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4 stars
Robert Silverberg�s story introductions are a gleeful inventory of success and the emergence of the �distinctive Silverberg voice�. These stories are seminal to their author�s success and what he has been trying to do as a writer. Aliens, memory loss, physics, biology, insanity are the elements of high fiction in the SF/Fantasy multiverse that his stories inhabit, without (usually) losing sight of their need to remain coherent works of fiction. He says, regarding the xenobiological speculation "Sundance" (written 1968) (p.192), "I think everything remains clear despite the ... derailments of the reader. ... I don�t regard myself as a �member� of any school of SF, and I don�t value obscurity for its own sake".
More recently Silverberg the storyteller has dominated over Silverberg the experimentalist, but the reader should realise that for their time these stories were a lot more experimental than they may seem now. For example, the …
More recently Silverberg the storyteller has dominated over Silverberg the experimentalist, but the reader should realise that for their time these stories were a lot more experimental than they may seem now. For example, the amusing tale of a mixed-species marriage "Bride 91" (written in 1967) was berated by Fred Pohl as �tedious crap� and its author was harangued for his and other authors� apparent obsession with sex in their stories. "How it was when the Past went Away" tells of a memory-destroying drug in the San Francisco water supply; when it was written, in 1968, there was a popular panic about terrorists putting LSD in the water. It, "Passengers" (1966), "Ishmael in Love" (1968) read like signposts towards the SF that would develop through the 1970s towards the present day. It is credit to Silverberg, Moorcock, and the other experimentalists of their time that the themes and treatments they pioneered now seem smoothly familiar.