On this date in 1935, acclaimed science fiction author was born in Brooklyn, N.Y., the only child of Jewish parents Helen and Michael Silverberg, an accountant. He read a lot to entertain himself and started submitting his own stories to magazines in his early teens.
“Gorgon Planet,” his first published story, appeared in 1954 when he was a sophomore at Columbia University, where he graduated. In 1956 he won his first Hugo Award, for Most Promising New Author. The runner-up was Harlan Ellison. “Revolt on Alpha C,” his first novel, was published in 1955 when he was 21. He went on to publish literally hundreds of award-winning stories, navels and novella under his own name and numerous pseudonyms.
Silverberg has said little about his personal religious beliefs over the years, but that reticence doesn’t extend to his characters who often have plenty to say. Like the narrator in “Thomas the Proclaimer” (1972): “I never became a believer. I had a natural predisposition toward skepticism. If you can’t measure it, it isn’t there. That included not only Old Whiskers and His Only Begotten Son, but all the other mystic baggage that people liked to carry around in those tense credulous years: the flying saucers, Zen Buddhism, the Atlantis cult, Hare Krishna, macrobiotics, telepathy and other species of extrasensory perception, theosophy, entropy-worship, astrology, and such. … I couldn’t buy the other stuff, the irrational stuff, the assorted opiates of the masses, When the Moon is in the seventh house, etc., etc. — sorry, no.”
“Good News from the Vatican” (1971) features the election of a robot to the position of pope of the Church of Rome and won that year’s Nebula Award for Best Short Story for its “integration of the robot into human religious culture.” Some critics noted the story’s satirical and ironic content. (Encyclopedia of Science Fiction)
The novella “The Feast of St. Dionysus” (1974) focuses on a guilt-ridden astronaut and mysterious Dionysian communal rites conducted by a Charles Manson-esque leader. The story explores themes of guilt, religion and communal ecstasy. (Google Books) It won the Jupiter Award for Best Novella.
Prolific applies to Silverberg’s output. One year he wrote 40 novels (though many were “quick-cash” efforts with adult sexual themes). By 1961 he had grown wealthy enough, largely through investments, to buy a mansion that had belonged to New York City Mayor Fiorello La Guardia. (Washington Post, Nov. 8, 2016)
Silverberg married Barbara Brown in 1956. She was an electronics engineer specializing in radar and optics whom he had met through her science fiction fandom. They separated in 1976 and divorced a decade later. He married science fiction writer and editor Karen Haber in 1987.
He was named president of the Science Fiction Writers of America and served in 1967–68. He was elected SFWA grand master in 2004 (the year after Ursula K. Le Guin), which was about the time he decided it was time to retire from imaginative writing: “I think most writers do their strongest work … between thirty-five and fifty. Certainly I did. Plenty of my work later than that needs no apology but … it does not have, line by line, the intensity of what I was doing twenty years earlier. So I stopped writing.” (“Conversations with Robert Silverberg” by Alvaro Zinos-Amaro, 2016)
“My only writing ambition is to keep my work of yesterday visible for the readers of today and tomorrow. But I am beyond the age when one has aspirations.” (Science Fiction and Fantasy World, July 31, 2015)
PHOTO: Silverberg in 2009 at Worldcon 67 Anticipation in Montreal; photo by Edward Swatschek under CC 3.0.
