Robert Silverberg Books

"By the time this present group of stories was written I had passed through the cultural turbulence that engulfed nearly everyone's life in the wild, stormy period we know as "the Sixties," which for me had actually lasted from 1968 to 1974 or 1975. I had come through my own angry four-year-long retirement from writing in the middle 1970s, and was working again at a steady pace, though not with the frenetic prolificacy of the pre-retirement years. At the beginning of this period my personal life was still pretty chaotic, a carryover from all that Sixties madness, and plenty of new chaos was going to descend on me while some of these stories were written, but I was tiptoeing toward an escape from the various messes that were complicating my life, and by the time the last five stories of this volume were being written I was heading into the stability of my second marriage." -Robert Silverberg, from the Introduction

The stories here, all of them written between March of 1972 and November of 1973, mark a critical turning point in my career. Those who know the three earlier volumes have traced my evolution from a capable journeyman, very young and as much concerned with paying the rent as he was to advancing the state of the art, into a serious, dedicated craftsman now seeking to leave his mark on science fiction in some significant way. Throughout the decade of the 1960s I had attempted to grow and evolve within the field of writing I loved building on the best that went before me, the work of Theodore Sturgeon and James Blish and Cyril Kornbluth and Jack Vance and Philip K. Dick and half a dozen others whose great stories had been beacons beckoning me onward and then, as I reached my own maturity, now trying to bring science fiction along with me into a new realm of development, hauling it along even farther out of its pulp-magazine origins toward what I regarded as a more resonant and evocative kind of visionary storytelling. Robert Silverberg, from his Introduction

Before Robert Silverberg won multiple Hugo and Nebula awards and became Grand Master of science fiction, he was a young man learning the art and craft of writing the genre. In Science Fiction: 101, Silverberg reveals the roots of modern science fiction with thought-provoking essays about some of the field’s most groundbreaking stories—included in this volume—which inspired him and taught him to write. These insightful analyses, along with the skills and strategies Silverberg developed to build his successful career, make this an indispensable volume for readers interested in science fiction history. Featuring Thirteen Classic Stories by Brian W. Aldiss, Alfred Bester, James Blish, Philip K. Dick, Damon Knight, C. M. Kornbluth, Henry Kuttner, C. L. Moore, Frederik Pohl, Bob Shaw, Robert Sheckley, Cordwainer Smith, and Jack Vance

"But, for all that, I went on writing short fiction all through the seventh and eighth decades of my life, and though I'm not very active these days, I would still pay attention if someone were to approach me with an interesting and challenging short-story project, or if some absolutely irresistible story idea were to come into my mind. I will not, at this point, try to claim that the stories that are collected here are the last short stories I will ever write. Surely some editor, in the years ahead, will tickle my imagination with a proposal I can't resist. But I doubt that will be happening very often; and, meanwhile, here's the harvest of the fourteen years that began in 1995-not an enormous number of stories, no, but stories nevertheless that I think are worth reading and reprinting." -Robert Silverberg, from the Introduction

Valentine, a wanderer who knows nothing except his name, finds himself on the fringes of a great city, and joins a troupe of jugglers and acrobats; gradually, he remembers that he is the Coronal Valentine, executive ruler of the vast world of Majipoor, and all its peoples, human and otherwise... Valentine's journey is a long one, a tour through a series of magnificent environments. Fields of predatory plants give way to impossibly wide rivers, chalk-cliffed islands and unforgiving deserts. The prose is unrelentingly dreamlike—no accident given that on Majipoor, dreams rule the minds of great and humble alike. Originally serialized in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction in four parts: November 1979, December 1979, January 1980 and February 1980.

Medical College of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. Ninth edition of a pocket manual to the nonoperative management of surgical patients, for residents and medical students. Previous edition 1993. Outline format. Wire spiral binding. 65 U.S. contributors.

Great science-fiction stories from the past one hundred years include masterworks by Kipling, Julian Huxley, Asimov, Le Guin, Capek, Bester, Farmer, and other luminaries