TRAVELER OF WORLDS: Conversations with Robert Silverberg – Alvaro Zinos-Amaro

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]

THE BEST OF MURRAY LEINSTER – edited by J.J. Pierce

The irony seems too salient still, me backing away from an obvious science fiction situation and bumping into Murray Leinster, known widely at one time as the Dean of Science Fiction. But, with a touch of Leinster license here and there, that is precisely what happened.

Murray Leinster

The sequence began about a week before the laptop screen went black. I'd undoubtedly annoyed the Collective Cyber Consciousness (as Leinster would have called it) by doing something so stupid to my primary laptop it forced me back to my backup laptop while the primary was in the shop getting a new power board. It was the backup that went black. Clearly a CCC reminder for me to try harder not to do stupid things to a member of the cyber community. (I've just now noticed a recurrence thus far in this report of the letter sequence a-c-k. In the interest of full disclosure, I have no idea what it means. Back to the report:)

The second shoe dropping in the reminder sequence occurred at my usual spot in the Virginia Room of our public library. Unbeknownst to me my chair was less than a three-step roll from the shelf that holds the library's donated row of Murray Leinster paperbacks. Instead of rolling, however, after it became apparent my laptop's screen was black for good, I stood, stretched and began searching for something to read. The row of Leinster paperbacks immediately caught my eye. I knew immediately why they were there. Not long after I'd moved to Gloucester County, Va. (1978) I read a piece in the local bi-monthly paper that Leinster (whom I'd not heard of and who was known locally by his real name, William Fitzgerald Jenkins) had some connection to Gloucester. In addition, he sounded like an interesting guy.

I confess to not having been a fan of science fiction over the years. I'd read a few novels and stories and enjoyed them. Found them fascinating, in fact. Yet, for some reason beyond my grasp the genre itself eluded my interest. This exposed me to the eventual embarrassment in a writing group of being caught using the abbreviation sci-fi, which immediately alerted cognoscenti, provoking metaphorical raised eyebrows and sidelong glances. A friend patiently explained that the ignominy of this appellation sprouted from ignorant movie critics' references to superficial treatments of the literary form, and that sf is acceptable but more so as an abbreviation for speculative than science fiction. Already an initiate when I spotted the row of books behind my chair and plucked for perusal The Best of Murray Leinster, I was pleased to see John J. Pierce using sf in his introduction to the anthology, which he had edited. This lent, I now knew, a particular authority to his stewardship.

I stood in front of the bookshelf reading Pierce's introduction, slowly becoming aware of the true reason the Collective Cyber Consciousness was messing with me. He (she?) was giving me an undeniably special introduction at long last to the Dean--alas too late for an earthly meeting, as Leinster died in 1975. I turned, entranced, and, book in hand, initiated the first of the three steps back to my table to start reading what Pierce assured me were Leinster's groundbreaking stories. As I lifted my foot to begin the second step I sensed the presence of a tall, elegant, honey-blond in the open doorway. I tore my attention from the paperback, looked up and smiled. She was smiling too, but not at me.

“That's Granddad's book!” The honey-hued voice, with its three-word message, brought everything together as neatly as an sf-inspired cosmic convergence.

Murray Leinster's granddaughter was on her way to a meeting and hadn't the time to chat, but I learned in that brief celestial moment his grave was a scant five minutes down the road. My first impulse was to drive there at once. I squelched the urge. I needed to read a little Leinster before venturing to the churchyard. This I did.

A couple of days later found me standing before the modest headstone marking the resting place of William F. Jenkins and his wife Mary. It was sunny and a tad too warm, but a cooling breeze played through the leafy oaks and tulip poplars where singing birds entertained one another and all who cared to hear them. The birds and the trees and the frisky breeze seemed in concert to summon a spirit of wary innocence and brave hope, the very sense that inhabits an imagined meeting in deep space of the advance scouting teams of two mutually alien civilizations. Their ships stop, facing each other, near enough that a push of a button by either could destroy the opposing ship. Their crews figure out a way to communicate their intentions. Both claim they want the inadvertent meeting to end peacefully, while recognizing the inherent danger in trust. Each just might have in mind to follow the other back to its home planet, perhaps to destroy its inhabitants. There's really no way to know. The classic stalemate.

As I gazed at the grave of the man who solved this dilemma in 1945, fifty-one years before the story in which he solved it—First Contact—finally won a Hugo Award (one of the most coveted honors society can bestow upon a writer) I felt a tremor ripple through my nervous system. A chill, it seemed at first. But no, I don't think it was that. No mere chill. Something more.

[for more Friday's Forgotten Books see the listing on Patti Abbott's unforgettable blog]

 

THE SHIFTING REALITIES OF PHILP K. DICK: Selected Literary and Philosophical Writings – Edited by Lawrence Sutin

Years before my first experience with psychotropic drugs I came across an observation by Edna Ferber that her everyday consciousness seemed to her similar to the heightened perceptions reported by people who'd experienced chemical psychedelia. She said she'd not tried them herself.

Meanwhile in a parallel universe Philip K. Dick wrote The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, considered by some to be the classic LSD novel, two years before he took any psychedelic drugs. This, according to Paul Williams in his extensive 1975 Rolling Stone piece on Dick. Dick told Williams he did try writing once on LSD, to disastrous effect: “It came out all in Latin and Sanskrit.” Williams attributes “probably” Dick's internal chemistry for the “stunning, almost hallucinogenic sense of reality” Dick created in his writings.

This “internal chemistry” apparently extended even to the dizzying pace of his creative imagination. He admitted he wrote his first thirty-some novels on amphetamines, but then was told by psychiatrists who tested him for possible drug addiction that the drugs had not been working. He was told his liver detoxified the chemicals so they never reached his brain. He found he'd been fooling himself.

A CANTICLE FOR LEIBOWITZ – Walter M. Miller Jr.

My laughter when I first read the opening scene of A Canticle for Leibowitz was of the near-maniacal kind that might accompany an epiphany. I was in the Army at the time, stationed in Germany during the Cold War. Madness hummed always somewhere in the air. We drank. Our humor tended toward the cruelly ironic. A particularly irreverent friend had recommended Canticle as a particularly funny book.

I was already primed to appreciate the ghastly irony of the second scene that made me laugh, the one where we learn of the sacred relic, the scrap of paper containing a grocery list in the handwriting of the now St. Leibowitz, found in ruins by survivors of a nuclear holocaust. My outburst at this revelation was less raucous than the first.

By now Walter M. Miller Jr.'s drollery had completely captivated me. His writing at the very start--the dot on the horizon that wriggles in the shimmering heat waves as it grows, drawing relentlessly nearer--was the snare that closed around my ankle and tugged me through a narrative so complex and esoteric that without its unceasing crafty brilliance I'd surely have broken free and fled in utter befuddlement.

The Black Cloud - by Fred Hoyle

A Silicon Valley survey by The Atlantic, published in its November issue, found the “greatest work of science fiction ever written” to be Asimov's Foundation novels. For their next choice the techies picked Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. If Fred Hoyle's The Black Cloud got any votes its total would have come in somewhere behind Star Wars, which captured the only honorable mention.

I've read nothing by Asimov, and the closest I came to Hitchhiker's Guide was to pluck it off the bookstore shelf, read the cover blurb and the first few paragraphs, and return it to the shelf. Science Fiction has so never been my thing I feel awkward just using the genre's vernacular abbreviations. For the sake of brevity in this instance, though, I'll grit my teeth and leap over what seems to be the no-longer-in scifi straight to what I sense is the current password: SF? Or is it lower case?

On second thought I probly wasted most of the previous paragraph building a defense against presumed sf snobbery. This because I just remembered various devoted sf fans have assured me they were unfamiliar with The Black Cloud, and I don't believe they were patronizing me. All the same, as a precaution I fought to withhold any implication of “gotcha” for having read what I considered a prerequisite for anyone pretending intimacy with the literature.