and
beginning to worry this aberration might be so noticeable as to get
me shunned or possibly punched in the nose, I took a friend’s
advice and read an interview with a man who is undeniably and
justifiably full of himself. It worked, returning me to my regular
unassuming bookish self by means of a psychological mule kick to the
ego. Thank you, Kitty, and thank you, Traveler
of Worlds: Conversations
with Robert Silverberg.
As a naif of the genre I had
not heard of 80-something-year-old
Science Fiction Grand Master Silverberg. Perhaps the best
introduction to him for others like myself is this comment from his
wife, Karen Haber, which is included in the afterward to Traveler
of Worlds:
Traveling with Bob is like
having one’s own portable database for a companion. Imagine Google
with a goatee, a glass of Bordeaux in one hand and a fork in the
other.
At times it can be more like
vacationing with one’s own investigative news team: within the
first five minutes of arriving in, say, Guadalajara, he’s taken in
the air temperature, made a quick survey of the flora and fauna on
the hotel grounds, speculated on the groundspeed velocity of an
unladen peacock, scanned the hotel restaurant menu for tortas
ahogadas, and mentioned in passing that the name Guadalajara,
bestowed by the invading Spaniards, has Arabic roots, Wadi Al Hajara,
meaning “river of stones.” Enlightening, yes. Tiring,
occasionally.
There’s
a saving grace of humor for those who otherwise might be inclined to
dismiss Silverberg as an anal-retentive control freak after reading
the above perhaps slight exaggeration by his wife. Here’s an
example, as Silverberg tells it to his collaborative interviewer,
Alvaro Zinos-Almaro:
There
are in Sardinia prehistoric structures called nuraghe, which are
built of massive chunks of stone, building up to several stories.
They’re quite strange, and they’re not found anywhere else.
They’re all over the Sardinian landscape, and they’re two or
three thousand years old. We toured the nuraghe in between dining at
Sardinian restaurants and one day as we were climbing one of the
greatest of the nuraghe in southern Sardinia it began to drizzle. And
then to rain. And then to deliver lightning. We’re out in the open,
clinging to metal railings, as this electrical storm begins, and
we’re at the highest point in this field. We looked at each other
and thought, “What a way to go.”
Maybe explains the extraordinary interest in weather on subsequent
excursions, although after experiencing a moment like that any
frequent traveler might have gone on to pursue a working knowledge of
meteorology.
In contrast a gentleness also comes through in these interviews.
Silverberg’s admittedly strict adherence to form, to expectations
of himself and others with whom he interacts, nonetheless allows a
rather insouciant acceptance of the odd irregularity in certain
encounters where one might expect resistance. An avid collector of
ancient curios, he relates an incident where he knew a young boy in
Mexico was swindling him. Silverberg was visiting a site “somewhere
in Mexico, maybe Yucatán” where the child sold him a statue from
country’s earliest known culture, dating back to five thousand BC.
The price was five pesos, equal then to seventy-five cents.
“I couldn’t resist it, so I bought it, and here it is. I’m
aware that the Olmec statue is not genuine, but it was fun buying
it.”
After providing another, similar example of the small swindle, this
time purchasing obviously bogus Roman coins, he observes, “We don’t
only buy fakes. But when it’s an amusing enough fake we do.”
 |
| Robert Silverberg |
It is admittedly churlish of me, a feeble attempt to mitigate
Silverberg’s ego-vaporizing superiority (ultimately of vastly
greater magnitude than necessary to affect my erstwhile need for
moderate comeuppance...Don’t believe me? Here’s how SF Hall of
Famer/author/editor Gardner Dozois puts it: “Robert
Silverberg could without hesitation be added to the list of SF’s
smartest practitioners, and even amongst this brainy bunch, his
intelligence stands out as impressive...It’s not widely realized by
SF readers today, who mostly know only his huge body of novels and
short fiction, but in his time Silverberg has written over thirty
acclaimed non-fiction books, on topics that range from El Dorado to
the Mound Builders of the American West to Mesopotamia to the Seven
Wonders of the Ancient World, and from ghost towns to Sequoias to
mammoths to atomic scientists to the tribesmen of prehistoric
Europe.” It is, of course, to gasp.), that I highlight here his
admission to having been unsurprisingly the typical brainy nerd as a
youngster who had to be coached by his only friend to behave so as
not to be pummeled to jelly by the ubiquitous dumb, resentful
“ruffians” any of whom might well have conjured a virulent illusion of
presidential timbre in later life.
The revenge part of this classic
nerd-to-triumph story begins while Silverberg is still in his teens,
with cash-money sales of his short stories to fantasy and science
fiction magazines. No papering his study wall with rejection notices
à la
F. Scott Fitzgerald and
virtually all other beginning fictionalists. His white-socked feet
hit the ground racing and never turned back.
No question I hate him. I’ve read
some of those early stories, published in the late 1950s, and they’re
a damned sight better than anything I could write right
now! This, when
the author was 21,
from a story that appeared in
1956 (the same year he won a coveted Hugo Award for “best new
writer”--grrrrrr)
in an issue of Amazing Stories:
It was beyond her to see that
some grease monkey back at the Dome was at fault— whoever it was
who had failed to fasten down the engine hood. Nothing but what had
stopped us could stop a sandcat: sand in the delicate
mechanism of the atomic engine.
But
no; she blamed it all on me somehow: So we were out walking on the
spongy sand of the Martian desert. We’d been walking a good eight
hours.
See what I mean? How could he know
at that callow age that women are always right? I’m rather more
than a tad older and still get it wrong! Smartass punk, get off my lawn.
So how come I loved Traveler
of Worlds and am trying
to entice you to read it, too? Am I about to reveal some delightful,
scandalous crash—drugs, gambling, plagiarism—something that
brings this titan of scholarly, authorly magnificence down to only
half a dozen or so tiers above my undeniably lamentable level? No.
Have I discovered in myself in the reading a long-suppressed deep-seated
reservoir of fetid masochism? Nah, I’m not that sorry a mess.
What saves Silverberg in my eyes, despite the information they convey, is the nature of the interviews. Billed as “conversations,” this is precisely
how they come across. Zinos-Amaro, who started out similarly nerdlike
as an SF aficionado, got hooked at seventeen while reading
Silverberg’s 1968 multiple award-winning novella Nightwings
(which
I will download from Kindle soon as I finish this report).
He says in the preface to Traveler
of Worlds, “I was
thrilled to realize that I had made first contact with a vast and
cool intelligence, one that had spent decades producing enthralling
stories now awaiting my discovery. I immediately hunted down as many
Silverberg books as I could find, reading perhaps fifty over the next
two years. It was a bibliophilic infatuation of the first order.”
Zinos-Amaro says his interest in
Silverberg the man grew along with his fascination by the author’s
work. They eventually became friends, collaborating on an SF novella, When
the Blue Shift Comes,
and, last year, holding the conversations contained in Traveler.
For me the relaxed, friendly tone of Traveler lifts it far
above the usual interview format pairing celebrity and questioner.
Traveler of Worlds
is truly an extended conversation. I felt like an eavesdropper, and I
feel good about it. And I’ve been soundly, and properly, humbled.
[for
more Friday's Forgotten Books check the links on Patti
Abbott's unforgettable blog]
