Follow Us / Contact Us

Links to Bibliographies

Alan Dean Foster

Eddie Jones

The Big Three
--- Isaac Asimov
--- Arthur C. Clarke
--- Robert A. Heinlein

J.R.R. Tolkien

Lin Carter

Patrick Moore

Philip E. High

Richard C. Meredith

Robert Silverberg
--- Introduction
--- Majipoor
--- The Collected Stories
--- Novels and Chapbooks
--- 1955-1976
--- 1983 onwards
--- Other Works
--- Collections
--- Omnibuses
--- Detective / Crime Fiction
--- Spicy Fiction
--- Non-Fiction
--- Short Fiction

Robert E. Vardeman

Fighting Fantasy

Science Fiction Magazines

Science Fiction and Fantasy Series

SF Universes and Fantasy Worlds

Photograph © Susanne Lee Houfek

In 1949 Silverberg started to write and publish Spaceship, his own science fiction fanzine. Around this time he also began to submit short stories to magazines, but was not successful in getting them accepted for publication, although a number of his letters did appear in print. His first professional sale was a non-fiction piece called Fanmag published in December 1953, in Science Fiction Adventures, a magazine edited by his friend Harry Harrison.

Silverberg finally sold his first fiction story soon after when Gorgon Planet was published in the February 1954 issue of Nebula Science Fiction. After seeing a critical review by Silverberg of one of their novels, an editor at the publisher Thomas Y. Crowell contacted him to commission a novel. The result, after several re-writes, was the publication in 1955 of Silverberg's first novel, Revolt on Alpha C. the following year he won a Hugo award for Best New Writer.

Silverberg moved to a new apartment in the summer of 1955 and there he met the authors Randall Garrett and Harlan Ellison. Garrett especially, proved to be highly influential and introduced him to many of the science fiction magazine editors of the day. They also began to write together, sharing and developing each others ideas and reworking and fine tuning each others work.

Silverberg graduated from Columbia University in 1956 with a degree in English Literature. Soon after graduating he married Barbara Brown. From this time, until 1959, his output of science fiction writings was huge. Ranging from short stories through to novels, he wrote more than one million words per year; although, by his own admission, the stories were largely formulaic and he did not try to push the boundaries of the genre.

In addition to collaborating with Garrett, Silverberg was writing a great deal of material in his own right, so much in fact, that he had to publish it under a variety of pseudonyms. Some, such as David Osborne and Calvin M. Knox, were used solely by himself, while others, like Ivar Jorgensen, were generic names created by editors to disguise the fact that all of the stories in some issues of their magazines were written by just one or two authors. Silverberg had the ability to write on demand for his editors. If asked, he could produce a story with a given theme and of a specified length in a day or two. Between 1957 and 1959, he published more than 200 short works and nearly a dozen novels. He also wrote stories in other genres including mysteries, westerns, and spicy fiction (sex and violence).

In 1959 the market for science fiction stories shrank significantly after the sudden collapse of the magazine distribution system, so Silverberg stepped back from science fiction and turned his ability to write copiously to other fields, most notably in historical non-fiction, as well as continuing to pen mysteries and spicy fiction. Even after this first "retirement", he still continued to produce a steady trickle of science fiction.

Frederik Pohl is credited with bringing Silverberg back to science fiction in 1962. Pohl, then the editor of Galaxy and If magazines, offered to publish anything that Silverberg offered him, on condition that he pushed himself to produce the more literate, thought provoking material of which they both believed he was capable.

The novels he wrote in this period are considered superior to his earlier work. Perhaps the first book to indicate the new Silverberg was To Open the Sky, a fixup of stories published by Pohl in Galaxy, in which a new religion helps people reach the stars. That was followed by Downward to the Earth, a story 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 include To 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; and Dying Inside, a tale of a telepath losing his powers.

In 1969, Nightwings 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 novel A Time of Changes and the short story Good News from the Vatican, and yet another in 1975 for his novella Born with the Dead.

After suffering through the stresses of a thyroid malfunction and a major house fire, Silverberg moved from his native New York to the West Coast in 1972, and announced his retirement from writing in 1975. In 1980 he returned, however, with Lord Valentine's Castle, a panoramic adventure set on an alien planet, which has become the basis of the Majipoor 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.

Silverberg received a Nebula award in 1986 for his novella Sailing to Byzantium, which takes its name from the poem by W.B. Yeats; a Hugo in 1987 for his novella Gilgamesh in the Outback, set in the Heroes in Hell universe of Bangsian Fantasy; a Hugo in 1990 for Enter a Soldier. Later: Enter Another. He was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 1999 and was named a Grand Master by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America in 2004.

Silverberg has been married twice. He married his first wife, Barbara Brown, in 1956. The couple separated in 1976 and divorced a decade later. Silverberg married science fiction author Karen Haber in 1987. The couple reside in the San Francisco Bay Area.
 

References
- Wikipedia - Robert Silverberg - retrieved 10 March 2013 - the text above is a revised version of that found on Wikipedia
- The Internet Speculative Fiction Database - Robert Silverberg - Summary Bibliography - retrieved 10 March 2013
- The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction - Robert Silverberg - retrieved 10 March 2013
- Majipoor.com - Robert Silverberg: A Brief History - retrieved 10 March 2013
- The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Vol.46, No.4, April 1974, ed. Edward L. Ferman, Mercury Press, 1974 - see pp.67-88
- Hell's Cartographers, ed. Brian W. Aldiss & Harry Harrison, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1975 - see RS autobiography on pp.7-45
- Other Spaces, Other Times: A Life Spent in the Future, Robert Silverberg, Nonstop Press, 2009
 

Listings of the first publications of Robert Silverberg's non-magazine published fantasy and science fiction appear below along with a selection of non-SF&F items.

Further listings covering short fiction and other genres are in preparation.
An illustrated bibliography is also in preparation and will appear in the future.

Top