Thanks to Emily Munro for enlightening me about Science Fiction 101 (formerly Worlds of Wonder) by Robert Silverberg. Also double thanks to Emily for lending this book to me literally years ago and waiting all of that time for me to return it.
This volume is a must-have both for superfans of the genre and for students of the craft. Silverberg starts by cherry picking the best stories from the golden age of science fiction — an age marked by his peers and himself.
Then after each exemplary piece, Silverberg proceeds to say, You know that part in the story where you got hung up? Here’s why:
I’m not going to spend nearly the time I did on William Atheling’s critical piece, but try for a more impressionistic read on this one.
Table of Contents
- The Making of a Science-Fiction Writer by Robert Silverberg
- FOUR IN ONE by Damon Knight
- FONDLY FAHRENHEIT by Alfred Bester
- NO WOMAN BORN by C. L. Moore
- HOME IS THE HUNTER by Henry Kuttner
- THE MONSTERS by Robert Sheckley
- COMMON TIME by James Blish
- SCANNERS LIVE IN VAIN by Cordwainer Smith
- HOTHOUSE by Brian W. Aldiss
- THE NEW PRIME by Jack Vance
- COLONY by Philip K. Dick
- THE LITTLE BLACK BAG by C. M. Kornbluth
- LIGHT OF OTHER DAYS by Bob Shaw
- DAY MILLION by Frederik Pohl
The Making of a Science-Fiction Writer by Robert Silverberg
I found this intro helpful and humble, at once, particularly when compared to other introductions of other volumes I’ve read over the years. Silverberg admits to being ridiculously quickly lauded at both Columbia and throughout the science fiction community for how fast he sold stories.
He tells the story of a mentor — an editor who stubbornly refused to buy his stories — who insisted that he learn how to squeeze as much craft, as much potential out of a speculative idea, as humanly possible. “You by God will not squeeze the most juice — juice, not wordage — from a setup.”
The more he meditated on it, the better he grew and eventually sold work to that editor as well.
His major premise over all of these stories is first to follow, more or less, Sturgeon’s definition:
A science fiction story is a story built around human beings, with a human problem, and a human solution, which would not have happened without its scientific content.
— Theodore Sturgeon
But Silverberg goes a step further — that the solution isn’t just human but speculatively so. His biggest emphasis in the whole book is that last phrase: which would not have happened without its speculative content.
Over and over again, he shows how this is so and how the greatest stories riff and riff and riff on their speculative “what if” question until only one ending remains.
I’ll try to eliminate spoilers and focus on Silverberg’s criticism.
FOUR IN ONE by Damon Knight
This story combines the brain-in-the-vat idea with the concept of rebelling inside a tyranny. Four people are consumed by a gelatinous jello block with naught but their nervous systems intact. They can hear one another’s thoughts and also manipulate bits of the ooze.
And the most bossy of them is a military commander
“Four in One”: Complications, with Elegance
Silverberg shows how this particularly science fiction solution grows out of the premise naturally: it’s not merely the brain in the vat nor the rebellion against the tyrannical commander that solves it, but that the four brains in the vat can control the gelatinous body differently.
That one tweak makes it both human and speculative, in the end.
FONDLY FAHRENHEIT by Alfred Bester
A robot goes mad and starts murdering people. Where is this robot? And why is it killing?
It also starts with a baffling sentence:
He doesn’t know which of us I am these days, but they know one truth. You Must own nothing but yourself. You must make your own life, live your own life and die your own death… or else you will die another’s.
The rice fields on Paragon III stretch….
This is not some pronoun battle. Rather it’s the statement of someone who has lost their mind, in the end. What’s consistent is that it’s hot when the murders happen.
“Fondly Fahrenheit”: Who Am I, Which Are You?
Silverberg shows how brilliantly this perspective shift in the narrative person over the course of the tale, how it subtly reveals a kind of insane enmeshment — something like an interior closed family system or a cult. If you’ve met enmeshed family systems, you know how perilous these can become, particularly when nepotism and the like get involved.
For us, again, the solution to the premise is teed up with this very personal enmeshment.
Silverberg’s complaint?
I work on the theory — which I picked up somewhere along the way from Ernest Hemingway — that every paragraph of the story ought to be firmly and inextricably welded to the one that precedes it, except where a scene break is used to create a deliberate discontinuity. Particularly in the opening paragraphs of a story, where the reader is being led step by step into an unfamiliar (and in this case bewildering) situation.
As this is something I struggle with immensely in both nonfiction and fiction, I appreciated this more than many of his comments.
NO WOMAN BORN by C. L. Moore
Moore’s story follows a dancer resuscitated as an android and whether or not love gets involved. It’s a feminine Frankenstein story, but one of power given to a figure that may not be so trustworthy.
“No Woman Born”: Flowing from Ring to Ring
The ideal science fiction story begins with a strikingly original speculative premise, which is rigorously developed to the limit of its probably consequences while the story’s plot, or pattern of human conflicts, is moving through a series of ingeniously devised complications towards its resolution. That resolution should provide a satisfying conclusion not only to the problems of the protagonists but to the speculative these that the story is meant to propound.
That’s the kicker. The thesis, not merely the character.
He shows all of the story’s benefits, but makes this critique (spoilers):
The main events of the story are interior ones: psychological transitions, changes in ways of seeing the situation. The one exception is the moment when Deirdre interferes with Maltzer’s suicide attempt, when we comprehend her at last in her full superhuman condition. Those five or six pages in which the trouble scientists stands by the open window, plainly preparing to jump, represent Moore’s lone concussion to the requirements for conventional narrative suspense, too. Rereading the story now, I’m not entirely comfortable with that scene; I suspect that the tense and jangled Maltzer, once he had resolved to commit suicide, would probably have done it in a quick impulsive leap when he was alone, rather than sticking around to deliver a farewell oration to Deirdre and Harris. But sometimes even a writer as good as C.L. Moore needs to manipulate psychological probabilities a little for story purposes.
Other areas he notes and says “in fear and trembling, since this is a story I revere, and the supreme technical mastery of both Moore and Kuttner has been an article of faith for me for decades.”
- There’s a parenthetical paragraph a third of the way through the story that foreshadows the control her new body will exert over her mind. He doesn’t think you need to do this so bluntly. Better to let it emerge from character behavior. The real sin is “Neither of them thought of that, at the time,” since it’s told from Harris’s viewpoint.
- Similarly, she foreshadows a few times how Deidre’s voice gets slowly metallic. Everything else in her is changing, we don’t need it to be that deliberate.
- The last piece is a paragraph in the midst of the attempted suicide that muses on the fourth dimension. It’s basically scifi gobbledygook and Silverberg assumes it was done to please Campbell.
HOME IS THE HUNTER by Henry Kuttner
This is a story about a future New York filled with hunters who chase after one another and kill each other. Person with the most heads is king. Wild, brutal story.
“Home Is the Hunter”: The Triumph of Honest Roger Bellamy
Silverberg has no discernible critiques worth note on this one, more just a showing of how Kuttner pulled it off.
THE MONSTERS by Robert Sheckley
This story starts out with two “humans” contemplating an alien spacecraft on another world and the first page culminates in a sorrow of delay, which reads, “I have to go home and kill my wife.”
The sexism implied here isn’t lost on Sheckley. It’s teeing up a complete subversion of modern values and showing us how, even in some of the worst scenarios, we ourselves are far more sexist than we believe.
“The Monsters”: Don’t Forget to Kill Your Wife
Silverberg has nothing but praise and admiration for his colleague in this one.
COMMON TIME by James Blish
This is a story about a ship that eat’s a man’s buddy. And the solving of the way time is being warped.
“Common Time”: With All of Love
Silverberg points to Burke’s system of Purpose, passion, perception for a good story. “Out of the agent’s action there grows a corresponding passion, and from the sufferance of this passion, there arises a knowledge of his act, a knowledge that also to a degree transcends his act.”
That’s a great way to frame it: we suffer for what we choose and in suffering, reframe our choices.
Silverberg also critiques the overwrought symbol systems between Blish and Knight.
SCANNERS LIVE IN VAIN by Cordwainer Smith
This is a story about robotic folks who eventually get permission to feel strong feelings.
“Scanners Live in Vain”: Under the Wire with the Habermans
Robert Silverberg’s main frustration isn’t aimed at the story at all, but rather at how Smith pulled off something that most writers don’t. “It is irritating when a writer forces one of his character to tell another something that both of them already know, simply to get the information before the reader.”
Similarly, “a story that presents the reader with fifty strange terms on the first page (‘it was mid-steel, the quirking season. Calmly Blargelon thrikkeled his blotch, and a smile slowly spread…) etc.
He admires Smith’s restraint.
HOTHOUSE by Brian W. Aldiss
Crazy youngsters in a jungle planet fight off massive bugs and whatnot.
“Hothouse”: The Fuzzypuzzle Odyssey
No complaints from Robert Silverberg on this one.
THE NEW PRIME by Jack Vance
I didn’t finish this story. Bounced hard off it seven times and eventually gave up. Only one in the anthology I didn’t finish, here’s why:
“The New Prime”: Six Plots for the Price of One
‘The New Prime’ differs in structure from the other stories represented here. Instead of following the problems of a single protagonist or group of protagonists facing one problem or a progression of problems, it is built of seemingly unrelated threads that only gradually unite. This is a storytelling tactic that can be highly effective in the right hands, though the usual result when it is employed by beginners is diffuse and irritating. The write must be prepared to surrender the effect of involving the reader emotionally int he story, since the constantly shifting focus destroys reader identification with the protagonists again and again.
COLONY by Philip K. Dick
This piece is freaking brilliant. It features a shapeshifting race that mimics all sorts of objects all over the base.
“Colony”: I Trusted the Rug Completely
Robert Silverberg finds no fault.
THE LITTLE BLACK BAG by C. M. Kornbluth
Great story about a drunk who stumbles upon a bag from the future that will cure any ailment.
“The Little Black Bag”: Press Button for Triple Bypass
No complaints, just analysis of how it worked.
LIGHT OF OTHER DAYS by Bob Shaw
My favorite of the set: “slow glass” is a genius idea of slowing down the speed of light so that you can see authentic images through glass that were made decades or centuries prior.
“Light of Other Days”:Beyond the Radius of Capture
Again, more “how to” from Robert Silverberg, not really criticism per se. But there’s a great moment where he simply raves about the idea of slow glass and how such a thing comes along once in a lifetime for the science fiction writer.
DAY MILLION by Frederik Pohl
This is a story that shatters the typical boy-meets-girl trope.
“Day Million”: A Boy, a Girl, a Love Story
And Robert Silverberg shows us how.
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