IGMS Issue 22 (18 page)

SCHWEITZER
: Let's talk a minute about being a "revolutionary." During the New Wave era you weren't particularly given to rewriting
Finnegans Wake
as science fiction or constructing a story entirely out of typographical tricks (the way Donald Barthelme has done on occasion), much less any of the extreme oddities of J.G. Ballard. It seems to me that when you were writing things like
Nightwings
or
Downward to the Earth
or
Dying Inside
, you were writing what was recognizably science fiction, only better, with more emotional depth and maturity. So what exactly didn't the readers want?

SILVERBERG
: I was never as radical an experimenter as some of the
New Worlds
crowd in the Moorcock period, say, or as downbeat as Ballard, or as radical in my world-view as Delany, but
Son of Man
, which I wrote in 1969, was far-out plotless stuff, some of my short stories of the period had a distinct Barthelmian absurdist flavor, one ("Many Mansions") was a pastiche of a Robert Coover piece,
Dying Inside
was mainstream in tone though built around a science-fictional concept, and
Book of Skulls
was or was not science fiction, depending on how you interpreted the ambiguous information about the immortals in the Arizona desert. So, all in all, I had moved quite a distance from the standard pulp tropes and what I was writing, though I regarded all of it as recognizably science fiction as I understood the term, was very far from what Asimov and Heinlein and Clarke had done. (It was not that far from Sturgeon or Bradbury or Leiber.)
Nightwings
was still straight SF and won a Hugo, but I wrote that in 1968. By the time of
Skulls
and
Dying Inside
, a few years later, the majority of the readers had turned hostile to my work, or so it seemed to me, and that was when I decided to give up writing.

SCHWEITZER
: In any case, when you do something innovative, isn't it inherent in the nature of such an enterprise that you are going to leave some of the duller or lazier readers behind? Surely when Bester wrote
The Stars My Destination
he left Captain Future fans behind him in the dust. Is this a problem?

SILVERBERG
: It was a long way from Captain Future to
The Stars My Destination
, sure. But for all its verbal and conceptual brilliance,
Stars
still followed the pulp conventions, sturdy hero triumphing over his adversaries. In a lot of my work of the period the hero wasn't all that sturdy and he didn't always triumph.

SCHWEITZER
: Or was it more of an economic issue, that, say,
Son of Man
or
The Book of Skulls
did not sell as well as the latest post-Tolkien knockoff trilogy, and publishers were beginning to notice?

SILVERBERG
: Nobody ever expected those two books to outsell the standard kind of SF. (The trilogy boom had not yet really begun.) My publishers were still willing to buy from me. But I had lost heart. I was very tired, having done something like fifteen novels in just a few years and most of them very exhausting things to write. I just wanted to go away and rest. And I did.

SCHWEITZER
: Would you say then that
Lord Valentine's Castle
and sequels were a successful compromise, then, i.e. something which fit the current taste but which you could still write with integrity?

SILVERBERG
: Yes. It's a cheerful, positive book full of interesting ideas, and the protagonist comes out okay at the end, but it is recognizably Silverbergian in style. Nothing experimental about it, but nothing that was written down for a slow-witted audience, either.

SCHWEITZER
: An aside, now that I've mentioned the title. I have seen a reissue of
The Book of Skulls
that says "soon to be a major motion picture" or something like that. But no movie. What has happened to it?

SILVERBERG
: It went right to the edge of production -- a director had been chosen, even. (William Friedkin.) Then the head of the studio, who was Friedkin's wife, lost her job and all her projects were canceled. You grow used to this sort of thing when you deal with Hollywood; you cash the check and hope for the best, and it's foolish to expect anything good to happen beyond that, though sometimes it does.

SCHWEITZER
: You've seen movements come and go in SF by now. The early '50s seems to have been a fairly revolutionary period. The New Wave is surely assimilated by now, to the extent that writers who grew up on the New Wave are now influencing younger writers. One might argue that Slipstream is the New Wave all over again, only with fewer science fiction tropes. So, what do you make of this? Are we going to be looking at revolution and reaction followed by complacency followed by revolution over and over, forever?

SILVERBERG
: That's what I would expect. This sort of cycle has been going on since Gernsback days. The Sloane Amazing, in 1933, began running astonishing semi-abstract covers by an artist named Sigmond. Like nothing SF mags had ever seen before. (Or pretty much since.) The readers rose up in fury and the magazine reverted, in 1934 and 1935, to some of the dreariest illustrative covers ever seen in the field. I know, this is illustration, not fiction, but it indicates that any attempt to change the formulas brings, usually, a reaction, and often an overreaction.

SCHWEITZER
: I've seen those covers and know what you mean. Then again, Gernsback experimented with abstract covers on
Wonder Stories
about the same time. There was one that was little more than a field of dots. It must not have gone over very well with the readers, because it was soon stopped.

But maybe you're basically right. Robert E. Howard remarked in the middle '30s that he didn't want to write SF, because it was far
more
formulaic than other forms of pulp fiction such as westerns or sport stories, and the readers would howl if there was the slightest departure from formula. But is this
still
the case? Do you think that SF is inherently conservative? If so, isn't it an odd paradox that this literature which is supposedly about the future and limitless horizons rejects new approaches?

SILVERBERG
: I do. What a lot of us tend to forget from time to time is that SF in the United States is a branch of popular entertainment, not a kind of avant-garde literature. There's a certain core of readers looking for sophisticated visionary experiences, sure, but most of the audience is just interested in finding an hour's light entertainment. When that substantial portion of the audience runs up against fiction that is difficult to read (Aldiss's
Barefoot in the Head
, for example) or difficult to understand (a lot of the modern high-tech stuff) or heavily downbeat (Ballard, let's say) it goes off in search of something more to its taste. I guess it's paradoxical that so many readers of a kind of fiction that deals in infinite horizons of time and space want the same old thing every time, but that's the way it is, and so be it.

SCHWEITZER
: If so, then what makes it worthwhile for a writer to struggle
against
what he knows the readers actually want?

SILVERBERG
: We don't always realize that we're doing that. Even as sharp-eyed an observer of trends and tastes as, ah, Robert Silverberg failed to notice that he was swimming upstream all through 1969 and 1970 and 1971. Then, too, some of us write just for the pleasure of it, and don't give a damn about commercial requirements. To a certain degree that's what I was doing during my big creative period in the late sixties. And some of us are very obstinate.

SCHWEITZER
: Do you read enough contemporary SF to have any sense of the state of the field today?

SILVERBERG
: No. I read hardly any, these days.

SCHWEITZER
: Do you have any sense that anybody is standing on your shoulders?

SILVERBERG
: I'd like to think so. When Elizabeth Bear complained that the older writers don't read the newer ones, I made a point of reading some stories by three of the writers she cited and saw distinct signs of my influence on all three. It may have been at second or third remove, but I do believe the fiction I wrote in the 1967-73 period, and some of the later work, had a lasting impact.

SCHWEITZER
: As for what the readers allegedly did not like in your work in the early '70s, I can't help but notice that books like
Dying Inside
and
The Book of Skulls
have shown real staying power. Particularly
Dying Inside
is now regarded as a classic. So, what happened? Might it not be that the conventional book will be easily replaced by another conventional book, but that the unique one, even if it sells fewer copies at first, can't be and therefore stays in print?

SILVERBERG
: They don't stay in print. They have to be brought back, again and again. Each time they find a new (small) audience, and eventually they slip out of sight again, and then some adventurous new publisher takes a chance on them, with the same result. I've been assiduous in finding new publishers for my books, but, then, I'm alive to do it. Sturgeon and Blish and Kornbluth aren't, and but for the work of some dedicated small presses they'd be forgotten today.

SCHWEITZER
: Isn't it some cause for optimism that publishers keep trying? After all, in today's market very little stays continuously in print. I can cite an example. I found a letter in a 1972 fanzine in which James Blish is bemoaning the fact that one of his short story collections published in mass-market paperback by Ballantine (he doesn't give the title but is probably talking about
So Close to Home
, 1961) has "died the death" and gone out of print
after eleven years
. You know better than I do how that just does not compute in modern publishing terms. Story collection by a midlist writer? In mass-market paperback? In print for eleven years? Who could imagine it today?

SILVERBERG
: Publishing has changed quite a bit since then. Books like the Blish collection, and
Son of Man
and a lot of other off-beat things, were published by Ballantine before it morphed into Del Rey. Betty Ballantine loved her authors and coddled them, and was willing to publish things that could be seen a priori not to have big commercial futures; she would stand behind those books for years. She ran the company as an expression of her personal tastes and counted on big sellers like her Clarke books to carry the rest along. Eventually the Ballantines had to sell their company. There may be a connection there.

SCHWEITZER
: I'd like to posit something to you about
Dying Inside
. Is this the last major psi novel? Of course you were working in the field when psi was everywhere and John Campbell seemed to think it was an "essential science" on which science fiction had to be based, just like physics or astronomy. But while there have been novels since which have had psi as one component among many, I cannot think of a later one (within the SF category, not counting something like Stephen King's
Firestarter
) in which psi is the primary subject. So, were you in any sense consciously bidding farewell to this old and tired SF trope? I can well imagine that John W. Campbell would
not
have approved.

SILVERBERG
: I wouldn't know. Probably there have been psi novels since mine, but I haven't been aware of them. Campbell, of course, would not have cared much for
Dying Inside
, because of its near-contemporary setting, the sex, the mainstream tone. There was some irony in the book's getting a special award from the Campbell Award people (not the worldcon award, the other Campbell award.) And the same year Barry Malzberg won that Campbell award for as unCampbellian a book as could be imagined this side of Samuel Beckett.

SCHWEITZER
: While I've brought his name up, could you describe your working relationship with John Campbell? Is it true that you and Randall Garrett used to race each other to see who could sell Campbell a story based on one of his editorials? Or is this just fannish legend?

SILVERBERG
: No, not true. John wanted his writers to pay attention to his editorials, but he didn't want them simply to feed his own ideas back to him, and he rejected stories that were of that sort. What he wanted was to establish a sort of Socratic dialog, the writers working with the concepts in the editorials but adding their own spin. Poul Anderson was better at this than anyone, though Garrett did it well. There was a distinct Campbell "slant" and we all knew what it was -- he disliked stories in which aliens get the upper hand over humans, for example -- but selling stories to him was not the simple button-pushing business fans think it was.

I did try to push buttons, now and then. Garrett and I used a Scottish protagonist, Duncan MacLeod, for an early story, and sold it to John. John was always partial to Scots. I wrote some stories for Horace Gold in which people were confined in close quarters, as Horace was, and he bought them. But when Garrett and I concocted a story for Tony Boucher, who was Catholic, a notorious opera-lover and cat-lover, and an expert on detective stories, about an opera-loving priest whose cat solved a murder mystery, Tony rejected it with a grin of appreciation for the stunt -- but rejected it all the same. (Bob Lowndes, who was an Anglican but otherwise shared Tony's interests, bought it.)

SCHWEITZER
: Surely the trick is to not let the editor know his buttons are being pushed. Besides, that kind of stunt writing is something you do when you're younger, isn't it? Do you find as you get older that you're less interested in writing stories which are contrivances aimed at a market?

SILVERBERG
: I certainly don't aim at markets, these days. Everything I write is sold before I write it, so why twist myself out of shape to meet someone else's slant? But stunt writing -- well, yes, I still enjoy doing that, writing a story in the voice Jack Vance used in
The Dying Earth
, or doing a novella interwoven with "Vintage Season" to tell the other side of the story, or playing around with themes out of Conrad.