Robert Silverberg's Many Trapdoors: Critical Essays on His Science Fiction 0313263086

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Robert Silverberg/s Many Trapdoors CRITICAL ESSAYS ON HIS SCIENCE FICTION EDITED BY

Charles L. Elkins AND

Martin .Harry Greenberg

Contributions to the Study of Science Fiction and Fantasy. Number 53 Marshall B. Tymn. Series Editor

Greenwood Press WESTPORT. CONNECTICUT • LONDON

Robert Silverberg's Many Trapdoors

Recent Titles in Contributions to the Study of Science Fiction and Fantasy

Contours of the Fantastic: Selected Essays from the Eighth International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts Michele K. Langford, editor The Connecticut Yankee in the Twentieth Century: Travel to the Past in Science Fiction Bud Foote The Reclamation of a Queen: Guinevere in Modern Fantasy Barbara Ann Gordon-Wise Steven Masters of Supernatural Fiction Edward Wagenknecht Out of the Night and Into the Dream: A Thematic Study of the Fiction of J. G. Ballard Gregory Stephenson "More Real Than Reality": The Fantastic in Irish Literature and the Arts Donald E. Morse and Csilla Bertha, editors The Dark Descent: Essays Defining Stephen King's Horrorscape Tony Magistrale, editor The Lost Worlds Romance: From Dawn Till Dusk Allienne R. Becker The Aesthetics of Ambivalence: Rethinking Science Fiction Film in the Age of Electronic (Re) Production Brooks Landon State of the Fantastic: Studies in the Theory and Practice of Fantastic Literature and Film; Selected Essays from the Eleventh International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts, 1990 Nicholas Ruddick, editor The Celebration of the Fantastic: Selected Papers from the Tenth Anniversary International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts Donald E. Morse, Marshall B. Tymn, and Csilla Bertha, editors Staging the Impossible: The Fantastic Mode in Modern Drama Patrick D. Murphy, editor

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Robert Silverberg's many trapdoors: critical essays on his science fiction I edited by Charles L. Elkins and Martin Harry Greenberg. p. cm. - (Contributions to the study of science fiction and fantasy, ISSN 0193-6875 ; no. 53) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-313-2630~ (alk. paper) 1. Silverberg, Robert-Criticism and interpretation. 2. Science fiction, American-History and criticism. I. Elkins, Charles. II. Greenberg, Martin Harry. III. Series. PS3569.I472Z86 1992 813' .54-dc20 92-10679 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available. Copyright © 1992 by Charles L. Elkins and Martin Harry Greenberg All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, by any process or technique, without the express written consent of the publisher. Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 92-10679 ISBN: 0-313-26308-6 ISSN: 0193-6875 First published in 1992 Greenwood Press, 88 Post Road West, Westport, CT 06881 An imprint of Greewood Publishing Group, Inc. Printed in the United States of America ~.

The paper used in this book complies with the Permanent Paper Standard issued by the National Information Standards Organization (Z39.48-1984). 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Copyright Acknowledgments The author and the publisher are grateful to the following sources for granting permission to reprint: Extracts from" 'Falling through Many Trapdoors': Robert Silverberg," by Russell Letson. Extrapolation 20 (Summer 1979): 109-17. Used with permission of the Kent State University Press. Extracts from "Introduction" to Silverberg's To Open the S/cy, by Russsell Letson. Boston, MA: Gregg Press, 1977. Used with permission of the author. Extracts from Tom O'Bedlam by Robert Silverberg. New York: Donald I. Fine, 1985. Permission granted by Donald I. Fine, Inc., and Victor Gollancz Ltd. Extracts from Valentine Pontifex by Robert Silverberg. New York: Arbor House, 1983. Permission granted by the author, Curtis Brown & John Farquharson, and William Morrow & Co., Inc.

Contents

l.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

Preface

ix

Introduction Thomas D. Clareson

1

Robert Silverberg: An Overview Russell Letson

15

An Ironic Deflation of the Superman Myth: Literary Influence and Science Fiction Tradition in Dying Inside Edgar L. Chapman

39

Repetition with Reversal: Robert Silverberg's Ironic Twist Endings Joseph Francavilla

59

Personal Identity in the Majipoor Trilogy, To Live Again, and Downward to the Earth John H. Flodstrom

73

Robert Silverberg'S The World Inside as an Ambiguous J Dystopia Frank Dietz

95

Contents

viii

7.

Silverberg's Ambiguous Transcendence Robert Reilly

107

B. On Silverberg's Tom Q'Bedlam C. N. Manlove

121

Bibliography

141

Index

151

About the Contributors

155

Preface

Robert Silverberg is one of the most prolific and popular science fiction writers in the world; he is also one of the most important. In putting together this volume we intend to provide the general reader as well as science fiction fans and scholars with an overview of his work and some in-depth studies of his more imp'ortant fiction. The title of this collection is taken from an observation by Russell Letson, one of Silverberg's most astute critics. In his essay for this volume, "Robert Silverberg: An Overview," Letson sums up his analysis of Silverberg with the comment that "the experience of reading Silverberg is like that of Tom Two Ribbons in 'Sundance' [Fantasy and Science Fiction 36 (June 1969): 4-17]: 'You are searching for realities. It is not an easy search. It is like falling through many trapdoors, looking for the one room whose floor is not hinged' " (17). When one reads the titles of many of the chapters in this collection, certain phrases repeat themselves; for example: "An Ironic Deflation of the Superman Myth," "Silverberg's Ironic Twist Endings," "The World Inside as an Ambiguous Dystopia," "Silverberg's Ambiguous Transcendence." As editors, we did not suggest these titles; each contributor chose his own title independently of the others. The words "ironic" and "ambiguous" suggest that things--the world, people, language, experience-may not be as they seem. What seems to be firm, solid, a good foundation, may in

x

Preface

fact be a "trapdoor." This is an excellent metaphor for what one often encounters in reading Robert Silverberg. Like many projects of this nature, we underestimated the time it would take to bring it to fruition. We apologize for the delays and express our gratitude to our contributors, many of whom, we suspect, had just about given up on ever seeing their chapters published. One person, Professor Thomas Clareson, deserves special mention. Not among the original contributors, Professor Clareson graciously agreed to write the introduction to this volume. Respected and admired as one of the most important American scholars and critics of science fiction and one of the foremost authorities on Robert Silverberg, Professor Clareson provides a masterful introduction to the following chapters. Finally, we wish to thank our editor at Greenwood Press, Marilyn Brownstein, for her help, her suggestions, and her patience.

Robert Silverberg's Many Trapdoors

1 Introduction THOMAS D. CLARESON

In 1956 at Worldcon in New York City, Robert Silverberg received a Hugo award as the most promising new writer of 1955 (before Silverberg, only Philip Jose Farmer had gained the award). Silverberg represents as well as anyone the emergence of a professional writer from science fiction fandom, for he had edited the fanzine Spaceship (1949-1955) and had contributed to the Fantasy Amateur Press Association (FAPA) beginning in the 1950s. In the April 1951 issue of Spaceship his editorial reveals a tension that did much to shape his career: in addition to literary book analyses, he asked his contributors for fiction under 2,000 words: "real fiction, not the usual fan stuff" (Clareson 1983, 67). His professional career began when Harry Harrison asked him to contribute an article on fandom ("Fanmag") to Science Fiction Adventures (December 1953) ("Sounding" 15). In February 1954 Nebula Science Fiction (British) published his first story, "Gorgon Planet," while in 1955 Thomas Y. Crowell issued his first novel, Revolt on Alpha C. During 19541955 only three other short stories saw publication, although in 1955 he began his brief but important collaboration with Randall Garrett. The autobiographical "Sounding Brass, Tinkling Cymbal" in Brian Aldiss and Harrison's Hell's Cartographers (1975) gives the best portrait of the youthful Silverberg, whose career began while he was still an undergraduate comparative literature major at Columbia University. A precocious only child, "the lure of the exotic" seized him early-from

2

Robert Silverberg's Many Trapdoors

collecting "with lunatic persistence" a complete run of National Geographic to reading the classic authors as well as the current postwar anthologies edited by Healy-McComas, Conklin, and Wollheim. He admits that he completely missed Edgar Rice Burroughs and came to the magazine late, when an "unquenchable thirst for science fiction" overcame his dislike of the magazines with their garish covers. His dream of a career in science-botany, paleontology, astronomy-gave way in his early teens to the idea of a career in journalism while he wrote "as a sideline." He preferred reading science fiction, while writing it "allowed me to give free play to those fantasies of space and time and dinosaurs and supermen that were so gratifying" ("Sounding" 10-13). In September of 1956, armed with a degree from Columbia University, a new wife-Barbara H. Brown-and his initial Hugo award, he attended the Milford Science Fiction Writers' Workshop at the home of Damon Knight in the Poconos. Indeed, he succeeded Knight as the second president of the Science Fiction Writers' Association (SFWA), which grew in large part out of the Milford meetings. Two interrelated factors coming out of his collaboration with Garrett shaped his early career in a manner that his colleagues-editors, reviewers, and readers-did not let him soon forget. First, saying that editors bought more readily from writers with whom they were personally acquainted, Garrett took him to editorial offices in New York. Second, Silverberg has frequently acknowledged that in order to gain financial security, he decided to provide those editors with the stories that they needed. Fifty thousand words a month at a penny a word, he has explained, equals $500 a month: a figure comparable to the salaries that his friends working in the sciences or as engineers received. A tone of guilt envelops his admission that by the summer of 1956, "I was the complete writing machine, turning out stories in all lengths at whatever quality the editor desired, from slambang adventure to cerebral pseudo-philosophy. No longer willing to agonize over the gulf between my literary ambitions and my actual productions, I wrote with astonishing swiftness" ("Sounding" 20). By the end of 1956 he had a million words in print. Between 1957 and 1959 the magazines took some 200 stories, many of them disguised by pseudonyms, since he often had more than one story in any given issue. Thirteen novels saw publication, almost all of them expanded from novellas. Donald A. Wollheim printed eight of them as Ace Doubles. Even those figures do not accurately reflect his output during those years; he has said that he has lost some of the records involving crime stories, a few westerns, profiles of movie stars, and other odds and ends" ("Sounding" 24). Yet "however dollar-oriented I became, I still yearned to make some valuable contribution to the field" ("Sounding" 22). A few stories-"The Songs of Summer" (September 1956), with its overlapping monologues; "Warm Man" (May 1957, his first sale to F&SF

Introduction

3

[Fantasy and Science Fiction)), with its treatment of what was to be a central theme; "Road to Nightfall" (July 1958), with its ruined America, where inhabitants of New York City were reduced to cannibalism---come immediately to mind, for technically and thematically they anticipate his later interests. As in the case of "Road to Nightfall," written as early as 1954, Silverberg has lamented the difficulty of getting what he regarded as his better stories accepted for publication. How few of his many stories he thought well of may be counted by the mere handful he included in his story collections after 1970. Most of his stories have never been reprinted, not even in the 1960s. Of the early novels, perhaps only two merit any notice in the 1990s. Invaders from Earth (1958) anticipates the attack on the industrial-military complex that was to become so popular in the 1960s and early 1970s. When the Extraterrestrial Development and Exploration Corporation, Ganymede Division, finds the moon rich in radioactive minerals, the Corporation decides that the United Nations must underwrite a military occupation deemed necessary to subdue hostile aliens. The protagonist dreams up an imaginary colony of humans, complete with women and children, and launches a media blitz playing up the suffering of the supposed colonists. Viewers and members of the United Nations are enraged, but the protagonist is troubled by the hoax. When he goes to Ganymede, the narrative' becomes Silverberg's first noteworthy examination of humanity's reactions to an alien culture. He declares that the aliens are people and reveals the hoax. In terms of social and political criticism, were it not for the conveniently happy ending, a reader might mistake this for a later Silverberg novel. Another victim of heroic action and a happy ending, Stl?psons of Terra (1958) has significance as his earliest elaborate handling of the time travel themes that proved so important to later works. Precisely when the first phase of his career came to an end remains debatable. He has dated it with the collapse of the SF magazine empire in 1958, which made his "mass production ... obsolete" ("Sounding" 24); influential as that factor was, it seems an oversimplification. Although a number of novels aimed at a juvenile audience, beginning with the highly praised Lost Race of Mars (1960), appeared in the early 1960s, one cannot be certain when they were written. Lost Race of Mars dates from 1959. Although the first collection of his stories, Next Stop the Stars, came out in 1962, publication of new stories evaporated: four in 1960, two in 1961, one in 1962, five in 1963, one in 1964, three in 1965. While these numbers underscore a shift of interest, they belie how prolific he remained. He has said that his production reached well above a million words in 1960 and 1961, while in 1965 it reached at least 1Y2 million words ("Sounding" 25, 33). For example, though he does not specifically mention them, under the pseudonyms of Don Elliott and Dan

4

Robert Silverberg's Many Trapdoors

Eliot he turned out well over a hundred erotic novels for such publishers as Nightstand Books; many were issued between 1959 and 1966, and some were reprinted in the 1970s. In like manner, during the 1960s he wrote eight novels, sometimes completing work begun by someone else, as in the case (twice) of W. R. Burnett (Clareson 1983, 45-48). The most important of this miscellaneous fiction was his juvenile novel, The Mask of Akhnaten (1965), a product of his interest in archaeology. He dates the second phase of his career from the nonfiction Lost Cities and Vanished Civilizations (Chilton 1962), although Treasures Beneath the Sea (Whitman 1960) and First American into Space (1961) had already been released. Be that as it may, between 1962 and 1972, he wrote eightyone nonfiction books, most of them aimed at the lucrative juvenile audience. During that period he gained a deserved reputation as one of those most skilled popularizers of scientific material. One finds many of those titles in public libraries even now, along with titles intended for the adult audience, like The Golden Dream (1967), Mound Builders of Ancient America (1968), and The Realm of Prester John (1972). Nor should one forget that with Earthmen and Strangers (1966), he became a highly regarded editor of anthologies, the most successful series in terms of critical reception being New Dimensions, first released in 1971 as a vehicle for serious SF. In terms of his own science fiction, however, the most important event occurred soon after Frederik Pohl replaced Horace Gold as editor of Galaxy in 1961. According to them both, Pohl suggested that he publish any short stories that Silverberg submitted to him; Silverberg was to have complete freedom-technically and thematically-to write what he chose; were Pohl to reject any story, Silverberg would contribute nothing more. In returning to SF as "a serious dedicated artist" ("Sounding" 28), Silverberg identified himself with those writers who were irrevocably changing the face of SF, writers like Cordwainer Smith, Harlan Ellison, Tom Disch, and J. G. Ballard, who were being lumped together oversimplistically under the sobriquet New Wave. His first stories for Pohl were "To See the Invisible Man" (Worlds of Tomorrow, April 1963), which had been inspired by Jorge Luis Borges, and "The Pain Peddlers" (Galaxy, August 1963), which dealt with the theme of psychic cannibalism. His subsequent stories and novels made him one of the most important writers, British or American, during the decade 1965-1975, for he expanded the parameters of the field more extensively than did any of his contemporaries. That is to say, especially with regard to theme, his works encompassed a diversity beyond the often narrow unity identifying the fiction of some of his most distinguished colleagues. Although one understands his assertion that he returned to SF as a result of his agreement with Pohl, it is a somewhat misleading statement, for throughout most of the 1960s his earlier work continued in print. Of

Introduction

5

four short story collections, only Needle in a Timestack (1966) contained stories first published in the 1960s. At least six novels were expanded from novellas written before 1960, as verified by their use of earlier titles. Perhaps The Seed of Earth (1962) most vividly exemplifies the difficulty of establishing a date of composition for another half dozen novels. In a preface to the 1977 reprint of that novel, he has explained that he incorporated into it "The Winds of Siros" (1957) and appropriated a title an editor gave a 1958 story that had no relationship to the novel. Galaxy purchased it for a new line of paperbacks that never materialized, so that it became a 1962 Ace Double. If this does not provide an adequate puzzle, Silverberg has gone on to say that it contains many of his "later literary themes and obsessions," particularly an exploration of "psychosexual interactions" between humans and aliens "under circumstances of stress" (Clare son 1983, 115). Nor can one be certain of the date of One of Our Asteroids Is Missing (1964), the last SF novel he issued under a pseudonym. And there is Planet of Death (1967), the only one of his novels aimed at a juvenile audience that its few reviewers severely panned (Clareson 1983, 160). If the 1963 short stories for Frederik Pohl opened the second phase of Silverberg'S SF career, then its first novels were To Open the Sky (1967), which he brought together from five novellas from Galaxy, and Thorns (1967), which he wrote for Ballantine without prior magazine publication. One of his finest studies of human suffering in an existential universe, Thorns won both Hugo and Nebula nominations as the best novel of the year, while the novella "Hawksbill Station" gained a Nebula nomination. Significantly, from 1967 to 1975 his fiction consistently received nominations for these awards--often entries in several categories the same year. His initial success came in 1969: A Hugo award for the novella "Nightwings," found in the collection Nightwings, and a Nebula award for the short story "Passengers." In 1971 he again received two awards: Nebulas for the novel A Time of Changes and the short story "Good News from the Vatican." In 1974 his novella "Born with the Dead" gained him a fourth Nebula award, but he did not win another Hugo award. The Nebula award came from his colleagues in SFWA, while the Hugo awards identified the preferences of the SF fans who were members of the annual World con. From the mid-1960s onward he has repeatedly expressed his disappointment of the reaction of SF audiences to his fiction, for he felt that beginning in 1967 he "was writing only what I wanted to write, as well as I could do it" ("Sounding" 34). Of his fellow writers he has said, "But to them I was still that fellow who had written all that zap-zap space opera in the 1950s"; he felt "a little pained ... that I had been judged all these y.ears by the basest of what I had written between 1955 and 1958" ("Sounding" 33, 35). As a result, for example, he withdrew

6

Robert Silverberg's Many Trapdoors

"Sundance" (1969)-which many now consider his finest piece of short fiction-from competition. In short, although he was the guest of honor at Worldcon in Heidelberg in 1970, he continued to be discontented. One can only surmise how much that discontent was affected by his "mysterious" illness of 1966 (a thyroid disorder) or by the shock of having his New York home ravaged by fire in the winter of 1968. Of that fire he has said, "But I was never the same again. Until the night of the fire I had never, except perhaps at the onset of my illness in 1966, been touched by the real anguish of life" ("Sounding" 37). During the decade following 1967 he was at the height of his career, one of the finest SF writers in the United States or Britain. Perhaps more than any of his colleagues-certainly as much as anyone of them-he showed that science fiction as a literary form could transcend mere adolescent fantasy and macho adventure to explore metaphorically the human experience. No catalogue of titles is necessary, nor does one need to discuss the individual fictions in detail. For Silverberg, as for so many of his contemporaries-whether they wrote SF or "mainstream" social criticism-one of his principal themes grew out of the existentialist view of human isolation and anguish in an indifferent universe where vast, incomprehensible forces act in a meaningless, random manner. To heighten the dramatic impact-and horror-of this theme, he repeatedly focused on acts of "psychic cannibalism," a term he first used in commenting on the short story "Flies," which he wrote for Harlan Ellison's landmark anthology Dangerous Visions (1967). Most simply, whether contrived by a human sadist or uncaring, yet inquisitive, aliens, the acts of psychic cannibalism involve creatures who feed off the tortured emotions of his central characters, who at times are manipulated so that they cannot suppress their own feelings or must share those of other persons. In this way, the acts become a kind of metaphorical action underlining the essential helplessness of his protagonists. But his main concern remains how those characters adapt spiritually to these grotesque situations. The theme's centrality to his concerns continues from "Warm Man" (1957) through the loneliness and despair of "To See the Invisible Man" (1963) and the stories "Flies" and "Passengers" (1968), with their parasitic aliens exploiting humanity, to such novels as Thorns (1967), The Man in the Maze (1969), and Dying Inside (1972). In contrast to this dark vision, however, Silverberg also explored the themes of redemption and transcendence in both Nightwillgs (1969) and Downward to the Earth (1970). Against a richly textured background of a ruined Earth devastated because of human arrogance and occupied by a vengeful alien race, the protagonist of Nightwings undertakes a pilgrimage to Jorslem during which he envisions a future-a fourth cycle of civilization-when both humans and aliens will be absorbed into a

Introduction

7

spiritual unity. Drawing upon his own visits to the great game parks of East Africa as well as his admiration for Conrad's work, particularly Heart of Darkness, Silverberg takes his protagonist Gundersen on a journey to the interior of an alien world in Downward to the Earth. He echoes something of Clifford D. Simak's vision in that the transformed, messianic Gundersen foresees the telepathic and spiritual union of all intelligent creatures, whatever their forms. In contrast to such questing for transcendence, Tower of Glass (1970) represents his updating of the Frankenstein motif, for Simeon Krug has used his science to create a race of androids from chemical vats. They worship him, building a religion around the concept of his redemption of them, but Krug is an indifferent god who dismisses his creatures as artifacts comparable only to such machines as robots and computers. A climactic scene occurs when Krug, newly aware of their dream, rejects the idea of their humanity, although the finest of them (the Alpha class) are indistinguishable from men and women except for the color of their skin. Through the Android Equality Party, he also dramatizes the hope of an oppressed people for social and political equality. In this way Tower of Glass becomes one of his most topical novels. The controversial Dying Inside (1972)-which he has described as an SF theme used in an otherwise "straight" mainstream novel ("Sounding" 41)-achieves not orily his most memorable study of character but also his most effective metaphor for the anguish of modern human experience. The first-person narrator, a resident of contemporary New York City, recounts his loss of the telepathic power with which he was born. The final scene, when he cries out, "Hello, hello, hello, hello," captures vividly a sense of the complete isolation of the individual in an indifferent universe. Had these four novels been the only products of these years, they would have placed him at the cutting edge of those writers who demonstrated the potential of science fiction. But they were only four of twenty novels and collections of stories, to say nothing of his nonfiction and the anthologies he edited. Yet by the early 1970s he had cut back his output, declining contracts and removing himself from the nonfiction field. The Realm of Prester John (1972) proved to be his last scholarly title, while he had undertaken no novels since completing Dying Inside in 1971. He began to think again of retirement; this impulse was heightened when he and his wife moved to California early in 1972. Throughout 1975, as early as the April conference at the University of Colorado-Denver, he announced that he was quitting science fiction. While writing "Sounding Brass, Tinkling Cymbal," he thought that by the time of its publication (1975) he would have undertaken another novel and was certain that whatever he wrote in the future woufd be "what passes for science fiction in my conscious-

8

Robert Silverberg's Many Trapdoors

ness these days. I still respond to it as I did as a child for its capacity to open the gates of the universe [but] I have little admiration for most of the science fiction 1 read today" ("Sounding" 44-45). His last novels of the 1970s were The Stochastic Man (1975), his most intensive study of the problem of free will and determinism, and Shadrach in the Furnace (1976). While that novel continues to reflect his pessimism regarding the future, in it he abandons his tortured protagonists in favor of a physician who may have the power to help shape the world in which he lives. For all its pessimistic trappings, Shadrach in the Furnace escapes any nightmare of despair in favor of Silverberg's strongest affirmation, though it falls short of any hope for transcendence. After 1974, when "Born with the Dead" gained a Nebula award, he published no new short fiction, although each year saw new collections of his stories. He may have stopped writing fiction, but he did not abandon the field of SF, for he reviewed for both Odyssey and Cosmos, while by 1978 for CaWeo he had begun a column, "Opinion," not restricted to reviews; that column became a feature of Amazing Stories by 1981. In addition, he continued to edit New Dimensions, for which he received the Milford award for distinguished editing from the Eaton Conference in 1981. One suspects that Robert Silverberg could never cut himself off completely from science fiction. Whatever the complex reasons that led him to give up fiction for some five years, the third phase of his career opened with Lord Valentine's Castle, serialized in F&SF during the winter of 1979-1980 before publication as a book. The tone of the novel differs radically from his previous fiction, for it dramatizes a heroic quest and emphasizes external incident as the amnesiac heir seeks to regain his rightful throne. Instead of the earlier protagonists, who grapple with problems of pain and meaninglessness, Lord Valentine brings to mind such figures as Shakespeare's Henry V as he meditates on the qualities of an ideal ruler. Whatever else the novel does, it requires that the reader reexamine the relationship between fantasy and science fiction, for Silverberg has fused the two together. The effect is that of furnishing with SF trappings a world that brings to mind medieval romance. Indeed, perhaps the chief accomplishment of Lord Valentine's Castle is that it reveals the panorama of vast Majipoor, a world that certainly rivals Herbert's Dune or Le Cuin's Winter as a backdrop. Some things, however, do not change; although nominated for both the Hugo and Nebula awards, Lord Valentine's Castle did not win either one. The premise binding together the eleven fictions of Majipoor Chronicles (1982) assumes that Valentine's heir-designate, Hussine, a clerk in the labyrinth Hall of Records, gains access to the closed Register of Souls so that he may "roam" the minds of diverse individuals living in past millennia. Although a skillful framing device, it cannot produce a sus-

Introduction

9

tained narrative. The high point of the Chronicles, "The Desert of Stolen Dreams," saw separate book publication in 1981. It focuses on the pilgrimage of a guilt-ridden protagonist who wishes to atone somehow for abandoning a former chance companion to her death, but it ends too abruptly with a mechanical SF explanation, which mars the aura of fantasy permeating the narrative. Nor does Valentine Pontifex (1983) match either the characterization or spectacle of Lord Valentine's Castle (1980). Absent, too, is the humor of the earlier novel. A blight, a new religion, and a revolt scatter the reader's attention as the Shapechangers endeavor to overthrow Lord Valentine. He triumphs, of course, but only to participate in the coronation of Coronal Lord Hussine. If these two volumes did not match the quality of Lord Valentine's original heroic quest, one may find an explanation in the effort of Silverberg put into Lord of Darkness (1983), a unique item revealing the extent of the scholarship more than any other novel. In a brief "Afterword" he explains that he made use of a "brief narrative" by Andrew Battell, a British seaman of the Elizabethan period who was imprisoned in Brazil by the Portugese, became an ocean-going pilot, and shipped to Angola, where he dwelt with the cannibalistic Jaqqas during part of his "twenty years of adventure" (559). Back in England by 1610, he dictated a slight memoir to Samuel Purchas, who included it in Purchas His Pilgrimes (1625). While Silverberg followed "the broad outlines" of Battell's tale as a "foundation" for what he calls a "historical fantasy" in a brief" AFTERWORD," he had to fill "those broad (and often vague) outlines with a world of imagined detail" (559). In necessarily creating a personal life for Battell, he relied on one of his old literary obsessionsin this case Battell's sexual affairs and sexual fantasies, which do not contribute so effectively to his themes as does the sexuality in Tower of Glass and Dying Inside. His finest achievement lies in his ability to capture the mode of the old travel books so well that the drama and graphic pageantry one expects in a Silverberg narrative are muted. Lord of Darkness has never received the attention it deserves and, with one exception, may yet emerge as his most significant work of the 1980s. That exception is Sailing to Byzantium (1985), the recipient of a recordbreaking fifth Nebula award, his only Nebula award of the 1980s. Its protagonist, a contemporary New Yorker named Charles Phillips, finds himself inexplicably in the fiftieth century, where a small dilettante population amuses itself by visiting famous cities reconstructed from the past-"the usual mix of eras, cultures, realities" (SB 9). Never more than five at a time, they range from Alexandria and Timbuctoo to Asgard and Mohenjo-daro; in turn, perhaps one a year, they are destroyed and recreated as other wondrous cities. Built by robots, they are populated by "temporaries"~seemingly "flesh and blood creatures" who must be "artificial constructs" (SB 18). That Charles Phillips is present to amuse

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Robert Silverberg's Many Trapdoors

the citizens of the future becomes more apparent as he encounters other "visitors" from the past. The slight plot line grows out of his involvement with Gioia, a woman who flees from him when she realizes that unlike her apparently immortal companions, she will grow old. But mortality in itself is not Silverberg's chief concern. The narrative recaptures much of the intensity of his fiction from the 1960s and 1970s as he again explores the nature of identity and reality. He works out Yeats's ideas in a futuristic, science fiction setting. It seems unique among his works in that love triumphs: after confrontation and debate, Charles and Gioia set sail for Byzantium. The novella may well be Silverberg's finest single fiction. The Conglomeroid Cocktail Party (1984) reveals Silverberg's skill as a storyteller, even when aloof and ironic. Gilgamesh the King (1985) exhibits his ability to turn his scholarly interest in the past into memorable fiction. But Gilgamesh differs from many of his protagonists; though he broods over his mortality, in a final meditation, he expresses at least a stoic affinnation: if one does one's duty, one can face death unafraid. After excursions into fantasy and historical fiction, Silverberg returned to SF with Tom O'Bedlam (1985). In the twenty-second century (2103) after the devastation of much of America, the survivors in northern California face such long-established threats as despair, barbarism, religious turmoil, and rioting. When an increasing number of persons start having visions of seemingly idyllic worlds in far galaxies, the issue becomes whether these are wishful hallucinations of individuals driven to madness or first contacts with extraterrestrial intelligences. Silverberg ends this familiar scenario with a nice touch of ambiguity. When Tom, apparently a holy fool and the chief visionary, helps a variety of people make "the Crossing," even as he declares that Earth is "lost, ... nothing ... but pain and grief" (TOB 305), the reader cannot be certain whether he is saving them or killing them. Nor is this ambiguity dispelled by a final scene, when another character either hallucinates or hears the voices of both alien beings and a woman who has perhaps made the Crossing. In Star of Gypsies (1986) Silverberg combines the premise that long ago, when the star of their distant system threatened their world, the Rom fled to earth, with the Rom's abilities to travel through time ("ghosting") and to drive the faster-than-light ships better than humans. Against this background, he concentrates on the first-person narrator, Yakoub, King of the Gypsies, in an attempt to create another heroic figure. But Yakoub does not have the stature of Gilgamesh, although after he rehearses his exploits, he concludes with a meditation echoing Gilgamesh's affirmation. With "Gilgamesh in the Outback," published in Janet Morris's Rebels in Hell (1986), he gained a Hugo award; perhaps the most notable feature of the story is his inclusion as characters figures from history

Introduction

11

and the literary scene. He concludes for example, with Robert Howard, H. P. Lovecraft, and Ernest Hemingway's watching Gilgamesh and Enkidu as they walk together into the Outback, friends again after a lengthy quarrel. The portrait of Howard is merciless in its satire. At Winter's End (1988) takes as its point of departure the concept that Earth is periodically devastated by a swarm of comets-some variation of such a theory may explain, for example, the extinction of the dinosaurs. Millions of years in the future, after an ice age lasting 700,000 years, Silverberg allows his people to emerge from their underground sanctuary to search for a legendary city. Its sequel, The New Springtime (April 1990), seems to concentrate on warfare between the people and the insectlike hjjk. As one examines Silverberg's major fiction of the 1980s, one must conclude that his stories and novels have concerned themselves, by and large, with spectacle and thus present the reader with brilliant surfaces. His fiction has lost some of the thematic intensity arising from the dark visions of many of his principal novels of the late 1960s and early 1970s. The calm acceptance and affirmation of his new protagonists does not replace the impact of his tortured protagonists of the earlier period, even those who dreamed of transcendence. To say this and to focus on these books, however, does not give a comprehensive picture of his output during the past decade. It ignores such novels apparently directed toward a juvenile audience as Project Pendulum (1987), in which identical twins travel in time, or The Secret Sharer (1988), in which a young starship commander offers his body as a refuge for the mind of a disembodied young woman. Nor does it take into consideration his continuing work as one of the most distinguished editors in the field, to say nothing of his critical and autobiographical commentary on stories that he has written or anthologized. Recently, for example, he and his second wife, Karen Haber, have edited Universe I, the first in a series renewing the tradition associated with Terry Carr. While a continuity, both technically and thematically, exists throughout Silverberg'S career-which now spans more than three decadesone cannot pigeonhole him. He would not be the major writer that he is if one could. He experiments; he changes emphasis; he looks at familiar material from a different perspective; at times he even parodies the field he is so fond of. Thus his work can never be ignored; there must be constant reassessment. Always excepting the occasional article in various journals or collections, the studies in this volume, edited by Charles Elkins and Martin H. Greenberg, make the most significant contribution to Silverberg scholarship since the early 1980s. Each of the contributors introduces a fresh perspective that both reevaluates judgments previously held and raises questions going beyond the fictions they concentrate on in their chapters. Russell Letson's "Robert Silverberg: An Overview" provides an ex-

12

Robert Silverberg's Many Trapdoors

cellent starting point, for variations on his thesis echo throughout the book. He argues that Silverberg has dealt with such modernist themes as anxiety and alienation, thereby moving the field toward the "high" tradition exemplified by such writers as Joyce, Conrad, and Yeats. Edgar L. Chapman follows with what serves as a case study, so to speak, his "An Ironic Deflation of the Superman Myth: Literary Influence and Science Fiction Tradition in Dying Inside." Joseph Francavilla turns his emphasis to narrative technique as he examines "Repetition with Reversal: Robert Silverberg'S Ironic Twist Endings." John H. Flodstrom shifts back to one of Silverberg's most enduring concerns as he shows how pervasive and complex is "Personal Identity in the Majipoor Trilogy, To Live Again, and Downward to the Earth." By concentrating on a single novel, "Robert Silverberg'S The World Inside as an Ambiguous Utopia," Frank Dietz shows that far from being just another exemplary dystopia, that episodic novel reveals that the dystopian paradigm established by the classic works and widely imitated prove to be as stereotypical and philosophically naive as were the utopias against which their writers reacted. Robert Reilly yokes together The Feast of St. Dionysus and Tower of Glass to show that Silverberg goes beyond the yearning affirmation of Thomas the Pilgrim or Gundersen to dramatize in two very different stories the question of whether transcendence has been achieved; indeed, whether transcendence can be achieved. In sharp contrast, in the concluding chapter in the volume, C. N. Manlove compares Tom Q'Bedlam and David Brin's The Postman as he suggests that Silverberg's most science fictional novel of the 1980s admits the possibility of a mystical experience involving the genuinely transcendent. From their different vantage points, each writer supplements and reinforces the views of the others, and, as noted, all of them raise questions taking the reader beyond their immediate concerns. At this point, one dare not even speculate what works Robert Silverberg will produce in the future. It seems certain that whatever one expects from him, he will surpass and surprise those expectations. In view of what he has already accomplished and those new dimensions he will undoubtedly introduce in his future work, one can only conclude that his work will call for continued examination and reassessment. Much has been accomplished by scholars; much remains to be done. This volume begins that task. WORKS CITED Clareson, Thomas D. Robert Silverberg: A Primary and Secondary Bibliography. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1983. Silverberg, Robert. At Wi,lter's End. New York: Warner Books, 1988. - - . The Conglomeroid Cocktail Party. New York: Bantam, 1985.

Introduction

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- - . Downward to the Earth. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1970. - - . Dying Inside. New York: Scribner, 1972. - - . "Fanmag." Science Fiction Adventures 2 (December): 88-95. - - - . "Flies." In Dangerous Visions, ed. Harlan Ellison. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1967, pp. 9-20. Gilgamesh the King. Toronto and New York: Bantam, 1985. Invaders from Earth. New York: Ace Double D 286,1958. Lord of Darkness. New York: Arbor House, 1983. Lord Valentine's Castle. New York: Harper and Row, 1980. Majipoor Chronicles. New York: Arbor House, 1982. The New Springtime. New York: Warner Books, 1990. Nightwings. New York: Avon, 1%9. Sailing to Byzantium. San Francisco, CA, and Columbia, PA: UnderwoodMiller, 1985. - - . The Secret Sharer. Los Angeles: Underwood-Miller, 1988. - - - . The Seed of Earth. New York: Ace Double F-145, 1962. - - . Shadrach in the Furnace. Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1976. - - - . "Sounding Brass, Tinkling Cymbal." In Hell's Cartographers: Some Personal Histories of Science Fiction Writers, ed. Brian Aldiss and Harry Harrison. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1975, pp. 7-45. New York: Harper and Row, 1975, pp. 7-45. Rpt. in Foundation 7 and 8 (March 1975): 6-37. Rpt. in Algol 25 (Winter 1976): 6-18. Cited as "Sounding." - - . Star of Gypsies. New York: Donald I. Fine, 1986. - - . Stepsons of Terra. New York: Ace Double 0-311, 1958. - - . The Stochastic Man. New York: Harper and Row, 1975. - - . Tom Q'Bedlam. New York: Donald I. Fine, 1985. - - . Tower of Glass. New York: Scribner, 1970. - - - . Valentine Pontifex. New York: Arbor House, 1983.

---. --. --. ---. ---. ---. --. ---.

2 Robert Silverberg: An Overview RUSSELL LETSON

I If the superficialities of the New Wave debate concealed any substantial

issues, I suspect that they had less to do with stylistic experimentation, scientific content ("hard" versus "soft"), or the depiction of sex than with what may be loosely called worldview. 1 The themes and forms of American magazine science fiction have remained constant over the last fifty years; despite the tradition of dystopian, satirical, and disaster formulas, SF has been rationalist, materialist, voluntarist, and optimistic. It has tended to ignore the decay of Western belief systems documented by modernist literature and philosophy since the end of the nineteenth century. The point here is not to revive the debate about the New Wave nor to pigeonhole Robert Silverberg as a New Wave writer but to suggest that Silverberg, like a number of other SF writers of the past twentyfive years, has shaped his fiction away from the staple formulas of the American magazine tradition-the adventure, satire, and process (gadget and puzzle) conventions-toward the themes and forms of modern "high" literature, that tradition represented by Dostoevsky, Kafka, and Conrad through Joyce, Eliot, Yeats, and Beckett. The fiction of Robert Silverberg has, especially since the early sixties, pursued the modernist themes of anxiety and alienation, and he has shaped science fictional materials to deal with problems that were not previously part of the American SF mainstream.

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Robert Silverberg's Many Trapdoors

Thomas Clareson has exposed the inadequacy of easy biographical or course-of-career readings of Silverberg's work (e.g., from hack to "serious" writer) and shown that the impulse to reshape SF materials to new purposes is as evident in his early stories-"Road to Nightfall" (1958), "Warm Man" (1957)-as in those of the "new" Silverberg of the early sixties (Clare son 1978, 2: viii). It seems prudent, therefore, to disclaim any ambition to draw conclusions based on the publication order of the texts examined here, though some interesting insights might emerge from a sensitive correlation of that sequence with the growing body of information supplied by Silverberg's autobiographical essays and introductions. 2 A different kind of falsification, however, might arise from a treatment that rhetorically rearranges the work to show "problems" and their "solutions" -Dying Inside followed by A Time of Changes, for example. I have chosen, therefore, to keep largely to the publication order but to group the samples to show the ways Silverberg explored the themes of anxiety and uncertainty between 1961 and 1975. II

All of the surface themes of Silverberg'S major fiction-immortality, new religions, archetypal renewal experiences, time travel, bodily transformations--conceal variations on the more powerful themes of anxiety, and the shape of his fiction is governed more by the exposition and resolution of anxiety than by the working out of science fictional processes. This is not to say that the science has suffered, or that his narratives are no longer SF/ but that the conventional focus on process as represented by the science fictional idea and its implication is subordinated, in most cases, to the spiritual situation of the characters. That is, the guilts, uncertainties, pains, anxieties, and emptiness suffered by his protagonists are not practical problems to be solved or resolved by the application of appropriate scientific or technical knowledge; nor are they simple ethical, moral, or psychological problems awaiting the touch of the right philosophical, theological, or therapeutic system. Even in Tower of Glass and The World Inside, the two books that Silverberg thinks of as "closer to pure science fiction, the exhaustive investigation of an extrapolative idea"4 than any of his other work, the characters exhibit signs of distress that seem to be less environmental than existential. Elsewhere the weight of the fiction is borne by the psychic state of the characters, and the SF content exists not for itself alone, but as an element of a kind of fiction that extends the range of the genre and brings to the modernist tradition a new source of metaphors and formulas. Here Silverberg is clearly part of the movement (in the sense of motion, not Movement) represented by Brian Aldiss, J. G. Ballard, Samuel Delany, Philip K. Dick, Harlan Ellison, Barry Malzberg, Michael Moorcock-and, I believe,

An Overview

17

by less-expected figures such as Robert A. Heinlein and Philip Jose Farmer. The catalogue of writers just cited indicates some of what I mean when I speak of an interpretation of modernist and SF traditions. In the work of these writers there is a retreat from the easy optimism and philosophical certainty of conventional SF and an acceptance of the intellectual and emotional disorder that is the burden of our century. A summary of the modern situation that I have found useful is contained in the first section of William Barrett's Irrational Man (1962), which traces the decay of traditional ideas of order and meaning in our culture and the erosion of systems of belief that once supported us: Alienation and estrangement; a sense of the basic fragility and contingency of human life; the impotence of reason confronted with the depths of existence; the threat of Nothingness. and the solitary and unsheltered condition of the individual before this threat. One can scarcely subordinate these problems one to another; each participates in all the others, and they all circulate around a common center. A single atmosphere pervades them all like a chilly wind: the radical feeling of human finitude. (36)

Silverberg'S fiction reveals various attempts to come to terms with such a "feeling of human finitude," to ease anxiety and guilt, to make sense of life, to make the universe emotionally as well as intellectually intelligible. The response to anxiety has varied from the spiritual rebirths and messianic outpourings of Downward to the Earth, Nightwings, and A Time of Changes, through the uncomfortable or ironic accommodations of The Man in the Maze, To Open the Sky, or The Masks of Time, to those surrenders to fate that are alien to the spirit of American SF, if not Western culture in general-"Born with the Dead/' "This Is the Road," The Stochastic Man. In the course of exploring this thematic area, Silverberg has begun the transformation of the conventions of magazine SF. Take, for example, the case of "To See the Invisible Man" (1963). It had its genesis, says Silverberg, in an idea gleaned from Borges's "The Babylon Lottery/' the notion of social invisibility used as a punishment ("To See" 48). Many SF stories have similar one-idea beginnings, and armed only with this information about the story's main motif and source and extrapolating from existing conventions and practices in magazine SF, I would expect a tale of a young nait wrongly sentenced to invisibility by a tyrannical government who joins the underground and fights for the overthrow of the regime and the abolition of such inhumane punishments. But the story is;not an adolescent power fantasy; it is instead an exploration of the feelings of the invisible man and of the effects of

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Robert Silverberg's Many Trapdoors

invisibility on his feelings toward his fellows. We are invited, as the title has it, to see the invisible man, to share his sufferings and eventual regeneration. The narrator's first crime is coldness, and at the story's end he is to stand trial for the opposite crime of kindness to another invisible. The suggestion is that the punishment is not always just or appropriate, but this possible injustice is not the point, as it would be in my imagined melodrama; it is, rather, that this punishment, just or not, has worked a change in the narrator, made him capable of accepting invisibility as a means to and sign of grace. "I will wear my invisibility," he says, "like a shield of glory" ("To See" 62). He transcends the state's notions of law and justice and attains a new, compassionate humanity. The story likewise goes beyond the reigning traditions of formula SF; it is neither a simple idea or gimmick story nor a one-against-the-state exercise, but an attempt to build a new fiction from the bones of the old. To Open the Sky (1967) is a similar transformation of conventional materials, on a larger scale and with a different emotional sign. The book's heart lies less in motif, plot, setting (the centers of most adventure SF), or even character (where the attention of many serious-minded SF critics is focused) than in the ironies generated by the conflicts between the needs and desires of the characters and the historical forces that appear to contain and direct all the action. As in a van Vogtian intrigue tale, we gradually learn that the growth of the Brotherhood of the Immanent Radiance, the schism that produces the rival Harmonists, and the ultimate reunion of the two churches are not simply examples of history repeating itself but the results of the manipulations of Noel Vorst as he pursues his goals of immortality and starflight. In this context the spiritual needs and aspirations of Reynolds Kirby and Nicholas Hartell are undercut: they do not know, at first, that they are part of Vorst's plans; even David Lazarus is not an autonomous prophet but a custom-tailored martyr never out of Vorst's control. In ironic contrast, the self-serving ambition of Christopher Mondschein turns out to be more in tune with the nature and purpose of the twin religions than the genuine faith of the Kirbys and Martells of the world. Thus far the book is not unlike the skeptical mainstream of SF, where religion has typically been portrayed as a means of gaining political or material ends, frequently by exploiting the superstition and naivete of an ignorant populace (Robert A. Heinlein's "If This Goes On ... ") or as an expression of the repressive, psychotic, or irrational side of human nature (Philip Jose Farmer's The Lovers). After the story of Kirby's genuine conversion, we see Mondschein's betrayal of the Vorsters and Martell's unwilling desertion to the Harmonists, the political jockeying surrounding the discovery and resurrection of Lazarus, and finally the revelation of the extent of Vorst's control of the whole century-long

An Overview

19

process. The sympathetic view of the Brotherhood's potential as a source of spiritual wholeness in "Blue Fire" (see the last scene) modulates to the painfully qualified conversion of Martell to Harmonism in "Where the Changed Ones Go"; elsewhere there is only the revelation of both religions as social mechanisms oriented toward the accumulation of power and knowledge. But the book does not allow us to rest in naive skepticism. As in the dialectical process in which antithetical Vorsters and Harmonists unite to produce a new church that balances intellect and emotion, the spiritual and naive-skeptical attitudes toward religion merge and leave the reader in a state of heightened, unresolved doubt. "Blue Fire" invites us to accept Vorsterism, particularly in its metaphoric use of the electromagnetic spectrum and modern physics, as a potential modern religion, a faith that will allow a rational, technologically sophisticated man to find unity, value, and peace in a fragmented and spiritually empty world. Subsequent stories suggest that Vorsterism is just another in the long line of religions to sell its spiritual message for worldly power, even though that power is used for the physical good of humanity. The revealing of Vorst as more a spider-king than a prophet reinforces this idea; the whole movement is corrupt and worldly at its very roots, aimed at getting men to the stars rather than bringing them peace of soul. But what provides Vorst's own motivation? While he is not a traditional religious prophet, he is still no ordinary dreamer; what shapes his actions is a precognitive certainty of his own success, a vision of a future in which he has already succeeded. Following his initial episode with precognitive visions, Vorst, his own gift gone, refreshes his foresight by hitching rides with other precogs--and the result is always the same; the future is fixed, only waiting for Vorst to do what he has, down the line, already done. How are we to take this? The god of the electromagnetic spectrum may only be Vorst's invention, the artistic metaphor necessary for any religion to work, but what forces gave him the vision of his own future? What moved the man who moved his species to the stars? A god of electrons creating harmony and unity in the physical universe is something we can appreciate; what sort of utterly transcendent force is it that holds all time as a fixed instant, and can reveal the shape of the future to one temporal creature? In this book's universe there is a place for religious faith, for experience of the transcendent, but its proper object is not the esthetic god of the electron, but an inscrutable, impersonal force that can only be known in its effects. In this scheme of things there is little comfort, and no alleviation of the burdens of loneliness and alienation. At the book's close, Kirby (unaware of the source of Vorst's success) faces a future without the reassuring presence of the prophet; he must run the world, and he has left no vision of his own. For the

20

Robert Silverberg's Many Trapdoors

reader the sense of isolation is greater, since he is doubly disillusioned, stripped of naive faith and naive skepticism both, facing the void with no certainties at all. To Open the Sky has no resting place for us, no simple affirmations, no easy cure tor isolation and anxiety. In a group of novels published between 1968 and 1971, however, Silverberg does portray some ways of finding relief from angst.

III What holds together The Man in the Maze (1969), Nightwings (1969), Downward to the Earth (1970), A Time of Changes (1971), and Son of Man (1971) is not so much the fact that they appeared in the same four-year period (from the April 1968 magazine version of The Man in the Maze to the 1971 book publication of Son of Man) as their similar uses of the theme of spiritual renewal. In these novels, anxiety appears as a spiritual malaise, a sense of guilt, of internal, inborn fault (call it original sin, perhaps) and isolation-our imprisonment within our separate selves, limited in our communication with each other and our communion with the world outside us. In response to these conditions of existence, Silverberg explores the ancient means of finding peace and community: ritual, pilgrimage and quest and trial, and rebirth. In each of these books the problem of individual renewal is linked with general salvation, and the protagonist not only saves himself but opens the way for others, becoming, in some sense, a messiah. The three novels I examine hereThe Man in the Maze, Downward to the Earth, and Son of Man-show Silverberg's handling of the theme itself and some changes he works on science fictional materials as he pursues it. The Man in the Maze incorporates a motif found in some earlier work. Like Minner Burris in Thorns and Cassiday in "Flies," Richard Muller has been altered by inscrutable, powerful aliens, and the results are a source of pain: he broadcasts the contents of his undermind, unable to stop or control the output. No one, not even the woman who loves him, can stand his presence for long, and his response is to renounce humanity and retreat to the center of the maze on the dead world of Lemnos. A major portion of the novel's plot is the attempt to break this isolation and bring Muller back into human society so that he can once again be used in the service of humanity-that is, to make contact with aliens who are the potential enslavers of our entire species. By the end of the book he does leave the maze and successfully completes this mission, but this save-the-world melodrama is not the heart of the novel. The essential action, the true heart of the book, is to be found in its two central symbols-the maze and Muller's affliction-and in the philosophical debate that surrounds them. The maze, a vast machine environment governed by a murderously

An Overview

21

paranoid mechanical mind, is, among other things, a metaphor for the universe. For the party attempting to reach Muller, gaining knowledge of the maze, finding a way to its center, means spending lives and treasure, and living in it is a constant battle for survival. Muller sees it as the highest expression of the culture of its builders: kill the stranger. This, he insists, is the universal impulse, ingrained in all sentients. Charles Boardman's description of the universe at large provides a parallel to the metaphor of the maze-the world, he says, is an impersonal machine that puts stress on some of its components (Le., men) and thereby causes pain. Muller is less detached and cool in his view of things. His transformation, he says, is a punishment for hubris, for aspiring after "the condition of a deity" (MitM 119), administered by a universe that allows no such ambition. Muller's involuntary broadcasting of what at one point is called emotional sewage does two things. Directly, it cuts him off from others by making his proximity painful for them; indirectly, Muller's secondhand knowledge of the content of his broadcast and the reaction of others to it convinces him that humankind is despicable. In short, Muller comes to accept that "sewage" is the real essence of humanity and of himself, and therefore withdraws from society in bitterness and self-loathing. He tells Ned Rawlins, the young man who is the novel's spokesman for nobility, innocence, and sympathy, "I'm the skull beneath the face, boy. I'm the hidden intestines. I'm all the garbage we pretend isn't there." (MitM 124). He is, he says, a "plague carrier," and the plague he carries is the truth (MitM 120). Although the broadcast pains him as much as anyone, Rawlins sees it not as the final truth about Muller but only as a manifestation of the basic "noise" and pain of the human soul's response to the stresses put on it by the universe. What he feels coming from Muller is "every discord in the universe," "a silent shriek of anger," "the tears of things" (MitM 114). In a novel that is otherwise reluctant to make affirmations or settle debates, I think this particular case allows us to see that Rawlins's perception of things is clearer than Muller's, that there is more to the human spirit than the sludge of the unconscious mind. The other questions run through the novel, and answers to these are not clear-cut. The first is whether Muller can step out of the isolation he has come to accept as not only a practical necessity but a good thing. At one point, for example, he says that the general psychic isolation of each man within himself is desirable, since mind-to-mind communication would reveal us to each other as we really are (MitM 120). But Muller does leave the maze; responding to Rawlins's foolish but noble gesture of giving him freedom to choose his own course of action, he accepts the mission t'O the radio aliens and does agree to serve his species once more. But he keeps his distance from the others, and when he has

22

Robert Silverberg's Many Trapdoors

successfully completed the mission, he retires to the maze, choosing not to reintegrate himself into human society. Part of the problem-the broadcast-is solved when the radio alien, in the course of communicating with Muller, drains his soul and fails to put everything back. The climax of that experience takes the form of one of Silverberg's favorite rhetorical devices-a catalogue. It is a partial inventory of the contents of Muller's personality, a portrait of the variety of human experience, and, incidentally, a corroboration of Ned Rawlins's feelings about Muller and mankind in general. It reads, in part: He surrendered himself gladly, in glittering droplets. He gave up first love and first disappointment, April rain, fever and ache. Pride and hope, warmth and cold, sweet and sol4'.... He gave it all, and much more, and he waited for an answer. None came to him. And when he was wholly empty he lay face downward, drained, hollow, staring blindly into the abyss. (MitM 186) '\

Muller has saved the race (we presume) but lost at least a part of himself, and, in the process, passed outside humanity. He has not, however, lost his cynical, hostile attitude toward his brothers. ''I'm fit to consort with humanity again," he says, " ... but is humanity fit to consort with me?" (MitM 187) Rawlins, ever hopeful, senses despite this that Muller is beyond hate, at peace of some unknowable sort in his renewed exile. There is no final answer here, no easy affirmation of heroic action or love or the saving power of self-sacrifice. The book's second question concerns the nature of the universe and the place of thinking beings in it, and there is no answer here, either. The puzzle of the universe is not penetrated; it remains an uncertain and unfriendly place for mankind, a maze of potential violence and death, a maker of fates. Even though the book's structure contains the basic elements of the quest, the sacrificial act, and the release from bondage, its ending does not bring a sense of satisfaction. Muller's particular pain is eased, but his solution cannot work for anyone else, and the world is as it is, so that in the last chapter Rawlins can wonder "what maze [is] waiting for him at the end of his own path" (MitM 191). It remains for Downward to the Earth and Son of Mall to elaborate on the possibility of spiritual rebirth. Downward to the Earth is full of mythic overtones: the Fall reenacted at the Serpent Station, where Gundersen loses his innocence during his first stay on Belzagor; Kurtz's identification with not only Kurtz of Heart of Darkness 5 but Lucifer, Mephistopheles, Faust, a "flawed Prometheus," a fallen angel, and a parody-Christ; and Gundersen's final identification with the true Messiah. The heart of the story, though, is a penitential journey undertaken to relieve one man's sense of sin and make him

An Overview

23

more than human-the same structural and thematic machinery that underlies this book's two closest relatives, Nightwings and A Time of Changes. And as in The Man in the Maze, there is a concern with the nature of the universe, with the faults and limitations of human nature, and with the possibility of shedding those burdens. The biology of Belzagor shows the sometimes creative, sometimes destructive, but always transforming energy of the cosmos at work. The main manifestation of this energy is the alteration of the planet's intelligent life from primatelike nildor to elephantoid sulidor form, but it can also be seen at work in the inhabitants of a high-temperature pool that the guide Van Beneker shows to tourists: the creatures are in a constant state of mutation, bodily forms changing from one generation to the next thanks to the high energy level of their pocket environment. On a higher level, the planet itself seems to live; it has the power to capture outsiders. Everyone seems to be aware of this power-Kurtz warns Gundersen that "the planet will eventually absorb [him] and make [him] a part of it" unless he takes care to "draw a boundary line about [himself]" (DttE 30), and Seena points out that "here on Belzagor we live in the presence of certain moral absolutes, native to this planet, and if a stranger comes to Belzagor and transgresses against those absolutes, he'll regret it" (DttE 110). Gundersen's soul is caught, then, not by his own guilt alone, but by Belzagor itself, as the nildor Vol'himyor tells him (DttE 42), and this is the force behind his pilgrimage. For other Earthmen the captivity is not so beneficial; Dykstra and Pauline are consumed by a parasite; Salamone breaks out with a crystalline disease similar to one in Nightwings; Van Beneker, Seena, and Cullen retreat into various kinds of self-imposed exile or imprisonment. (The last two of these are symbolically interesting-Seena in her false Eden at ShangriLa Falls and Cullen trapped in the mist country with cancer, the crab, consuming him as the parasite or crystals consumed others.) But the most significant quality of this world is its ability to make spiritual and moral qualities physically manifest. Kurtz's failed rebirth turns him into a monster, his body a mirror for his soul. He is paying not only for a specific sin, the tempting of nildoror to blasphemy at the Serpent Station, but for his general satanic pride. Gundersen, on the other hand, manages to change his old Earth-imperialist arrogance into humility and has a successful rebirth. The sulidor Na-Sinisul tells Gundersen, "For your kind there can be no true transformation, because you have no complementary species. You change, but you become only what you have the potential to become. You liberate such forces as already exist within you. While he slept, Kurtz chose his new form himself" (DttE 165). J Thus Gundersen's rebirth is the releasing of his own potential, the incarnation of his true self. Like the nildoror, he has cleansed his spirit

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Robert Silverberg's Many Trapdoors

elsewhere, on his pilgrimage to the mountain of rebirth, and this is only the outcome of that penance and change of heart. During the process of rebirth, not only is Gundersen's body dissolved and reformed, but his mind is finally set free to see with direct eyes the spiritual realities of the universe. He is linked "to all who possess g'rakh [intelligent spirituality; akin to C. S. Lewis's hnau] in the universe" (DttE 168). He touches the souls of human friends, of natives of Balzagor, and even of Kurtz in his Mephistophelean hell of self-isolation. The key phrase is: "He partakes of the biological wisdom of the cosmos" (DttE 168). This points to the unity of conscious life, the community with which the nildoror and sulidoror are graced, and, by contrast, to the "monstrous isolation" (DUE 170) of human existence. Gundersen's response to this vision is to take on a further task..:....-the freeing of all humanity from their skull-prisons, and with a burst of messianic language he descends the mountain, down to the world of action. Here, unlike The Man in the Maze and To Open the Sky, the universe is revealed to be morally intelligible, and the final truth about human nature is that evil can be quenched by community. Gundersen has found what Reynolds Kirby needs-an individual vision that can nevertheless be shared-and intends to do what Muller could not: offer the means of his salvation to other humans by returning to the world of men. Son of Man continues the investigation of the themes of pilgrimage and renewal by departing from the traditions of magazine SF. The other books discussed so far are squarely within that tradition in their dependence on conventional narrative structure and characterization, their use of standard-issue SF machinery (interstellar travel, aliens, first contact, empires, invasions, marvelous technology, and so on), and in their connection to us in historical time. Son of Mall, however, uses none of these. There is no plot in the Aristotelian sense, but only episodes. As for characterization, Clay's name indicates that he is a representative rather than representational figure, and the rest of the book's cast is similarly made up of types and archetypes. There is only minimal rationalization of the basic situation (the time flux is mentioned but not developed) and almost no technology. The story floats in some unthinkably distant future, unconnected to our history or to any history that could mean anything to us. (Even Nightwings, 40,000 years distant from us, is explicitly connected to our history by a temporal-orientation-historical-exposition passage, and the other 'novels take place in recognizable possible futures closer to us.) The closest literary relatives to Son of Man, then, are not those works that are part of the SF tradition that is described by Alexei and Cory Panshin as the "old paradigm," but books such as Stapledon's Last and First Men and Star Maker, David Lindsay's A Voyage to Arcturus, and even Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress. Son of Man gives us a representative human being, an Everyman, who

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25

undergoes a series of educational and purifying experiences that show him the variety and rich potential of humanity in its evolved forms, give him a place in this flow of life, and finally relieve him of his burdens of guilt, sorrow, pain, and isolation. I have said that the book lacks an Aristotelian plot; what holds it together is a number of repeated features: a series of encounters with other forms of man, the Five Rites of the Skimmers, and journeys through the "zones of discomfort" and other semi magical localities. Clay does not so much learn about his new environment as come to know it from the inside-the most obvious examples are his transformations into Breather and Awaiter. In each case, a new mode of existence allows him to know the world as another knows it. There are other transformations as well-the acquisition of new senses, a sex change, dissolution in a magic river-and participation in the Five Rites, during which he attains new and powerful communions with the nonconscious universe. Part of the function of all this must be similar to that of the transformations in Downward to the Earth, that is, to show the protean creative power of nature and to allow some sharing of its inwardness. And as in that earlier book, these experiences prepare Clay for a redemptive act in which he transcends his own limitations and is reborn. Clay's adventures are bracketed by his awakening in the future and, following his messianic sacrifice at the Well of First Things, a final sleep. Those bracketed adventures constitute an education in some of the things it means to be human. Clay meets eight entirely different species of man, each descended from Homo sapiens, each genetically human but physically alien. Each species represents only a part of the full potential of humanity, as simplified and intensified as humorous characters in a Renaissance comedy. The Awaiters and Breathers are static and physically isolated, intent on their pursuits of solitary contemplation and merging love respectively, and Clay participates fully, if temporarily, in their lives. The Eaters, Destroyers, and goat-men are not so sympathetic, being concentrations of various of our demonic and bestial capacities; Clay's encounters with these are dangerous and unpleasant. Eaters and Destroyers are obsessive and destructive. Eaters are solitary, independent, and power-worshipping, their physical forms a "comic exaggeration of all that is most brutal in nature" (SoM 121); Destroyers, on the other hand, are organization creatures, servants of the mysterious being or force called Wrong; they are sleek, functional, lithe essence of animal power, understated, menacing" (SoM 139). Their activities are highly coordinated enterprises aimed at an increase of entropy-the expansion of those areas called Ice and Fire. Closest to Clay's humanity and our own are the Skimmers; not only are they the most lil5e him in form, but they seem to represent aspects of human nature important to modem men. They have control over themselves and their environment that can only be called magical (as

26

Robert Silverberg's Many Trapdoors

when Hanmer takes Clay's hunger). They are the fulfillment of our own century's dream of power coupled with peace. Their lives are taken up with the round of the Five Rites, in which they harmonize and regularize the physical universe: the Opening of the Earth, the Lifting of the Sea, the Tuning of the Darkness, the Filling of the Valleys, and the Shaping of the Sky are sacramental experiences that show power over nature without alienation from it. There are lessons to be learned from the earth itself as well. The seven "districts of discomfort" were established, Clay is told, "for the instruction of mankind" during a "very serious" era of the old times (SoM 73), and his passage through Old, and later Ice, Fire, Heavy, Slow, Empty, and Dark constitutes a trial and an education. As the discomforts become more severe, Clay is pushed to the limits of his physical and psychological strength. Finally, in Dark, bereft of even the gray light that Empty had offered, he hits bottom, admits he has had enough, and finds himself back in the ordinary dark of night. He was, Hanmer tells him, learning and growing. Finally Clay encounters manifestations of that which stands behind all the variousness he has seen and experienced-the force that moves nature itself, and men as well, the energy that shapes the fabric of reality, and of which all that Clay meets is an expression. The two symbols of this force are the outbreak of Chaos and the Well of First Things. These two are, Hanmer says, brothers (SoM 174), sources of creative energy. Chaos is an undisciplined flux, its output an "outrageous fecundity" of monsters and beauties (SoM 177), while the Well is an equally prodigal but more orderly-and phallic-"column of light" (SaM 206): "It is a scepter of power, it is a focus of change and creation; it is an axis on which the entire planet could spin" (SaM 207). From this springs all life, all the forms of man that Clay has seen, and many more; it is the reconciliation of the apparent contradictions and absurdities in human form Clay has met, and his surrender to the Well signals his acceptance of all humanity as it is, in its infinite variety, and also his acceptance of his own limitations. Throughout his experiences, Clay has been troubled by many thingsthe loss of his familiar world, the confusion of human forms and ontological styles, his own transformations. What he is not aware of is his effect on the Skimmers-that he troubles them to the point where they go to seek the true, the big death (as opposed to the little, temporary death they can experience voluntarily). With the help of Wrong he becomes aware that he bears a "great cold wad of cruelty and ugliness inside" himself, that he is "capable of being crude, vindictive, unfaithful, irascible, jealous, greedy, irrationally hostile, and coarse" (SaM 191). From the Interceders he finds the answer: "He is to yield; he is to accept everything. There is no other way" (SaM 202). The way out of the trap

An Overview

27

of the imperfect self is also the way out of the confusion over the variety of humanity-yield and accept. At the Well of First Things, Clay lets go his own anxieties and pains and takes on the burdens of the Skimmers and all men; he unties that cold, internal knot of original sin and accepts all the species of man for what they are, from the Neanderthals to the Eaters and Destroyers. As the Eater told him earlier, "We are part of the texture of things" (SoM 122). So are all the others, and so is Clay himself. It is acceptance of this, and of the place of all in the "golden arch of mankind" (SoM 212), that gives him release and lets him sleep. Clay's sleep resembles, oddly enough, Muller's retreat to the Maze after his sacrifice. Like Muller, Clay has passed outside of humanity; he has helped the progress of that process which is our species, but he is no longer part of the struggle, and needs only rest. Muller also needs rest, but the sense of completion we find in Son of Man is absent from The Man in the Maze-Muller has been emptied, not fulfilled; he has not gone downward to the earth, but neither has he ascended; he merely rests off to one side, an ambiguous savior. Son of Man, like Downward to the Earth, Nightwings, and A Time of Changes, is unambiguously messianic; salvation is possible, even inevitable, in a universe where moral qualities take on physical shapes and where mind can speak to mind directly. The question of l1lan's place among the infinities is not left hanging, as it is in The Man in the Maze and To Open the Sky, and the Biblical passages that bracket Son of Man make it clear that creation is for man and the sons of man, even though the way to gain that inheritance is to yield, accept, sacrifice the old self, and be reborn. If this were a linear, theme-tracing essay, this would be a good place to stop-with the end of a line of "development," the opening of new formal possibilities, and a resolution of thematic tensions. Silverberg'S work, however, does not cooperate with such a scheme, and there are other examinations of anxiety and further formal and stylistic transformations to come. IV It is deceptive to separate and sequence these works this way; while there are clear thematic movements discernible in Silverberg's work, they do not fall into distinct periods, but interweave. For example, during the rebirth period there appeared also presentations of unrelieved anxiety and even nightmare ("Passengers," "Sundance"), ironic and satiric versions of the salvation theme (Tower of Glass, Masks of Time, To Live Again), and a dystopia (The World Inside). Nevertheless, 1973 and 1974 saw the publica~ion of a number of short works that confront anxiety in its primal forms 'and also push Silverberg's technique farther away from traditional SF and toward modernist fiction. "Schwartz Between

28

Robert Silverberg's Many Trapdoors

the Galaxies" (1974), "Breckenridge and the Continuum" (1973), and "The Science Fiction Hall of Fame" (1973) avoid linear plot and resolution, and even in the one with the closest approach of the three to a conventional fulfillment of expectations ("Breckenridge"), there are elements designed to distance the reader from the narrative in a way that no traditional genre writer would employ. In "The Science Fiction Hall of Fame," a speaker questions his affection for and attraction to SF as he simultaneously reflects on his fears and uncertainties: What's the purpose of life, anyway? Who put us here, and why? Is the whole cosmos merely a gigantic accident? Or was there a conscious and determined Prime Cause? What about free will? ... Big resonant questions. The kind an adolescent asks when he first begins to wrestle with the stuff of the universe. What am I doing brooding over such stuff at my age? Who am I fooling? ("Science Fiction" 26)

These reflections are intercut with scenes from imaginary SF stories featuring space opera, telepathy, future history, alien monsters, and fancy hardware and with the narrator's recurring nightmare, in which he wanders an apparently endless maze of tunnels, passing but not communicating with alien beings. The story has no resolution. The speaker finds his actual life unsatisfying: performing "one of those impossible impersonal mechanical screws" ("Science Fiction" 26) while watching the live broadcast of the first moon landing, he feels nothing for either experience. LSD leaves him with a need to stay awake after coming down to "read Marcus's Starflame novels, both of them, before dawn" ("Science Fiction" 33). His hypotheses concerning SF's hold on him go unproved (a desire for immortality? nostalgia for his youth?); only the dream recurs. The most likely answer is itself a puzzle: SF's "multiplicity of futures," represented by the imaginary-story extracts, is also the tunnel maze of his nightmare. Perhaps what I really fear is not so much a dizzying multiplicity of futures but rather an absence of futures .... Nothingness, emptiness, the void that awaits us all, the tunnel that leads not to everywhere but to nowhere-is that the only destination? If it is, is there any reason to feel fear? Why should I fear it? Nothingness is peace. ("Science Fiction" 34-35)

What he desires is a different sort of nothingness, "the center of the universe, where all vortices meet, where everything is tranquil, the zone of stormlessness .... This is the edge of the union with the All" (JlScience Fiction" 28). In the story's last paragraph, in what may not be a dream (but how are we to know in such a narrative?), the green light carries

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29

him to the tunnel, and he is "launched on [his] journey" to an unknowable destination ("Science Fiction" 37). "Schwartz between the Galaxies" is less problematic in structure and in the form that anxiety takes. Schwartz is an anthropologist in a future where all cultures have blended to produce a single, homogenized planetary culture, and he is plagued by "too much of a sameness wherever I go" ("Schwartz" 81). His professional response has been to call for a return to diversity, a "rebirth of tribalism," and "ethnic revival" ("Schwartz" 96); his personal response is to imagine himself not in rocketliners and skyports, but aboard a starship filled with a diversity of life forms that reflect the variety and wonder of the universe. His dreamlike imaginings of the starship alternate with his experiences on a world lecture tour, and the dreams become stronger, until he gives himself to them entirely. The triumph of dream life over reality is not a new theme, nor does the story offer any structural surprises or puzzles. It is the texture of the thing and the irony of Schwartz's situation that give it strength. This future, though apparently safe and prosperous, lacks the richness of detail that Schwartz needs; it is "a nugget of dead porcelain" ("Schwartz" 79), smooth and featureless. Contrasted with this is the vision of penitude contained by the starship---strange bodily forms, alien religions and philosophies, nearly unintelligible categories (the Antarean whose gender is best defined as "not male"). This is, literally, an anthropologist's dream, an opportunity to understand humanity by understanding the nonhuman; it also shows the connection between Schwartz's professional and personal anxieties: not only has he found his discipline without an object and himself "an evaluator of dry bones, not a gatherer of evidence" ("Schwartz" 97), but the merging of all human cultures and races has robbed him of identity. In a world without distinct folkways and traditions, what can identify rest on other than the isolated individual? Schwartz holds to his Jewishness, but in trying to explain to his dream Antarean what that consists of, he eliminates theology, folkways, and character traits as applying to him. It is, then, that his parents were Jews, suggests the Antarean. No, Schwartz says, only his father, "and he was Jewish only on his father's side, but even my grandfather never observed the customs" ("Schwartz" 99). What this means is that Schwartz is not a Jew, at least according to the tradition of matrilineal descent. Not only is his occupation gone, but his ethnic and cultural identity as well. Schwartz is not just a disappointed academic, but a Wandering UnJew, a man whose sense of self and place are threatened by a world that can offer him .everything but a unique identity in a manageably small community that is itself a unit in a larger whole. The worldwide fame provided by the success of his book and his lecture tour (eighty

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Robert Silverberg's Many Trapdoors

million have heard him speak in one month) are not adequate substitutes, nor is the attempt to "find the primitive in [himself)" ("Schwartz" 92) the same as being a primitive. The need represented by the dream of the starship is one for Stapledonian community, "everyone joining hands and tentacles and tendrils and whatever, forming a great ring of light across space, creating union out of diversity while preserving diversity within union, everyone locked in a cosmic harmony, everyone dancing. Dancing. Dancing" ("Schwartz" 104). His surrender to the dream is not so much a defeat (though as the world defines sanity, it must seem like catatonic withdrawal) as it is a sign of the depth of his need for identity in and with a community as a basis for living in and making sense of the tlniverse. "Breckenridge and the Continuum" is similar to "Schwartz" in structure (alternating scenes of mundane and visionary experience) and theme (the dissatisfied man finds himself in an exotic new environment that offers satisfactions unavailable in the mundane world), and seems to behave in a more conventionally science-fictional manner. Breckenridge's complaint is more like that of the narrator of "The Science Fiction Hall of Fame" than that of Schwartz-"life," he says, "is empty, dumb, and mechanical"; he is "oppressed by a sophomoric Sense of the meaninglessness of life" ("Breckenridge" 61). At a dinner party, while a "famous anthropologist" speaks of the importance of myth as "an everlasting pattern which can be detected in the present," and a woman at the table begins to recite Henry Vaughan's "The World" ("I saw eternity the other night"), Breckenridge feels ill and heads for the washroom. He instead finds himself facing first a prehistoric jungle and then a desert, and a voice tells him, "You have come to the place where all times are one, where all errors can be unmade, where past and future are fluid and subject to redefinition" ("Breckenridge" 69-70). This is not Vaughan's place outside Time, but the future, and Breckenridge and four companions journey through the desert to examine a long-dead city; this future milieu, and not the "real" present, contains the story's main line, the process by which Breckenridge becomes mythmaker and reviver of the sleeping inhabitants of the city. The myths begin as jumbled versions of our myths and fairy tales ("Oedipus, King of Thieves") told to amuse his companions, but as the city comes to life, these fractured tales begin to form a coherent cycle, a "master myth" ("Breckenridge" 80). In a dream, Breckenridge learns how to bring the city fully to life; the sleepers awake; rain falls and the desert grows green. Breckenridge achieves his apotheosis; linking himself with Christ, Orpheus, and Homer, he can affirm that "there's meaning everywhere .... Dawn after dawn, simply being alive, being part of it all, part of the cosmic dance of life" ("Breckenridge" 83). Finally, surrounded by his audience/

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congregation, "he experiences a delicious flash of white light. The world disappears" ("Breckenridge" 83). This affirmation-and-apotheosis climax is familiar from the tales of rebirth and renewal, but here it is distanced by a device that emphasizes the fictiveness of the narrative: two sections labelled, respectively, "Some possible structural hypotheses" and "Hypotheses of structural resolution" ("Breckenridge" 78, 80). The material in these sections offers a way of reading the story that accounts for the main elements (Breckenridge, the four seekers, the city) and the themes they can be used to illustrate (Life as a meaningless condition, Life rendered meaningful through art, The impact of entropy, Aspects of consciousness- ("Breckenridge" 78-79). The "structural resolution" section suggests that renewal is the point of the story, and in fact the next three sections go on to show Breckenridge's affirmation and apotheosis. The story's final section, however, seems to qualify what has gone before. First, it confuses the sense of neat alteration between the mundane and visionary parts of the story by showing Breckenridge on his way to JFK Airport (after his disappearance from the desert city?). He makes his way to the Sahara after sending a cable that says he is "VERY HAPPY STOP YES STOP VERY HAPPY STOP VERY HAPPY STOP" ("Breckenridge" 84) and is never heard from again. That night there are signs and portents, including an aurora over New York and rain in the Sahara-two phenomena associated with the desert city and its rebirth. What are we to make of this? Did any of the future part of the story really take place (i.e., is it SF?), or was it, like Schwartz's starship, a wish-fulfillment dream? I suspect that, as in the case of "The Science Fiction Hall of Fame," the ambiguity is intentional, and that both stories abandon the representational mode common to SF (recall that for Robert Heinlein, SF is a branch of realistic fiction) in order to emphasize the literariness, the fictiveness of the form. The fact that both stories are thematically involved with the relationship between literature and anxiety-whether fiction is a symptom of or cure for anxiety-reinforces this possibility. In these stories Silverberg pushes not only theme but form as well away from the traditional center of SF toward the reflexiveness of modernist fiction.

v Silverberg's novels exhibit rather less disruption of structure and surface than do these shorter works, but there is, as I say above, a weakening of the focus on process that characterizes most American SF and a corresponding foregrounding of the spiritual or psychological situation throughout his work after 1961. His protagonists' problems resist rational and, frequently, irrational solutions alike. Outside of the triumphant

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Robert Silverberg's Many Trapdoors

messianism of Downward to the Earth and Nightwings, salvation is purchased at a great price (A Time of Changes, Man in the Maze), or portrayed as a mode of surrender (Thorns, "Going," "This Is the Road," "Trips"), or attainable in qualified form, if at all. 6 The Stochastic Man offers an interesting and difficult version of the qualified solution. Where novels such as The Masks of Time and To Open the Sky contain internally qualified or ironic resolutions, The Stochastic Man (repr. 1976) seems to bring its protagonist to a peaceful equilibrium at its close: Lew Nichols has weathered his doubts about seeing the future, has survived the loss of his wife and his ambitions for political influence, and has apparently found a way to accept the nonfreedom of a deterministic universe without becoming a zombie as his mentor, Carvajal, has. But this acceptance of determinism is troublesome for the audience this book is likely to have-we are taught to value even the illusion of freedom, sometimes more than life itself, and this book inverts the value structure by insisting that if we accept its vision, "we will see, we will understand, we will accept the inevitability of the inevitable, we will accept every turn of the script gladly and without regret. There will be no surprises; therefore there will be no pain. We will live in beauty, knowing that we are aspects of the one great Plan" (TSM 240). That Silverberg goes this far from Western solutions, I think, is a measure of the depth of the anxiety he seeks to portray. It is, in its way, more frightening than the nightmare of "The Science Fiction Hall of Fame." What drives Nichols to embrace the static certainties of Carvajal's vision is a dialectical progress from his worst fears that the universe is random (which he characterizes as "adolescent cynicism"-TSM 6), through a faith in cause and effect and stochasticity, to the complete security of his faith in a determined universe. It is this movement from fear of the "gigantic dice game, without purpose or pattern" (TSM 5) to the safety of a "fully structured, fully determined life" (TSM 138) that provides the action of the book, rather than an examination of how seeing works or why the paradoxes inherent in such a process do not apply. (In fact, Nichols admits that there are paradoxes, but he "prefer[s] not to examine them too closely"-TSM 157.) Metaphysical questions, epistemological problems-all the usual concerns of philosophical inquiry-are as irrelevant as the science fictional curiosity about process. What matters here is not how or even why; the script is beyond intellectual understanding. Only human accommodation to the script matters. Nichols's story is one of the triumph of faith over stubborn intellect and will, of the realization that freedom (dangerous in a causal universe, meaningless in a random one) is illusory and only the fixed script is real. There are other attitudes, other ways of seeing the world, presented as foils. The Transit creed that captures the belief of Nichols's wife

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Sundara is a combination of a stern ego renunciation and existentialist radical freedom: in a chaotic, impermanent universe, the way to shed the self and the pains of existence is to yield to the flow of change, "because nothing is unbendingly foreordained, everything is within our individual control. We are the existential shapers of our destinies, and we are free to grasp the Truth and act on it. What is the Truth? That we must discard our rigidly conceived self-images" (TSM 76). Nichols, of course, is "not comfortable with chaos" (TSM 77), and resists the Transit invitation to get off the wheel their way. The politician Paul Quinn, on the other hand, is a traditional Western man, determined to impose his will on the world, to create himself by his own efforts. He is, predictably, frightened by Nichols's gift and by the fixed future it implies. Although he does not feel threatened by Transit, his ambition (an ego attachment) makes him quite unlike its adherents. He has no desire at all to get off the wheel, although he would probably accept the Transit notion of the power of the will to make the self, to control personal destiny. If Sundara is Will attempting to shed Ego in a chaotically fluid universe, Quinn is Ego imposing its Will on whatever universe is pliant enough to allow that to happen. Carvajal is nothing at all. He has given up will and ego and curiosity in his acceptance of the script. There is in him no place for the questions or assertions of any aspect of the self; the future is fixed, and he has seen it, and questions of why and whether, of meaning, simply do not apply. "The script," he says, "admits of nothing other than acceptance" (TSM 100). Nichols's reaction to this "deterministic existential passivity" is not simple. He is repelled by the passivity but attracted by the peace it promises: "How comforting it might be, I thought, to live in a world free of all uncertainty" (TSM 101). In the end, his own response to the gift of seeing is quite different from Carvajal's. What Nichols settles on is a messianic version of Carvajal's acceptance of the unchangeable script. Rather than allowing himself to be eaten up by the vision of his own death, he will attempt to share the gift with others, until we are all as gods, serene in our knowledge of things as they must be. I doubt that many readers are able to accept Nichols's solution to the problems of making sense of the world-I can't, for one, although I can understand the forces that drive him to seek it. This puts the whole book in a curious position; internally (and science fictionally) it works as a hypothetical solution to real problems. If the universe were deterministic, and if one could develop the ability to see the patterns, then Lew Nichols's story is no more unlikely than that of Edmund Gundersen in Downward to the Earth and the healing of spiritual ills no less acceptable. Bu~ for an audience strongly conditioned to believe in a free, probabilist universe, the ending is no more satisfying than that of "The Science Fiction Hall of Fame.,,7 Lew Nichols has found a resting

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Robert Silverberg's Many Trapdoors

place, a faith; Silverberg's readers may find themselves so distanced from the content of the solution that it seems no better than the fear of chaos that it is a response to. Silverberg has presented us with other, less alien resolutions, but none that seems final; his fiction does not add up to an answer but to a set of questions and a willingness to explore. What remains constant is the pain. To read his fiction is to face that pain over and over, sometimes finding a momentary stay, more often not. The publication of Shadrach in the Furnace, followed by Silverberg's "retirement" from writing, did not put a period to the search, only an ellipsis. The experience of reading Silverberg is like that of Tom Two Ribbons in "Sundance": "You are searching for realities. It is not an easy search. It is like falling through many trapdoors, looking for the one room whose floor is not hinged" ("Sundance" 245). VI

The foregoing, intended for an earlier version of this volume, was begun several years before Silverberg "retired" in 1975 and completed just after. I have chosen to add this afterword rather than completely overhaul it because I see nothing in the work that Silverberg has published since returning to writing to change either the thesis or the supporting arguments. It may, however, be interesting to look at the criticalbiographical cliches that can be instantly generated by the reemergence. During his retirement, Silverberg often said that he felt no urge to return to writing. And then Lord Valentine's Castle (1980) appeared, and later short stories for Omni and Asimov's and Mnjipoor Chrollicles (1982), and the retirement was over. So now we now have three Silverbergs to deal with: Silverberg I, the "old" high-production pulpster; Silverberg II, the "new," "serious" writer; and Silverberg III, the renewed and returned version. There are thus at least two oversimplifications to tempt critics: (1) that Silverberg returned from retirement with the intention of gaining the popular and commercial success that his "serious" work had not received and compromised his art to do so; and (2) that the renewed writer has managed to combine aspects of the previous incarnations to become a producer of fictions that are at once "serious" and "popular." Cases can be made for both propositions. At a panel at the 1988 World Science Fiction Convention, there was proposed the case of a writer who, disappointed at the reception of his ambitious, serious work, set about analyzing popular genre works with the intention of writing a SF "best-seller." It was pointed out that this description fit both Piers Anthony and Silverberg and that both have indeed succeeded in writing best-selling SF series. The question at hand was whether the calculatedly popular work was as good as the earlier,

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"serious" work, and whether such motivation was good for the literary life of the genre. Some reviewers, at least, detect in the returned Silverberg a change for the worse. Ian Watson's reviews of the first two Majipoor books (Foundation 21 [Feb. 1981]: 75-77; Foundation 26 [Oct. 1982]: 86-88) and Star of Gypsies (Foundation 39 [Spring 1987]: 92-93) find traces of coziness, laziness, repetition, and sprawl that an earlier Silverberg would not have permitted himself. More telling is Geoff Ryman on the 1986 collection The Conglomeroid Cocktail Party (Foundation 37 [Autumn 1986]: 67-69): I also think it would be fair to say that most of the stories in this collection are not about anything. Most of them do not confront personal, emotional, social, political, spiritual, or even technical matters. They touch on them for the purposes of storytelling. The exotic aliens, the other-world landscapes, the time-travel tourism, the edgy love stories, the religious imagery ... these are formal elements. They are not meant to be taken to heart. As practiced by Silverberg, SF is a minor art form, like some kinds of verse, to be admired for its surface polish and adherence to form. (Ryman 1986, 68)

Silverberg, Ryman says, "writes fiction as if fiction didn't matter" (Ryman 1986, 69). One could -construct from these responses a Silverberg III who has lost some of the desperate engagement that marked the later middle-period work; in fact, one could go farther and argue that his commercial instincts have regained the upper hand (recall the millionwords-a-year, high-production period between Silverbergs I and II). Certainly the sequels to Lord Valentine's Castle, the licensing of the Majipoor setting for game scenarios, and his participation in the shared-world enterprise of Rebels in Hell demonstrate a willingness to exploit current market opportunities. 8 This last project is especially interesting: "Gilgamesh in the Outback" places the hero of his own Gilgamesh the King (a novel in the historic mythic vein of Robert Graves) in a Farmeresque shared-world afterlife fantasy that also features as characters Robert E. Howard, H. P. Lovecraft, and Prester John, among others. This mixture of the latest in clubby, commercial genre collaborative ventures and the existence of a book that Silverberg must see as a serious work must confound those tempted to employ only basic versions of the new oversimplifications. The Majipoor books offer another demonstration of the trickiness of the new cliches. First, of course, the books form the most commercial of forms, a trilogy, with strong science-fantasy (and thus popular and commercial) elements (monarchical government, princely hero, technology-as-magic). "I:.rue, the set was not conceived as a trilogy,9 and the middle book, The Majipoor Chronic/es, breaks the safe trilogy formula by presenting a collection of short stories rather than a continuation of the

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Robert Silverberg's Many Trapdoors

adventures of volume one. But even if a trilogy were not planned from the start, it could indicate that Silverberg was responding to the marketplace success of Lord Valentine's Castle with more stories set against the same background and finally with a genuine sequel in Valentine Pontifex (1983). We seem to have the author in a corner here: if he planned a trilogy, he always intended a commercial enterprise; if, like Frank Herbert and Arthur C. Clarke, he produced sequels because of the success of the first book, he fell into one. But all this is not as important as the evidence of continuity in the content and attitudes of his postretirement work. Lord Valentine's Castle is, among other things, an homage to the exoticism of Jack Vance, a writer Silverberg has admired since his youth. Majipoor is an elaborated version of Vance's Big Planet or Tschai, settings with the geographical scope and variegated population to permit tales of marvels and picaresque adventure. There are precedents in Silverberg's work for such a background (Son of Man, Nightwings). And the themes of the Majipoor books, especially Valentine Pontifex, recall those of Silverberg II: the struggle with anxiety and despair (especially as symbolized by the Labyrinth-cf. the Maze), the drive for redemption and inner peace, the urge to balance the moral scales, the triumph of the messianic hero. Similar arguments can be made about the rest of the postretirement fiction. Silverberg may have consciously determined to pursue popular success in the Majipoor books, and his participation in shared-world, or "franchise fiction," projects and his willingness to write sequels show an awareness of commercial enterprise. But he has also returned to areas he had previously abandoned because they did not gain the kind of recognition he thought they deserved. The historical novels Lord of Darkness (1983) and Gilgamesh the King (1985) recall the historical and archaeological nonfiction of the 1960s in which Silverberg exercised his scholarly ambitions. (Research for The Realm of Prester John [1971} provided part of the inspiration for the former; see "Silverberg Sells Valentine Sequel," Locus 255 [April 1982}: 19.) More important, such middle-length fictions as Sailing to Byzantium (1985) and The Secret Sharer (1988) pursue the same themes and employ the same modes as the "serious" work of the immediate preretirement period; they have appeared in the most popular genre magazine, Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, and have gathered awards and award nominations. The very titles of these last two stories reinforce the continuity of Silverberg's new work with the old. The concerns of modern literature, of Yeats and Conrad, have always been part of Silverberg's sensibility, directly informing such works as "Born with the Dead" and Downward to the Earth. Now he again rewrites Conrad as an interstellar tale and returns to the consideration of artifice and immortality. If this were a critical-biographical essay (which, recall, it is not), I would call this the

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fulfillment of Silverberg's youthful fascinations and ambitions, the resurrection of his career. The longitudinal audience may indeed decide that the best work (whatever that may come to mean) was done between 1961 and 1975, but I cannot think that it will dismiss what he did later as irrelevant.

NOTES 1. Portions of this chapter have appeared, in slightly different form, in the introduction to To Open the Sky (Boston: Gregg Press, 1977) and "Falling through Many Trapdoors: Robert Silverberg" in Extrapolation 20 (Summer 1979). 2. The major autobiographical statement is "Sounding Brass, Tinkling Cymbal" in Hell's Cartographers, ed. Brian Aldiss and Harry Harrison (1975; London: Futura Publications, 1976). Other information has appeared in the form of his own introductions to Ace and Berkley paperback reissues of his books. Especially interesting for his development as a writer are his introduction and comments in the annotated anthology Robert Silverberg's Worlds of Wonder (New York: Warner, 1987) and his headnotes in the two volumes of The Best of Robert Silverberg, 2 vols. (vol. 1: New York; Pocket, 1976; vol. 2: Boston: Gregg Press, 1978). 3. I am not sure what Darko Suvin would say about this, though; see "On What Is and Is Not a SF Narration; With a List of 101 Victorian Books that Should Be Excluded from SF Bibliographies," Science-Fiction Studies 5 (March 1978): 45-57; repro as "The Limits of the Genre" in Victorian Science Fiction in the UK: The Discourse of Knowledge and Power (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1983). See also Stanislaw Lem's review of A Time of Changes, "Only a Fairy Tale," SF Commentary, 52: 8-9. 4. Silverberg, "Sounding Brass" (PO 40). I would argue that even the dystopian The World Inside deals with the failure of a planned and prosperous society to satisfy all human needs, though the slant taken is psychological/environmental rather than philosophical/existential. And the picaresque Up the Line contains a strain of sexual obsession that is a comic modulation of the pathological sexual obsessions of "In the Group" and "Born with the Dead." 5. For an extended discussion of Downward to the Earth and Heart of Darkness, see Rose Sallberg Kam, "Silverberg and Conrad: Explorers of Inner Darkness," Extrapolation 17 (December 1975): 18-28. 6. For this reason, readings of individual works that lean on established ideological/moral/philosophical/therapeutic systems are in danger of missing the stubbornness of the anxieties Silverberg portrays. For example, George Tuma's "Biblical Myth and Legend in Tower of Glass: Man's Search for Authenticity" in Extrapolation 15 (May 1974): 174-91, does a fine job of outlining the book's issues, but in its reliance on a Christian-existentialist point of view, it reads into the book an affirmation I find doubtful. 7. If there is any doubt as to the possibility of such externals interfering with acceptance of the book's resolution, see two reviews: Spider Robinson in "Galaxy Bookshelf," Galaxy (May 1976): 114-16, and Pauline Jones, "Son of Towering Inferno," Foundation 10 Oune 1976): 93-96. Both reviewers clearly have trouble

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accepting the book's determinist ideas, despite admiration for other aspects of it. 8. Janet Morris, ed., ReI,cls in Hell (I'-:ew York: Baen, 1986), pp. 73-137. This is the second anthology in a shared-world series devised by Janet Morris, the overall (trademarked!) designation of which is Herues in Hell. The sociology, esthetics, and economics of shared-world enterprises, crosses between private games and the corporately developed "projects" and "concepts" of television and film, merit on essay all to themselves. 9. See "Silverberg Sells Valentine Seque!." Locus 255 (April 1982): 1, 19; "Silverberg Sells Sequel to 'Lord Valentine's Castle,' " Science Fictioll Chronicle, April (1982): 1.

WORKS CITED Barrett, William. Irrational Man. New York: Anchor, 1962. Clareson, Thomas D. Introduction to The Best of Robert Siluaberg. Vol. 2, pp. viixxi. \ Panshin, Alexei, and Cory Panshin. SF in Dimension: A Book of Explorations. Chicago: Advent, 1976. Ryman, Rev. Geoff. 'The CongIomeroid Cocktail Party." Foundation (Autumn 1986): 67-69. Silverberg, Robert. The Best of Robert Silverberg. 2 vols. Vo!' 1: Pocket Books, 1976. Reprint. Boston: Gregg Press, 1978. Vol. 2: Boston, Gregg Press, 1978. - - - . "Breckenridge and the Continuum [1973)." In Capricorn Gallle~, pp. 5584. Cited as "Breckenridge." - - - . Capricorn Games. New York: Random House, 1976. Cited as CG. - - . Downward to the Earth. New York: Signet, 1971. Cited as DttE. - - - . The Man in the Maze. New York: Avon, 1969. Cited as MitM. - - - . "Schwartz between the Galaxies." In The Feast of st. Dionysus. New York: Scribner's, 1975, pp. 79-104. Cited as "Schwartz." - - - . "The Science Fiction Hall of Fame." In Capricorn Games, pp. 23-37. Cited as "Science Fiction." - - . Son of Man. New York: Ballantine, 1971. Cited as SoM. - - - . "Sounding Brass, Tinkling Cymba!." In Hell's Cartographers: Some Personal Histories of Science Fiction Writers, I'd. Brian W. Aldiss and Harry Harrison. New York: Harper and Row, 1975, pp. 7-45. - - - . The Stochastic Man. Reprint. Greenwich, CT: Fawcett Gold Medal, 1976. Cited as TSM. - - . "Sundance." In The Best uf Robert Silverberg, Vo!. I, pp. 229-245. Cited as "Sundance." - - . To Open the Sky. New York: Ballantine, 1967. Cited as TOtS. - - . "To See the Invisible Man." In Tire Best of Robert Silverberg, Vol. I, pp. 4962. Cited as "To See."

3 An Ironic Deflation of the Superman Myth: Literary Influence and Science Fiction Tradition in Dying Inside EDGAR L. CHAPMAN

I

Silverberg's transformation of his career from journeyman professionalism to high art reaches one of its finest flowerings in Dying Inside (1972). This impressive novel shows the author bringing science fiction close to the boundaries of serious mainstream fiction, while confronting directly the "real anguish of life" and describing the alienation and sense of existential despair that afflicts modern life.! Silverberg's setting is the familiar urban labyrinth of New York City at the beginning of the seventies, and Dying Inside is a portrait of a society in the throes of moral confusion as it undergoes an examination of its values. But Dying Inside is not merely a novel of social criticism any more than it is a return to the simplistic affirmations of the naive science fiction of the twenties and thirties, or the more sophisticated assertions of the myths of technological progress in the science fiction of the age of John W. Campbell. 2 Instead, the work uses science fiction conventions to examine modern experience from an ironic perspective, in the mode of Joyce and Kafka, and like some of the more ironic science fiction of the fifties and sixties. 3 It is helpful here to turn to the critical theory of Eric Rabkin. One of the proper uses o( the fantastic in literature, Rabkin contends, is to provide metaphors for experience not easily described by fiction using realistic conventions. Another and more specialized use of the fantastic

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for Rabkin is that it offers a mode of writing that may present an unusual ironic perspective or angle of vision toward human experience. 4 In many respects, Dying Inside is a well-sustained ironic novel, quite similar to the work of many contemporary "modernist" mainstream writers, especially the American Jewish novelists of midcentury. The mainstream literary influences on the novel are fairly obvious, but they bear witness to Silverberg's erudition and the breadth and depth of his understanding of contemporary "serious" literature. A glance at some of the novel's literary antecedents will be helpful. Clearly, one of these is the classic tradition of "modernist" writing as embodied in the fiction of Kafka and Joyce and the poetry of T. S. Eliot. Another influence is the American Jewish fiction of alienation and angst that flourished in the fifties and sixties in works like Bernard Malamud's The Assistant, Saul Bellow's Seize the Day and Herzog, and Philip Roth's Portnoy's Complaint. But such literary models are not the only influences on Dying Inside: except for Kafka, these predecessors tend to exist within the recognizable conventions of the realistic novel or the somewhat broader limits of modernist poetry. Yet Silverberg'S originality in Dying Inside appears precisely in his use of science fiction metaphors to depict the experience of modernist fiction and the American Jewish novel. Silverberg's adaptation of science fiction conventions to express the sensibility of a modernist "invisible man," however, also exercises an influence over science fiction tradition. For Silverberg borrows the metaphors of two overlapping themes of science fiction: the fictional tradition of telepaths and other characters with "wild talents," and the conventional motif of the wunderkind or talented child who grows up to become an embodiment of a superman archetype. These themes, although they sometimes interlock, have appeared in the genre since Edgar Rice Burroughs's Tarzan and are featured frequently in the science fiction of the thirties and forties in such writers as A. E. Van Vogt and Stanley Weinbaum. Silverberg, however, while indebted to these traditions, transforms and remakes them in Dying Inside. David Selig is a boy wonder with extraordinary intelligence as well as telepathic power, but he does not become a superman. Instead, he finds salvation in rejoining the human community when he loses his powers. Silverberg's novel is thus, among other things, a sophisticated critique of the somewhat naive and romantic science fiction visions of the "superman" that have preceded it. But the influences on the novel deserve a further examination. II

The question of literary influence is always somewhat problematical, since much of it depends on the writer's awareness of the past and of

Ironic Deflation of the Superman Myth

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his own zeitgeist; moreover, many influences on the writer are unconscious ones. Even a writer's statements about his work are not entirely trustworthy, for authors are human and often dislike acknowledging the power that other writers exercise over their imaginations. Similarly, for science fiction writers, especially American science fiction writers who began publishing in pulp magazines, the question of literary influence can be both fascinating and vexing. In the early pulp days of the twenties and thirties, American science fiction writers seemed to be following some rather obvious predecessors: H. G. Wells, Poe, Rudyard Kipling, Rider Haggard. But the writers of the Campbell era worked under a more complex set of influences. On the whole, however, such authors as Asimov and Heinlein-and most of their contemporaries in the forties-do not appear to have been very much affected by consciously "literary" models, the primary exceptions being Ray Bradbury and Theodore Sturgeon. But the writers emerging in the fifties, like Harlan Ellison, Frederik Pohl, Alfred Bester, Philip Jose Farmer, and Silverberg, represent a different case. For these men were more or less aware of the importance of the masterpieces of modernist literature, and their writing, especially their early fiction, reveals the power of such literary models. At any rate, Dying Inside provides clear evidence of Silverberg's knowledge of the giants of twentieth-century literature, through its numerous and rich use of allusions and its creative restatement of some of the classic themes of modernist masterpieces. This novel of existential anguish and alienation from modem society, with its myths of technological and social progress and its complementary spiritual impoverishment, recapitulates in a science fiction mode the themes of estrangement and personal despair that have dominated much of modem literature from Baudelaire and Kierkegaard to Eliot, James Joyce, and Franz Kafka, whose presences are frequently invoked in the novel. The novel's relationship to modernist literature is revealed in numerous ways. David Selig, Silverberg'S alienated telepath, is an antihero in the tradition of Eliot's J. Alfred Prufrock, a lonely and divided intellectual who is afflicted by too much awareness and a paralysis of will, especially in his inability to establish meaningful relationships with women (or anyone else, for that matter). Selig evokes Prufrock in one passage, and Selig's futile journeys through the nightmare of New York in the early seventies and through the labyrinth of his past are reminiscent of Eliot's portrait of the modem world as a wasteland in his celebrated poem. 5 Like James joyce's antihero, Stephen Daedalus, whom Selig also invokes, Selig is a frustrated writer who finds himself an exile in his natal city.6 But more impqrtant than Eliot or Joyce is the ubiquitous influence of the Austrian or Central European Jewish writer, Franz Kafka. The significance of Kafka is pervasive. This is not to say that the novel

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resembles Kafka's work in superficial ways. Rather, the influence is much deeper and involves Silverberg's creative transformation of a literary influence into science fiction terms by adroit novelistic strategy. In Kafka's novels and stories, for example, the celebrated novella "The Metamorphosis," nearly anonymous antiheroes, such as Joseph K. and Gregor Samsa struggle with enigmas and with the absurdities of the human condition, while enduring alienation from family, society, andin The Castle especially-whatever divine or transcendent source of meaning may exist. Each of these Kafka heroes is a twentieth-century everyman, like the heroes of Kurt Vonnegut's novels, and their experience as they wander through the labyrinth of guilt, estrangement from family, paranoia, and the anguish of existence may be taken as symbolic of the anonymous modem man in his existential despair and moral confusion. Indeed, the metaphor of modem life as a labyrinth is central in Kafka's work. Silverberg's narrator, David Selig, is in many ways a Kafkaesque figure: the only son of an immigrant Jewish family, he suffers from numerous guilts arising from his inability to have satisfactory relationships with his parents or his adopted sister, Judith. His alienation from the institutions of modem American society is also obvious: like a minor bureaucrat or salesman in Kafka, he ekes out a modest income as a ghostwriter of term papers for students at Columbia, his alma mater. When finally apprehended, he learns that his "crime," though viewed as a disgrace, is considered too trivial to warrant prosecution, as long as he agrees to discontinue his writing. Throughout the novel, Selig roves through the labyrinth of New York City's subways and ethnic subcultures somewhat like a ghost: a virtually invisible twentiethcentury man as insignificant in the scheme of things as Kafka's everymen are in the bureaucratic jungle of Austro-Hungarian society and its legal system. 7 The importance of Kafka's absurdist vision for Dying Illside is suggested in the novel itself, in the term paper on Kafka that David writes, a large portion of which is provided in the narrative. David's comments on the struggles of Joseph K. in Kafka's two most important novels could equally well be a description of his own predicament. This is not surprising, since David's writing frequently reflects his inner conflicts, whatever the ostensible subject. (Another illustration of this point is David's difficulty with the essay on the Greek tragedians' treatment of the Electra story, which hinges on a troubled brother-sister relationship not unlike David's own ambivalent and frustrated love-hate relationship with Judith.) At any rate, David's analysis of Kafka reveals not only extraordinary insight but an obvious sense of identification with the Kafka protagonist, Joseph K.:

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In the nightmare world of The Trial and The Castle, only one thing is certain: that the central figure, significantly known by the initial K, is doomed to frustration. All else is dreamlike and unsure; courtrooms spring up in tenements, mysterious warders devour one's breakfast, a man thought to be Sordini is actually Sortini. The central fact is certain, though: K will fail in his attempt to find grace. (DI 20)

If this term paper reveals David's awareness of the Kafka vision of the human predicament, it is also worth noting that the analysis of Joseph K. and his world also probably reflects Silverberg'S personal vision, at least during the first two decades of his career. As a matter of fact, Silverberg informed me in a personal interview that nearly all of the papers included in the novel to represent David's ghostwriting are actually term papers Silverberg wrote during his student days at Columbia. s To be sure, David's struggle is more firmly rooted in the contingencies of social and historical reality than the world of Kafka's fiction. This rootedness suggests another influence on Dying Inside: the contemporary American Jewish novel. But clearly the nightmarish New York of Dying Inside resembles one of Kafka's dream cities, and the solitary and painful existence of David, with its tendency to blend the subjectivity of the inner life with the bizarre character of an eccentric social existence, seems as enigmatic and paradoxical as that of any Kafka protagonist. The novel demonstrates one of Silverberg's great virtues as a writer, what Clareson calls "a background in comparative literature and a wide knowledge of literary criticism" (1979, 4), but obviously the influence of modernist writers like Joyce and Eliot and the highly significant model of Kafka's fiction are more important formative forces for Dying Inside than, say, Silverberg'S knowledge of Greek tragedy.9 However, there are two other significant influences on Dying Inside that deserve comment: the popular science fiction tradition of stories about telepaths who are latent geniuses, and the more recent mainstream influence of the American Jewish novel.

HI One of the most common themes in popular science fiction of the thirties and forties is the story dealing with the person with "wild talents," that is, such psi powers as the power to levitate objects or telepathy. Frequently, although not always, this theme blends with another, the development of a character who is, by virtue of his special gifts, a superman. The superman theme is an ancient one and enters modern literature with Nietzsche and George Bernard Shaw, but a variation that

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combines "wild talents" with extraordinary intellect probably enters popular science fiction in the pulp novels of E. E. Smith, and appears (without telepathy) in a somewhat ambitious-and more pretentiousform in Stanley Weinbaum's posthumous The New Adam (1939), where the heroic superman is a lonely, misunderstood, and alienated genius. Perhaps even more significant as a treatment of the superman archetype is Olaf Stapledon's Odd John (1935), an ambitious speculative novel in the British intellectual tradition of science fiction or "scientific romance." Stapledon's isolated genius, John, who grows up flouting conventional morality and evading retribution for his acts is a "supernormal," or mutant who possesses latent "wild talents": as he approaches adulthood, he can not only move objects but also communicate telepathically with mutated humans of his type. When Stapledon's first-person narrator, a journalist of modest talents, visits John's colony of superior humans in the South Seas, the narrator is astonished to find that much of their communal life is conducted through silent telepathic communication. However, unlike Silverberg'S David Selig, John's telepathic point of view is never revealed from the inside. Stapledon's extraordinary gifted hero is distinctive for another reason, as Brian Stableford has pointed out in Scientific Romance in Britain 18901950. This distinction may be described as John's compulsion to show his superiority to ordinary humanity by breaking every important law or taboo taken seriously by normal people. Though most superman characters tend to be somewhat contemptuous of ordinary mortals, Stapledon's hero translates his sense of belonging to a superior species into a Nietzchean defiance of human moral standards: early in the story John kills a policeman who was attempting to interfere with his freedom of action and shows only a perfunctory regret; later, it is hinted that John experiments with erotic feelings by violating the ancient taboo against incest and making love to his mother. 10 In this regard, Stapledon's Odd John presents a sharp contrast to a popular American treatment of the telepathic superman, A. E. Van Vogt's Sian (1940), an epic melodrama that embodies the essence of the pulp tradition, which Silverberg treats ironically in Dying Inside. In fact, though Jommy Cross, Van Vogt's hero, is a lonely and persecuted outsider whose inherited telepathic powers make him a member of a hated species, he acts according to high standards of human morality, which he apparently learns from his martyred mother and later from an older woman who adopts him as an orphan. Although a hostile government of ordinary humans has, through its agents, murdered his mother, Cross never surrenders to unreasoning hatred; instead he longs for acceptance from ordinary people while seeking contact with others of his despised species of telepaths, who have been forced by persecution to go underground. In achieving both goals, Cross becomes not only a superhero

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but a messianic figure, as his name suggests obliquely. Indeed, it is curious that a novel containing so much obvious romanticism and restatement of pulp conventions before the "golden age" of John W. Campbell's editorship of Astounding should have appeared in Astounding during the heyday of its classic era. l l In Sian, Van Vogt unfolded an epic romance of a brilliant boy with telepathic powers and scientific genius, persecuted because the telepathic mutants are feared and despised. Although Van Vogt's Jommy Cross endures years of exile, he discovers his genuis and eventually invades the corridors of power, only to learn that the dictator who rules the earth is himself a secret telepath and a benevolent despot. Though romantic and incredible, this novel clearly follows the well-defined heroic conventions of pulp science fiction, including Campbell's own early work. Yet here (and elsewhere in his work), Van Vogt revised the superman myth for a decade of science fiction readers, thus sustaining a tradition that Silverberg was able to treat ironically in Dying Inside. Moreover, Van Vogi's Sian describes the inner life of the telepath, his special way of perceiving the world through the feelings of others. Indeed, Sian may be the first science fiction novel to render the telepath's subjective experience in a credible way. Equally important for later writers, including Silverberg, is Van Vogt's success at portraying his telepathic superman, Jommy Cross, as a pariah whose special gifts caused him to be considered a freak; his alienation and suffering because of his special powers make him a curious and primitive example of a Christ-like deliverer. Although Cross eventually finds acceptance from the mysterious father figure of the novel, Kier Gray, Cross's experience as a lonely alienated genius anticipated by three decades Silverberg's creation of David Selig. Despite the happy ending, the theme of the loneliness of the gifted outsider remains the most memorable impression made by Van Vogt's Sian. Two other novels of telepaths prior to Silverberg deserve some attention also, for they make important contributions to the myth of the telepathic superman. These are More than Human (1953) by Theodore Sturgeon and The Demolished Man (1953) by Alfred Bester. In Sturgeon's novel, a group of young people with talents come together to make a unified entity or extended family that symbolizes a higher kind of human potential. For a time, the amoral telepath, Gerry, becomes the dominant force in the group, and he makes of it an identity that Sturgeon describes as a gestalt, showing that Sturgeon's vision has been influenced by the psychoanalytical school of that name. The group's conscience comes in the form of Hip Barrows, a man with ordinary powers but a highly developed moral sense. Thus Sturgeon's novel-a far more sophisticated performance than Van Vogt's-examines the moral relationship of the extraordinary human, especially the telepathic superman, to society, and

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embodies the theme that great gifts require a high degree of moral responsibility. Here Sturgeon adumbrates Silverberg's vision in Dying Illside, for Silverberg is concerned in part with the moral burdens that accompany the possessor of extraordinary talent. Yet another novel of the telepath as a superman is Alfred Bester's The Demolished Mall, where the master telepath, Lincoln Powell, serves society by playing the role of a brilliant policeman. A curious combination of detective story, social comedy, and psychological novel, The Demolished Man describes Powell's relentless pursuit of an amoral and ruthless business executive who goes outside the law in the effort to commit a perfect murder. Indeed, the murderer, Benson Reich, is a rather subtle satirical portrait of the capitalist entrepreneur as a fascist sociopath. The telepathic detective, Powell, is in turn a counterportrait of the superior man serving the social good rather than his own ends, and despite all the sophistication of Bester's novel, his vision of the telepath as superman is perhaps even more grandiose and seductive (because more convincing) than Van Vogi's. As for the telepath's ability to violate the privacy of others by probing their random thoughts (a circumstance that causes guilt in Silverberg's David), this talent provides Bester with some obvious social comedy, but the author tends to shy away from the deeper implications of what it might mean to possess this power. All three of these novels, and doubtless others of less imaginative power and importance, have provided science fiction with a myth of the telepath as a superman and benefactor of humanity. The myth is continued in various ways by other authors in the sixties, such as Samuel R. Delany and Suzette Haden Elgin, among others, but the important point here is that the myth provided a body of conventions for Silverberg to treat ironically.12 Thus the myth is being parodied by David Selig's various failures in Dying Inside. Selig himself comments ironically about the science fiction tradition of "stories of little superbrats with freaky powers" (DI 142). Unlike Jommy Cross of SIan, Selig never achieves a position of great power or satisfactorily reconciled to an imposing father figure. Unlike Gerry in More tharl Humall, Selig does not find a kind of communal love in the acceptance of others of his kind. And whereas Lincoln Powell of Bester's suspense novel finds fulfillment in pursuing and capturing the most intelligent criminal in the solar system, David Selig works at the futile business of writing research papers for lazy students. Also, unlike Powell, who puts his knowledge of the thoughts of others to a socially productive purpose, David Selig experiences the anguish of his fellows without being given any opportunity to lessen their misery. Of course, there is an important sense in which Selig symbolizes the fate of the gifted writer or artist, as perhaps most of the people with extraordinary talents in science fiction do. But there is still another for-

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mative influence on the novel that deserves a short look: the contemporary American Jewish novel. IV

During the fifties and sixties, one of the most important literary developments was the flowering of the American Jewish novel in the work of Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth, and others. It should be noted that the American Jewish novel differs from novels by a Jewish American writer like Norman Mailer or John Barth: the former describes a specifically Jewish anguish in serioecomic terms, the trials and suffering of Herzog or Alexander Portnoy, whereas the latter often presents its vision in terms of traditional American protagonists, such as Mailer's attempt to recreate the Hemingway hero in An American Dream, or Barth's comic and Dionysian hero Giles in Giles Goat Boy. In the American Jewish novel, the hero is clearly presented as Jewish, and his ethnic background, including the experience of having an ancestry of recent immigrants to America, is a significant aspect of the character's experience. So too is the sense of the Jewish moral and religious traditions and, thus, almost by definition, the protagonist is somewhat alienated from the mainstream of American culture. This sense of alienation is present even when the author seems to be enthusiastically determined to affirm American experience, as in Bellow's The Adventures of Augie March. It is a central fact of the experience of Bellow's Moses Herzog, of Malamud's suffering and agonized heroes, such as Martin Bober in The Assistant, and of Philip Roth's Neil Klugman in Goodbye Columbus-and, of course, Roth's Portnoy and Zuckerman. Along with the Jewish protagonist's estrangement from American society, there is a sense of being victimized and a moral awareness that recognizes the shallowness of those who make victims of others: domineering parents, especially mothers; authority figures, like psychiatrists, who turn out to be charlatans; jealous siblings; unscrupulous rivals in business and love; bigoted members of the goyim; and naturally, even fellow victims. At the same time, the protagonist schlemiel of the American Jewish novel is not only extraordinarily sensitive in moral terms but frequently highly self-conscious and capable of seeing his personal anguish in comic terms. Practically all that has been said about these suffering Jewish characters can also be asserted of David Selig in Silverberg's novel. Selig suffers from existential anguish while he is deeply aware of the comic overtones of his predicament. Victimized by everyone despite his superior telepathic gift$, he becomes a reluctant sharer in their personal agonies. And his moral indignation at the outrages and self-serving rationalizations of others is diluted by a compassion that prevents him

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from treating them ruthlessly or exploiting them, unlike his fellow telepath Nyquist. Dying Inside is thus one of Silverberg's major efforts to deal with his own Jewish experience, an honor it shares with The Book of Skulls. Its similarity in rhetoric and tone as well as in plot to the work of Malamud, Roth, and Bellow reveals its affinity to the mainstream Jewish novel. One of the major themes of such American Jewish fiction is its tendency to satirize the American dream of success and personal happiness, or to present it in an ironic context. Saul Bellow's short novel Seize the Day (1956), for instance, describes a day of crisis in the life of a middleaged salesman, Tommy Wilhelm. It is a day when Wilhelm, a classic victim, is forced to recognize that his dreams of wealth, marital happiness, and fame as an actor are all doomed to be unfulfilled. A more extended treatment of the same theme-the illusory nature of the American dream-is found in Bellow's celebrated Herzog (1964), which depicts the hero's long personal crisis and near breakdown in the face of the collapse of his personal dream of marital happiness, quiet scholarship, and life in a sane and orderly American society. Bellow is particularly impressive among American Jewish novelists in his ability to counterpoint the defeat of his character's personal dreams with the disorder in American society. Indeed, Silverberg may well have learned a good deal about this from reading Bellow, to judge from Dying Inside. But the major point here is the fact that Dying Inside is focused on the theme of the failure of the American dream for David Selig, Silverberg'S protagonist. A fruitful approach to the structure of the novel is to see it as a series of ironic reversals and defeats for David Selig, disillusionments that refute the expectations of the American dream. Selig's exploration of his failures during a midlife crisis corresponds closely to his sense of failing talents and his slowly fading telepathic powers. As Selig relives his fictive past and experiences the frustrations of his present, a close analysis reveals the failures of his life in numerous relationships.

v One of the major sources of David's frustrations is his relationship with his parents, an experience he relives early in the book. David's childhood life with his parents was seldom happy and frequently troubled, as his memories reveal. Much of the difficulty arose from David's ability to read their thoughts; his gift did not allow him the usual illusions of childhood innocence. Quite aware of his mother's demanding nature and his father's sense of failure, David soon came to realize that he carried a heavy burden, for, like many American parents, David's father and mother expected to find fulfillment not in their own lives but through the achievements of their talented son.

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This sense of great expectations for the child, which in tum places intolerable stress on him, is a disease of the American family ably diagnosed by another American Jewish moralist, Arthur Miller, in his classic tragic drama, Death of a Salesman. With such a background, David's relationship with his adopted sister was also destined to be a stormy and troubled one. From the first, David resents Judith, and his hatred is so obvious to her that she in tum despises him. The situation is worsened by her gradual discovery that David is indeed "different"; for somehow, she realizes that he has the power to perceive what she is thinking. Indeed, David's relationship with Judith helps to demonstrate the ironies attendant upon his particular gift. David's telepathic ability is limited to the reception of messages, but such a power is enough to make him obnoxious to most people if they know of it. Hence, David is tormented not only by his ability to overhear the thoughts of others, but by his isolation resulting from the necessity of keeping his gift secret. Like Prometheus and other handicapped or enslaved titans, David is a potential giant in fetters. Yet when David confesses the truth to Judith, their relationship is greatly complicated. In the novel's present, David and Judith maintain a relationship of negotiated neutrality. As survivors of the family after their parents' deaths, they feel a certain affection for each other, but this emotion is tainted by their old hostility. It is hard to say which of the two is more unhappy: David as a lonely bachelor and recluse, or Judith as an aging career woman who has gone from man to man in search of the perfect lover or the strong father she lacked in childhood. Judith's sexual adventures have an air of desperation about them, while bringing her little satisfaction. Another of Judith's ambivalent and concealed motivations seems to be the desire to shock David and arouse his jealousy. Curiously, David's reactions to his probes of her mind reveal a jealousy of his sister's lovers as well as an agony of guilt over her actions. Indeed, he blames his sister's promiscuity on her profound need for the love denied to her by her brother and the parents who adopted her. Moreover, despite all of David's assertions of hatred for Judith, it is easy to suspect that there is an element of incestuous love in his feelings. Paradoxically, the relationship between Judith and David seems to be the one aspect of David's life where some improvement is made in the concluding section of the novel. Judith feels a sense of triumph at David's loss of his mind-reading power, for this means the end of his superiority. Yet in this ironic victory, Judith is able to show compassion for David and to give him the acceptance that she has withheld before. As a result, brother and sister ar~ reconciled by a sense of their common humanity, a resolution providing some consolation to soften the novel's bleak ending.

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VI If David's relationships with his parents and sister are sources of grief and guilt, so are his efforts to find fulfillment in romantic love. In addition to his ambivalent relationship with Judith, David relives, in memory, romantic relationships with two young women. In each case, David's desire to love and be loved provides him with temporary happiness, but in the end his gift and his egotism frustrate him and undermine the relationship. Moreover, David's isolation and his special talent render it virtually impossible for him to establish a stable relationship. The first of David's adult romantic affairs is his brief involvement with Toni, who is somewhat sketchily characterized. This experience provides an ironic view of two romantic myths of the sixties: the belief in a simple and innocent love as the solution to most problems, and the mystique of drugs, particularly LSD and marijuana, as keys to unlock the gateway to the spirit. David's lover, Toni, is caught up in the search for transcendental experience through drugs, particularly LSD trips. But the relationship comes to an abrupt end when Toni takes a drug trip that goes badly, and David vicariously shares it by entering her mind. At first pleasurable, the experience soon becomes a horrifying and traumatic hallucination. Initially, all had seemed well, for "lost in transcendental realms of mystery was my Toni" (01 57). But after David enters her mind, he finds himself in a bizarre phastasmagoria. What I see is a feast of demons. Can such darkness really live within her? I saw nothing like this those other two times: has the acid released some levels of nightmare not accessible to her before? Her past is on parade. Gaudy images, bathed in a lurid light. Lovers. Copulations. Abominations. A torrent of menstrual blood, or is that scarlet river something more sinister? Here is a clot of pain: what is that cruelty to others, cruelty to self? And look how she gives herself to that army of monstrousmen! (Dl 59)

Such deSCription is an effective, first-rate demonstration of Silverberg'S mastery of prose imagery depicting psychological experience. Moreover, Silverberg reveals his awareness of the darker side of drug-induced fantasy, for his description here differs sharply from the romanticized vision given in Son of Mall (1971) or A Time of Changes (1971), where drugs are used to overcome barriers to psychic communication. Clearly, David's aim in sharing Toni's drug trip is to find a deeper unity, a kind of mystical lover's union with her. Silverberg'S most sympathetic and sensitive characters are, after all, like Kafka's characters, seeking a "state of grace," to use Silverberg'S own words. But the result of David's sharing of Toni's bad trip is just the opposite: David is ap-

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palled by his discoveries, and Toni, realizing that through some means David was present in her mind, is also frightened and indignant. Feeling violated, Toni ends the affair. If this liaison with Toni is disheartening, David's passionate relationship with Kitty, a woman more sharply characterized, is devastating. Kitty is a sensitive and compassionate woman who not only learns of David's gift but is willing to try to develop telepathic powers of her own in order to share his experience. Unfortunately, as David reflects, he realizes that his error with Kitty was his attempt to make her over, and especially to encourage her to try telepathy. As he looks back on this bitter memory, David coins the rueful apothegm: "Axiom: It's a sin against love to try to remake the soul of someone you love, even if you think you'll love her more after you've transformed her into something else" (DJ 206). This is a lesson David learns painfully at age twentyeight. In this matter, David resembles one of Nathaniel Hawthorne's heroes, the scientist Aylmer, in "The Birthmark" (one of Hawthorne's fables anticipating twentieth-century science fiction) who tries desperately to obliterate his lovely wife's only blemish, a birthmark on her face. 13 Like Hawthorne's hero, and another Silverberg hero, Kinnal, in A Time of Changes, who destroys the woman he loves while trying to change her, David's anguish arises from his utopian and transcendentalist longings. However, David, unlike Aylmer, is shown coming to terms with this bitter experience. Not only did David try to turn Kitty into a telepath, but he sought to "improve" her mental outlook by supervising her reading and initiating her into his knowledge of "culture." The inevitable result was his loss of Kitty; ironically, she turned to his fellow telepath, Nyquist, who lacked David's aesthetic awareness and moral sensitivity. An additional irony in this affair is the way in which its progress and decline parallel the peak year of John F. Kennedy's presidency, 1963. The relationship thrives in the idealism of the summer of '63 and collapses after the jolting disillusionment of the assassination. Here and elsewhere in the novel, Silverberg makes an impressive use of ironic parallels between public and private events. VII

Just as significant as his failures in his relationship with his family and his loves is David's inability to find a vocation, a sense of fulfillment using his enormous gifts of telepathy and intellect. As we have already noted, David lives an anonymous existence as a Kafkaesque man, lost in the labyrinth of New York City in the early seventies, eking out a wretched existence as a ghostwriter of term papers for indolent and dishonest Columbia students. The idea of David as a "ghostwriter" is

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itself symbolic, for it provides a metaphor for David's existence. Like an actual ghost, or an invisible man, David eavesdrops on society, experiencing vicariously the emotions and anguish of men and women around him, but he is not perceived as a person because he has no real existence for those he encounters. Consequently, the metaphor of David as a ghostwriter is as imaginatively appropriate as Ralph Ellison's famous metaphor of invisibility for his black hero in his classic Invisible Man. Why does David choose this life, however? Is it a necessity for him? The answer is complex and stems from David's character and moral sensitivity. Here Silverberg develops an instructive contrast between David and his fellow telepath, Nyquist, who serves as a foil for David. Nyquist takes advantage of his ability to overhear the thoughts of others in order to make an easy living through shrewd investments. According to the conventional wisdom, Nyquist is a brilliant success, not only in his acquisition of a large and steady income, but in his life-style as a hedonist and womanizer. Indeed, Nyquist lives the life of pleasure that men fantasize about when they identify with James Bond, but unlike Bond, Nyquist is able to act without really risking his life, his money, or even his emotions. By Nyquist's standards, David is a weak-minded and sentimental fool, seeking love, permanence, social justice, and some higher good. However, Nyquist is himself a walking refutation of his own shallow values. In order to live as Nyquist does, one must deaden one's moral sensitivity and ignore the anguish of those fellow humans whom one encounters and overhears. Silverberg portrays Nyquist with sufficient realism to demonstrate that the author does not respect material success without moral self-respect and a sense of achievement in one's profession. This is not surprising for an author who could have continued to write undistinguished fiction and readable popularizations throughout his career, but who instead chose at great personal cost to transform himself from a mere journeyman professional to an artist. Similarly, the Nyquist who steals Kitty when she gets bored with David is morally inferior to David, just as those science fiction writers who persist in writing juvenile adventure fiction year after year produce novels that are inferior to Silverberg's best work because they lack his mature moral vision. In reality, David's sensitivity to the suffering of others is both his chief vulnerability and the major source of our admiration for him. David uses his telepathic gift as miserably as he does because he finds it difficult to take advantage of others and because his awareness of the suffering around him prevents him from living in an uncaring indifference. In a world of alienated New Yorkers, especially suffering Puerto Ricans, victimized women like Judith, and angry blacks, a vulgar success like Nyquist seems callous and obtuse. This same theme is reaffirmed in the ironic ending of the novel. De-

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spite misgivings, David writes a tenn paper for a petulant black basketball player who resents David's intelligence and in addition bristles with anti-Semitic feelings. On delivery of the paper, the athlete's volatile temper erupts. He assaults David, attracting attention to the scene and scattering the ghostwritten paper, which is then picked up as evidence of David's disreputable occupation. As a result, David is brought before a dean-a choice irony is that the administrator is an old classmate of David's, a conformist who has weasled his way upward-and threatened with prosecution if he does not abandon his shabby means of making a living. Although the dean pretends to show sympathy by refusing to prosecute David, it is obvious that the university would prefer not to make public the scandal of an alumnus becoming a successful ghostwriter, not to mention the dishonesty of its students. Moreover, David's punishment is harsh compared to that of the basketball player's, although in moral terms the athlete's action might be considered more culpable. In short, once again David has been victimized, this time by everyone involved: the black athlete; his old classmate, the dean; and the university itself. Not only is David exposed and his income from writing curtailed, but at the novel's conclusion, he also suffers the fate he fears throughout, when he loses his power to receive messages. Yet the irony of the novel is once again double-edged. By losing his powers, David ceases to be a superior being and feels a loss of self-esteem, yet the loss liberates him to rejoin the human community. Freed from the burden of hearing others' thoughts, David is now in a position to accept humanity more charitably. One indication of this changed status is his improved relationship with his sister, who at last can give him sympathy over his loss. Paradoxically, David's loss of his power to enter the minds of others allows him to experience life much as others do. Hence, though the novel's resolution is a fitting climax to the ironic tone of the work as a whole, it is not without affirmative overtones. While David does not find the "state of grace" he occasionally longs for, the possibility of its existence is intimated in one important passage. This passage illuminates the subtle religious allusions that enrich the novel. The experience is part of David's memory of adolescence. He is thinking of a period in his sixteenth year when his family was summering in upstate New York on a farm with another Brooklyn Jewish family, the Steins. His companion, Barbara Stein, has gone off to a rendezvous with Hans Schiele, the son of the dour Lutheran family who own the fann. At this point, David looks into the mind of old Georg Schiele, the father of the farming family and is astonished to discover a mystical consciousness: "God floods his ·soul. He touches the unity of all things. Sky, trees, earth, sun, plants, brook, insects, birds--everything is one, part of a

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seamless whole, and Schiele resonates in perfect harmony with it" (DI 81). In this encounter, David finds a state of being that he longs for, yet that eludes him for the rest of the novel. But its presence in old Georg Schiele indicates that it is an achievable possibility. Such a vision of the wholeness of life provides a standard by which the fragmented shards of David's experience and the frustrated lives around him may be measured. VIII

Silverberg's artistry in Dyill8 Inside is impressive. As a work of fully sustained ironic vision, it is highly successful in achieving its aims. Its kinship with the novels of Kafka and the modernist tradition of Joyce and Eliot has been established here, as has its relationship to the American Jewish novels of Bellow, Malamud, and Roth. Its quality makes it not unworthy of comparisons with the Work of Kafka. Equally significant is the fact that Dying Inside makes an impressive contribution to the genre of science fiction, especially fiction dealing with telepathy. No earlier novel in the tradition had explored so thoroughly the experience of what living as a telepath might actually entail, and scarcely any novel dealing with telepathic gifts had ventured to explore the tragic possibilities of possessing them. Nor had much American science fiction ventured to be as courageously realistic and ironic in its narrative tone and plot as Silverberg's novel. English science fiction had produced its Wells and the dystopian visions of E. M. Forster, Aldous Huxley, and George Orwell, but most American science fiction, before Silverberg's middle period at any rate, had tended to be relentlessly affinnative and optimistic about social progress. There are some exceptions: works by Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth, Fritz Leiber, Fanner, and particularly Philip K. Dick come to mind. But Silverberg's novel is an impressive performance in the ironic mode; moreover, its assured artistry should refute the gossip that it suffered from the unjudicious cutting of editors. 14 The maturity of Dying Inside provides evidence both of Silverberg's coming of age as an artist and of the intellectual growth of American science fiction in the late sixties. It is to Silverberg'S credit that his novel transforms the naive romantic conventions of telepaths and supermen found in earlier science fiction into art of a high order. NOTES 1. Silverberg thoroughly discusses this change of direction in his career in

Hell's Cartographers, ed. Brian Aldiss and Harry Harrison (London: Futura, 1976), pp. 7-45. The phrase quoted is on page 37; the transformation of Silverberg'S career is discussed in detail on pages 33-42. Silverberg'S description of his child-

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hood and youth also suggests certain parallels with David Selig, the hero of Dying Inside. 2. The "golden age" of John W. Campbell and Astounding is the subject of a great deal of writing on the part of critics, academic scholars, authors, editors, and fans; much of it is controversial. But there can be little doubt that Campbell espoused a strong faith in the meliorative possibilities of science and technology and that he advocated some of the standard principles of "realistic" characterization and narrative that were in vogue in mainstream fiction. See more information about the fiction of the pre-Campbell era, in Isaac Asimov, ed., Before the Golden Age (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1974). Valuable commentary on the same era is to be found in Robert Scholes and Eric Rabkin, Science Fiction: History, Science, Vision (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), pp. 26-41. Scholes and Rabkin discuss the Campbell era in "The Golden Age and After" (pp. 51-69). 3. Scholes and Rabkin (70-86) discuss the period following the decline of Campbell's influence. Actually, during the fifties, Horace Gold's Galaxy provided an antidote to Campbell, and so did some of the writers represented in Hell's Cartographers. Writers like Philip Jose Farmer, James Blish, and Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth all tended to incorporate ironic motifs into their work in the fifties and sixties, working in part under the influence of the giants of literary modernism. Later in this chapter, the relation of Dying Inside to Kafka is explored more thoroughly. For a discussion of some of the ironies and literary parallels of Dying Inside, see Willis McNelly, "Dying Inside," in Survey of Science Fiction Literature, ed. Frank Magill, vol. 2 (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Salem Press, 1979), pp.671-75. 4. Eric Rabkin's theory of the various uses of fantasy is found in his The Fantastic in Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976). Pages 74116 are particularly interesting on the use of fantasy to provide an ironic perspective on the material of conventionar "realism." 5. Like Eliot-and many other authors-Silverberg blends past and present in the novel. David Selig is a kind of J. Alfred Prufrock in the wasteland, and Prufrock is invoked by quotation or allusion on the first page of Dying Inside and throughout the first chapter. 6. The allusions to Joyce are not as frequent as the Eliot allusions, but Silverberg makes up for that by invoking numerous other important modernist authors, including Aldous Huxley on drugs and E. M. Forster's description of existential emptiness, the Malabar Caves sequence in A Passage to India (1924). 7. Kafka's antiheroes confront an absurd and remote bureaucracy that is a grotesque caricature of the bureaucracy of Austria-Hungary, under which Kafka lived most of his life. Probably Joseph K's struggles with official authority in The Trial are the most memorable example of man's encounter with the labyrinth of government in modern literature. 8. Robert Silverberg, interview with author, Ft. Lauderdale, Fla., March 1989. 9. The same point is present in Clareson's monograph, Robert Silverberg (Mercer Island, WA: Starmont House, 1983), to which I have alluded already; Clareson's discussion of Dying Inside is on pp. 66-68. Another critic who has stressed literary influences on Silverberg's Dying Inside is Peter S. Aiternman, in "Four Voices in Robert Silverberg's Dying Inside," in Critical Encounters Il, ed. Tom

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Staicar (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1982), pp. 90-103. Alternman's perceptive essay also notes parallels with Prufrock, Leopold Bloom, and Kafka's antiheroes. lD. Brian Stableford, Scientific Romance in Britain 1890-1950. London: Fourth Estate, 1985, pp. 206-8. Stableford's study is very valuable as a critical treatment and analysis of the major works in the British intellectual tradition of science fiction. It's also worth noting that Silverberg mentions both Stapledon and Van Vogt as writers he read as a young fan in the introduction to Revolt on Alpha C, his first novel, published by Thomas Crowell in 1955. See the Special Anniversary Edition of this work (New York: Warner, 1989), p. iii. 11. Van Vogt's fiction is extremely melodramatic and his concepts often quite hard to accept, and his characterizations seem somewhat flat or sketchy. To a contemporary reader, Van Vogt's fiction sometimes seems hard to distinguish from that of E. E. (Doc) Smith, which is a synonym for the most farfetched space opera. At the same time, it is wise to remember that Campbell and his readers accepted a good deal of melodrama and flat prose, and that authors like Robert Heinlein were guilty of sins of the same kind, if not degree. Van Vogt's novels are really stories of variations on the superman theme, considered from different aspects, if one studies the heroes of The World of NullA, Sian, The Weapon Shops of Isher, and The Wizard of Linn, for instance. Since the hero's discovery and use of his powers to fulfill his destiny are the main theme, characterization, plot, style, and setting are all secondary matters to Van Vogt. 12. Delany uses certain characters as telepaths in his fiction, since he is always interested in the gifted individual. Elgin also uses telepathy imaginatively in her Coyote Jones novels. For a discussion of these, see my essay in The Feminine Eye, ed. Tom Staicar (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1982), pp. 89-102. For the record, Robert Heinlein also occasionally has used telepaths in novels, as far back as his Time for the Stars (1956). 13. Hyatt Waggoner, in his fine study, Hawthorne, rev. ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963), pp. 201-2, provides a good study of Aylmer's foolish search for perfection. Because of their ability to perceive the hidden antisocial impulses and desires in others as well as in themselves, many Hawthorne characters are alienated, much as David Selig is. They also consider themselves too cold and rational in their approaches to others, just as David sometimes feels that he is too dispassionate an observer and voyeur looking into the souls of others. 14. Brian Stableford, in "Robert Silverberg," in Science Fiction Encyclopedia, Ed. Peter Nicholls (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1979), pp. 545-46, asserts that Silverberg had complained that the texts of Dying Inside and Tower of Glass were " 'assassinated' " by the publishers (546). Silverberg, however, has denied that Dying Inside was mutilated or poorly edited in, for instance, a letter to me in September 1983. In point of fact, Dying Inside does not give the impression of having been harmed by the omission of relevant material; on the contrary, Dying Inside appears to be one of Silverberg's most finely crafted and well constructed novels.

WORKS CITED Alternman, Peter S. "Four Voices in Robert Silverberg's Dying Inside." In Critical Encounters II, ed. Tom Staicar. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1982, pp. 90lD3.

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Asimov, Isaac, ed. Before the Golden Age. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1974. Bellow, Saul. Herzog. New York: Viking Press, 1964. - - - . Seize the Day, with Three Short Stories and a One-Act Play. New York: Viking Press, 1956. Bester, Alfred. The Demolished Man. Chicago: Shasta, 1953. London: Siedgwick and Jackson, 1953. Clareson, Thomas D. "The Fiction of Robert Silverberg." In Voices for the future, ed. Thomas D. Clareson, vol. 2. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1979, pp. 1-33. - - - . Robert Silverberg. Mercer Island, WA: Starmont House, 1983. McNelly, Willis. "Dying Inside." In Survey of Science Fiction Literature, ed. Frank N. Magill, vol. 2. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Salem Press, 1979, pp. 671-75. Rabkin, Eric. The Fantastic in Literature. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976. Scholes, Robert, and Eric Rabkin. Science Fiction: History, Science, Vision. London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1977. Silverberg, Robert. Dying Inside. Rpt. New York: Ballantine, 1972. Cited as DI. - - - . "Sounding Brass, Tinkling Cymbal." In Hell's Cartographers, ed. Brain W. Aldiss and Harry Harrison. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1975; repro London: Futura, 1976, pp. 7-45. Stableford, Brian. "Robert Silverberg." In Science Fiction Encyclopedia, ed. Peter Nicholls. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1979, pp. 545-46. - - - . Scientific Romance in Britain 1890-1950. London: Fourth Estate, 1985. Sturgeon, Theodore. More Than Human. New York: Farrar Straus, 1953. London: Victor Gollancz, 1954. Van Vogt, A(lfred) E(lton). Sian. Sauk City, Wisconsin: Arkham House, 1946. Rev. ed. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1951. London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1953. Waggoner, Hyatt. Hawthorne. Rev. ed. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963.

4 Repetition with Reversal: Robert Silverberg's Ironic Twist Endings JOSEPH FRANCAVILLA

A myth has grown up around Robert Silverberg, partly furthered by his autobiographical statements about a "new" and "old" Silverberg in essays such as "Sounding Brass, Tinkling Cymbal" in Aldiss and Harrison's collection Hell's Cartographers (1975). A number of critics, such as Barry Malzberg and Russell Letson,l have described a "new" and "mature" Silverberg of the late sixties and early seventies and see Silverberg's career as having a linear development broken up into a number of distinct phases. In this view, it is generally perceived that Silverberg went through an early phase of formula pulp fiction in the middle to late fifties followed by a brief abandonment of science fiction for nonfiction writing. The second phase, from around 1962 to 1967, was one of transition and gradual experimentation with style and technique. In the third phase, from about 1967 to 1975, this experimentation with point of view, allusion, modernist mythic underpinnings, present tense narration, postmodernist self-reflexiveness, graphic treatment of sexual relationships, and discontinuous, fragmented narration was at its peak. Silverberg announced his retirement from writing in the spring of 1975, and only began producing fiction again at the end of 1979 with the serial publication of Lord Valentine's Castle. Since then, he has continued to write both epic fantasy and science fiction. When Silverberg suddenly broke out of what Letson terms "process oriented sf" (Letson 1979, 117, n. 2), he supposedly demonstrated true artistic craftsmanship and an

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overriding concern with experimental literary technique. The themes and style and plots of his stories were said to have changed drastically throughout these phases. It is as if the author Silverberg suddenly shed his ugly caterpillar body and sprouted butterfly wings. Each of these phases (I suspect the post-1979 period would now also be included) showed a "new and improved" Silverberg-like ad copy for the latest detergent. So the theory goes, at any rate. But those butterfly wings are merely pseudoappendages or even apparitions. Thomas Clareson has questioned the idea just sketched in his essay "The Fictions of Robert Silverberg" (1979, 2: 5) and in his book Robert Silverberg, claiming that there is a strong continuity in themes, imagery, plots, and narrative strategies throughout Silverberg's entire output of science fiction, which belies this convenient but misleading categorization based on cosmetic differences. Clareson has also commented on how the ironic O. Henry twist is in early stories such as "The Old Man" (1957), where the spaceman who is forced to retire is discovered in the end to be less than twenty years old (Clareson 1983, 16). Taking these two ideas, 1would like to support the notion of continuity in Silverberg's fiction by examining how Silverberg has used throughout his career a peculiar variation on the "well-made" magazine story ending first practiced by such writers as Edgar Allan Poe, Guy de Maupassant, Ambrose Bierce, and especially O. Henry. In America, the O. Henry ironic twist ending came to dominate the general magazine fiction of the early decades of the twentieth century. In Europe, modernist authors at this time such as James Joyce, Franz Kafka, and Marcel Proust certainly had already discarded this particular device and even more so, a reliance on traditional "plot" itself. Although in America after World War II it was generally seen by many avant-garde "literary" authors and writers associated with academia as a passe commercial contrivance, this type of ending was prominent throughout the science fiction magazines of the 1950s and early 1960s. These magazines published writers who excelled in this kind of ending, such as Fredric Brown ("Knock," "Answer"), Alfred Bester ("Fondly Fahrenheit"), and Damon Knight ("Not With a Bang," "To Serve Man"). This period of the early fifties was precisely when Silverberg, obsessed with narrative technique and with knowing the "trick" to producing and selling science fiction, first began seriously to study the magazine markets and to publish science fiction, beginning with "Gorgon Planet" in 1954. The latter two writers, Bester and Knight, Silverberg has claimed as his "literary idols" when he first began writing ("Sounding" 9). One can detect this type of ending in another early Silverberg story, "Collecting Team" (1957), in which Earthmen who are gathering specimens from an unexplored world themselves become zoo specimens of

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aliens. In most of Silverberg's later fiction, this last-minute displacement and ironic reversal of roles (zoo specimen and Earthmen, Earthmen and aliens) achieves a perfect chiasmic symmetry, and each of the pair of opposing figures becomes a doppelganger. This is the hallmark of the structure of Silverberg's stories, both long and short, as seen in pieces such as "Born with the Dead," "Going," The Second Trip, "Passengers," "Sundance," "In Entropy's Jaws," "Push No More," and "When We Went to See the End of the World." I have selected several stories for discussion to represent various periods of Silverberg's career: "Collecting Team" (1957), "To See the Invisible Man" (1963), "Passengers" (1968), "Caliban" (1972), "Born with the Dead" (1974), and "Amanda and the Alien" (1983). Despite any formal or stylistic experimentation, these representative stories demonstrate that Silverberg's short fiction thrives on this ironic twist ending-without the positive affirmation often in a typical O. Henry story such as "The Last Leaf" or ''The Gift of the Magi"-where the doppelganger characters reverse roles in a repetition of a previous situation in the story. The double characters are bonded together in a relationship involving power, authority, and psychic and/or psychosexual cannibalism. 2 The aloof, cold, alienated,. and isolated protagonist usually undergoes some metamorphosis or displacement or displays some special power at or near the beginning of the story. In many cases the story seems to start in medias res, as if the shock has happened to the protagonist and his world just before the opening. He then continues on the "trip," quest, or initiation in order to establish true communication, empathy, and deep understanding with another person-which almost always fails and is eventually seen as futile, perhaps undesirable, and always problematic. This broken Hnk of communication often appears as a vicarious experience of psychic cannibalism-the act of feeding off the pain and emotions of a double of the protagonist. Finally, there is a countermetamorphosis, a counterdisplacement, or else the main character loses his special power as the doppelganger characters reverse roles. In traversing from one polarity to its opposite, the protagonist's fate thus seems unstable and unpredictable, as if another oscillation or series of oscillations between poles appears extremely likely. The twist ending underscores Silverberg's pessimistic, existentialist themes involving alienation, angst, and the chaotic nature of the univers~ randomness that allows capricious fate to upset man's stability and Hfe. The ironic ending usually reaffirms the individual's despair, loneliness, and isolation, often accomp~nied by a further withdrawal from society. The protagonist's separafeness from others is emphasized simultaneously

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with his deep-seated need (which he often hides or denies) to be acknowledged and accepted by others and to be bonded or attached to others. Although a person's autobiography may turn out to be little more than a self-recorded fiction, it is nevertheless tempting to relate Silverberg's autobiographical statements in "Sounding Brass, Tinkling Cymbal" (1975) to the previously outlined themes in his stories. He describes his childhood as "painful," "lonely," and "isolated," and, like his characters such as Caliban, feels his body then was "weak," "puny," "sickly," and "ugly" ("Sounding" 9-10). At fourteen, he began to see himself split into two identities: "Robert was that spindly misfit, that maladjusted, isolated little boy; Bob was a healthy, outgoing, normal young man [who could] sustain friendships and manage conversations" ("Sounding" 14). If there is any recurrent theme in this autobiography, it is the development of a split personality generated from an initiation into an alienating world. One key incident in Silverberg's later life was the fire that devastated his New York house in 1968. Suddenly, a capricious stroke of fate had upset and disoriented Silverberg's rather stable life. Silverberg states that he had previously never known the "real anguish of life," that he had "literally passed through the flames," and that, after the fire, he was "never the same again" ("Sounding" 36-37). But this incident may only have deepened the sense of splitting that had already begun. Against a background of an alienating society, he constantly refers to a "new" and "old" Silverberg. For example, he reports that before the fire the old Silverberg could crank out fiction to editorial order in no time and "write even the most taxing of ... books in wild joyous spurts" ("Sounding" 37-38). The new one, however, "had become as other mortals," needing to revise over and over and proceeding slowly, painfully. It is as if the artistic process of creation and the production of writing are metaphors of interpersonal relationships, the procreative and the sexual. Joyous spurts aside, Silverberg appears to describe an "artistic impotence" not too unlike the loss of special mental powers of David Selig in Dying II/side or Harry Blaufeld of "Push No More," or John Skein of "In Entropy's Jaws." The science fiction devices-telepathy, emphatic mind links, personality implants, and so forth-are associated with the protagonists' parallel artistic creativity and the ability to produce science fiction in an almost superhuman way. The parallels extend even further. For example, David Selig is also a "writer" who "sells," whipping off and peddling student essays to his school acquaintances on existentialist delights such as Kafka and Greek tragedy. Even the character's name "Harry Blaufeld" ("blue field") echoes "Robert Silverberg" (" silver mountain"). A more recent autobiographical piece in Robert Silverberg's Worlds of

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Wonder (1987) spells out Silverberg's confessed obsession starting in 1949 with narrative technique. Similar to his earlier anthology of stories and accompanying criticism The Mirror of Infinity (1970), Worlds of Wonder contains analyses of classic SF stories that Silverberg had studied and admired. Several statements he makes about these stories by other authors apply very well to his own and show this ingrained sense of the commercial "well-made story" previously mentioned. He begins by remembering Thomas Uzzell's Narrative Technique, a book on writing that defined a story as a working out of a conflict and claimed that a story was based on a "pattern of oppositions" (WoW 9). A couple of his other comments echo Edgar Allan Poe's observations on storytelling in Marginalia (1965b) and in Poe's essay "The American Drama" (1965a). For example, in Marginalia, Poe finds fault with most American authors because they "seem to begin their stories without knowing how they are to end; and their ends, generally ... seem to have forgotten their beginnings" (1965b, 16: 171). In "The American Drama," Poe asserts that a plot "is perfect only inasmuch as we shall find ourselves unable to detach from it or disarrange any single incident involved, without destruction to the mass" and that in an excellent plot "no one of its component parts shall be susceptible of removal without detriment to the whole" (1965a, 13: 44-46). Silverberg also claims that it is aesthetically pleasing when a story's ending recapitulates or refers back to its beginning and that a strong, unified plot has incidents that build upon one another and contains no incidents that are either removable or interchangeable (WoW 62, 254-55). The first point is highlighted again when Silverberg discusses the ending of Brian Aldiss's story "Hothouse" as a "promise of fulfillment," rather than a "real denouement": "[A] closing passage that propels the story into a new set of episodes carries with it the sense, for the moment, of an ending: this phase is closing, another is beginning and we know that the road goes ever onward" (WoW 255). These observations by Silverberg on storytelling and his life, as will be shown, aptly describe this peculiar narrative strategy and its thematic significance in much of Silverberg's fiction. The basic premise in Silverberg's "Collecting Team" (1957) was certainly not new when it was published. The plot gimmick of the Earthman who goes into space to make contact with extraterrestrials and who becomes imprisoned as a pet or specimen by powerful aliens had been done before, notably in Paul Fairman's story "Brothers beyond the Void" (originally appearing in Fantastic Adventures in March 1952 and collected in the 1953 August Derleth anthology Worlds of Tomorrow). But in borrowing this motif a~.d the surprise ending, Silverberg melds the form of the popular "puzzle" story with his own peculiar narrative pattern: a repetition of an initial situation with an ironic reversal of roles under-

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scoring a failed attempt at forming an emotional and communicative bond. Silverberg invents several Earthmen who collect extraterrestrial zoo specimens and they, in tum, become the collected specimens on the "zoo" planet controlled by unseen superaliens. An initial and fmal image reflecting this reversal is the narrator's supposition that zoologist Davidson is dreaming of attaching "tags" to all the new life forms, with his name as the designation of the newly discovered alien species. At the end of the story, the narrator imagines a placard (specifying that Earthmen are in their "native habitat") in front of the alien-built Earth homecage. Another reversal oc~urs with the purple giraffe creature that tries unsuccessfully to warn. them. The spacemen discover that the giraffe creature is a prisoner, like them, not their captor. As in many other Silverberg stories, another victim often exists whose situation parallels the protagonist's (a fellow Invisible in':To See the Invisible Man," a fellow human temporarily possessed by th~ aliens in "Passengers," etc.). As with all "first contact" stories, an essential theme is the establishment of communication in the widest sense. The collected creatures of the Earthmen are treated as something like pets, and so there is an implied emotional bond between the Earthmen and their specimens. In later stories this bond develops an even more pronounced psychological, sexual, or psychical nature, generating sexual "pets" or playmates, psychic vampires, telepathic voyeurs, and the like. Even in this early story there is a tentative exploration of mental contact. The aliens, unseen manipulators, hypJ)otize the Earthmen, forcing them repeatedly to sabotage their own ship, and then reach into their minds to obtain the model for building a replica of an Earth house. But communication in the story fails. The aliens, like those in "Flies" (1967) or "Passengers" (1968), are invisible, incomprehensible gods with whom the Earthmen cannot make true contact. Similarly, the imperative warning of the giraffe creatures is not understood by the humans until it is too late. It is ironic also that the initial joy and interest in collecting specimens will undoubtedly become unbearable, routine, and annoying reminder of the spacemen's captivity. The central idea of "To See the Invisible Man" (1963) is that a future society is about to punish the protagonist for his fourth crime of "coldness," of not unburdening himself to his fellow man. The penalty is one year of "invisibility," in which everyone ignores the criminal, refusing to speak, make contact, or even acknowledge his presence, for fear of being sentenced to invisibility himself. At first the novelty and excitement of being perceived as invisibleof being able to do anything without being noticed-is exhilarating. He observes others in private acts, the perfect voyeur who cannot be acknowledged by law. Yet the protagonist, after being unable to obtain a

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doctor when he is sick and noticing how society subtly protects and defends itself against Invisibles, begins to see invisibility as "a two-edged sword" ("To See" 52). He gradually perceives invisibility first as a joke and then as annoyingly boring. He refers to his mood swing-a combination of malaise and ennui that is part of the typical Silverberg protagonist's rite of passage-as a kind of "insanity" caused by extreme loneliness. His plea for interpersonal contact with a fellow Invisible is shunned. After his term is over and he returns to society, the same Invisible he had accosted earlier now pleads with him and dares him to speak. At first the narrator shuns the Invisible as the Invisible had earlier shunned the narrator. But when the narrator finally relents, does make contact, and holds and comforts the Invisible, the security robots arrest the protagonist. The attempt of the protagonist to establish a special bond and to absorb the emotional pain of another like himself is thwarted. Finally, unconcerned, with cool indifference, he awaits trial for the crime of excessive "warmth," and pledges, if convicted, to wear the mark of invisibility not with shame, as before, but with honor. The other Invisible is the obvious doppelganger of the narrator. He is sentenced for the same crime, feels the same lonely despair, and repeats the narrator's criminal pleas for contact made earlier. But in the second instance of the crime, the double characters have reversed roles. The protagonist oscillates between extremes, from exhilaration with the novelty of his special power to an annoying boredom with it, and from a crime of coldness to a crime of warmth. The ironic ending thus hearkens back to, and reverses, the beginning. One expects that another crime with another reversal is entir.ely possible. Cold and impersonal, the alienating, restrictive society with its rigid laws, rules, or codes of behavior imposes itself severely upon the protagonist. Some unseen, manipulative force suddenly strikes the protagonist like lightning--or a fire. In this story it is society's ignoring of the narrator based on the laws of invisibility and the final enforcement of these laws by the robot police. In "Passengers" it is the invisible aliens who sporadically "ride" and "possess" humans and the associated taboos concerning the "ridden." In "Caliban" (1972) it is the genetic scientists eager to change one's body and appearance, and society's capricious need to be the "latest thing." Finally, the invisibility in the story is a sham or pretense whose initial delight and novelty metamorphoses into dullness and boredom. This science fiction device may be seen as a metaphor for the writing and reading of science fiction itself, whereby the initial novelty quickly turns into ennui. It may also represent the problematic nature of interpersonal communication attempted through the writing and reading of science fiction. After a time, -as Silverberg has admitted ("Sounding" 41) and as the narrator of "The Science Fiction Hall of Fame" (1970) has stated, it

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is perhaps hard to take the "stuff" and "devices" of science fiction seriously. The result is the creation of an oblique, somewhat jaded, selfreflexive parody of the inventions or materials of science fiction, as indicated in the offhand borrowing of H. G. Wells's Invisible Man in this story, and of Wells's Time Machine in a story with another phony invention, such as "When We Went to See the End of the World" (1972). In the introduction to his story, Silverberg indicates that his inspiration directly came from Jorge Luis Borges's "The Babylon Lottery," whose protagonist is "declared invisible" for a lunar year ("To See" 48). But Borges, after all, was a devotee of H. G. Wells who carried on Wells's tradition in fantastic literature. The expression "to.ride someone" takes on a new meaning in "Passengers" (1968). Again, invisible, inscrutable superaliens have suddenly exerted their awesome power over humans. Three years before the opening of the story, the aliens invaded and conquered earth, and now they temporarily "possess" humans at random, that is, take over their minds and bodies to have vicarious, sensory experiences through the host body. Usually the human victims, when abandoned by the Passengers, are left with no memory of their experiences. But Charles Roth has been left with a memory (perhaps by the perverse aliens) of the girl (also "ridden") with whom he had an affair. Roth pursues Helen and attempts to tell her about their affair (she remembers nothing) and to start it up again. At first, she is horrified and refuses him, since the tradition or "tribal more" of the society is to avoid contact with people who are ridden and, in fact, never to acknowledge the experience. Yet Roth expresses his hope of somehow evading the Passengers and living out his romance with Helen undisturbed. In his attempt to "reach out" emotionally to Helen, Roth does acknowledge that he wants something more than sex. He also realizes that "Passengers ... take wry amusement in controverting our skills" ("Passengers" 153). Roth's pride in his sexual prowess with women turns to distress and shame when he supposes that the Passengers might have made him "fail repeatedly" with the woman. Roth also wonders if he is being permitted to recall his experience, if the Passenger has receded in his brain and has given him the illusion of free will. The whole question of free will and determinism becomes problematic, given the nature of the aliens. In fact, metaphorically, the aliens represent an unknowable, ambiguous, and capricious fate. In the last phase of the story, the ironic reversals occur, and the pendulum swings to its opposite point from the initial situation. Rejecting the custom not to acknowledge a "ridden" person, Roth convinces Helen to break the taboo and to continue their relationship, which began while they were both "ridden." Helen finally agrees. She is about

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to walk out of the cocktail lounge with him and return to the apartment, when Roth is suddenly possessed again by a Passenger. (It is not clear whether it is the same Passenger as before or another.) He is "turned gay," and, ignoring Helen's pleas, he walks off and picks up a young man in the lounge. The two men go out to have their affair. The reversals are clear. Helen at first rejects his advances, and then he rejects hers. His heterosexual prowess is "controverted" into an overwhelming homosexual desire. His hope of evading the Passengers and having a life with Helen is thwarted forever. When fate (in the form of the Passengers) strikes again, we realize Roth's life is not his own and is not of his own making. Once more, the attempt at establishing communication and an emotional link with a fellow human being fails miserably. Roth is even more alienated and isolated than before. Silverberg has declared the stories such as "Caliban" (1972) are "a kind of parody of science fiction" ("Sounding" 41). The protagonist Caliban is abruptly displaced into a future society where eager genetic scientists make everyone look like a cross between California models and Aryan iibermensch. He dislikes their perfection, their beauty. Caliban finds he has a new master and eventually makes himself into a new man. But his initial primitive "ugliness" is prized by all the beautiful, identical blondes as the "latest thing," and the women take turns with him in the public copulatorium. (He is careful to ask their names beforehand so he can keep track of who's who.) The sexuality in the story, as in many others, signals not a deep, emotional understanding and lasting communication but rather an empty, meaningless act underscoring the impossibility of establishing such a bond of understanding and lasting communication. Gradually, as Caliban notices more people who begin to look like him, he emphasizes his primitive uniqueness by scratching under his arms and belching. When Caliban first asks to be changed to look like the beautiful ones, the doctor refuses, saying that they like him as he is. Finally, Caliban does have the operation to make him belong, to make him appear like everyone else. After the operation he is immediately rejected sexually by Louisiana, the first woman who formerly had adored him. The final irony is that the whole society changes to look like him in his first form, while he must remain looking "beautiful." (The doctors have conveniently either disappeared or taken extended holidays.) He is the odd one out again, and he despises them because "all of them [are] mocking me by their metamorphosis" ("Caliban" 76). He dislikes them as in the beginning, but now because, ironically, they all look the way he did. His initial dislike of their perfect beauty is obviously changed into admiration when he decides to have his operation. Again, at the climax, Caliban becomes a double of the members of the future society in a chiasmic reversal of roles and appearance. No

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doubt future transformations and oscillations could occur, given the ready technology (and the doctors' return from vacations). Caliban remains alienated, like Shakespeare's monster, a lonely outcast of the society he desperately wants to fit into. His uniqueness and novelty soon wear off when everyone copies his appearance, as does society's initial obsession with the novelty of "perfect" beauty. Initially, Caliban is sexually desired by Louisiana, then rejected after his operation, and in retaliation, he finally tells her he doesn't need her since he can find others like her (literally). At the end, he remains rejected by the society, since they have just been "beautiful" and thus his appearance, though again unique, is overly familiar and boring to them. In "Born with the Dead" (1974), an Orpheus-like Jorge Klein chases his dead wife Sybille after she has been "rekindled" and has gone to live among the other unemotional zombies who breathe, speak, and move, but who exist in a state between life and death. Jorge Klein, a Jewish South American whose name perhaps echoes the South American writer Jorge Luis Borges, is disconsolate and desperate since the death of his wife Sybille two and a half years ago. He is drawn to her as she is said to be drawn to the exotic Zanzibar, "like Ulysses to Ithaca, like a moth to a flame" ("Born" 3). Sybille is one of a small "family" group of "deads," zombies who live secluded in towns away from interaction with the living ("warms"). The deads also are the typical affluent, worldly Silverberg protagonists: calm, remote, aloof, cold. They are the ultimate jet sett~rs who are compared to characters on a Hemingwayesque safari, but who are infected with terminal ennui. Indeed, when a dead in the group, the "other man," Kent, makes love with Sybille in the "fashion of the deads," one senses the dispassionate act of passion, the way in which communication and bonding through sexuality is failed, desultory, mechanical, meaningless. One of Jorge's acquaintances, Dolorosa, tells him, in fact, that to a dead the whole universe isn't real and that nothing matters since it is all a joke to the dead anyway. Jorge's angry, frantic, excited, and desperate efforts to find his wife neatly contrast with the existentialist indifference of the deads. Sybille, who is called the "huntress" and the lunar god "Diana," hunts extinct animals near Mount Kilimanjaro-the creatures are recreated through genetic manipulation-while Jorge hunts for her. Intending to infiltrate the "necropolis" of the deads and convince Sybille (who has refused him already) to come back with him, Jorge takes a drug to give him "that good old zombie look" ("Born" 55). Surely, the element of parody of science fiction cliches about zombies in stories, films, and television is unmistakable here. As usual, the initial unique, fantastic element of the story (intriguing to Jorge and his friends) becomes boring

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to the deads, and boring even to the protagonist after he becomes a dead. jorge's fraud is spotted immediately. The dead inject him with a lethal poison, and he becomes "rekindled"-~me of them. Like Christ's welcome, on the third day after Jorge's rekindling, the deads visit him and welcome him into their group, since he is no longer an annoying outsider to them. But in the final reversal, he now finds them "droning insects," and he has absolutely no interest in either Sybille or them. He rejects Sybille'S advances as she earlier rejected his. Everything appears meaningless to Jorge. For him, the opposite of love and sexual passion is not hatred, but extreme detachment and indifference. Even the last brief description of Jorge and Sybille hunting together several years later near Kilimanjaro seems mere chance or accident, rather than a purposeful reunion. Jorge's metamorphosis, from a living person obsessed with restarting a passionate relationship with his wife to a "dead" who cares about absolutely nothing, is both chilling and disturbing. The standard love triangle Gorge and the two deads Kent and Sybille) is made unique in this story and others. One part of the triangle is unable to "bridge" the gap to reach the other (or others) because some science fictional device sets up a barrier between the protagonist and others, and he is a fundamentally different being from them. The sexuality associated with this triangular relationship, whether it involves an encounter with aliens (or an encounter under the manipulation of aliens), genetically altered beings, "rekindled" immortals, or androids, always emphasizes the boredom and meaninglessness of the attempt at bonding. The science fictional "Others" may represent metaphors for not only the male encountering its Other as a female (and vice versa), but also the human being encountering its Other as another human being. Thus Jorge cannot penetrate the remainder of the triangle of the deads, Kent and Sybille. When he becomes a dead, he loses all emotion and desire and so is still separate from her and them. In "Caliban," the protagonist cannot bridge the gap with the "perfect" blonde women, on the one hand, and the male scientists who manipulate genetics on the other. In "Passengers," Roth cannot connect with either Helen or the invisible aliens who possess his body. In "To See the Invisible Man," the protagonist cannot reach out to either the society that sentences him or the fellow Invisible. And in the final story to be discussed, "Amanda and the Alien" (1983), the teenage girl cannot successfully bond with either her boyfriend Charley or the alien. First published in Omni magazine in 1983, "Amanda and the Alien" playfully presents a teenage femme fatale who outsmarts, uses, and then betrays to the police a shape-changing alien. Essentially a cannibal

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that wants to devour her as it has devoured a previous girl, the alien is fooled, tamed, used for sexual gratification, and then virtually captured (and, one suspects, destroyed) by her and the police. In retaliation for being spurned by her boyfriend Charley, Amanda traps Charley into being eaten and possessed by the alien and makes love to the body of Charley, which the alien now controls. But, as usual, the sexual experience becomes tiresome, mechanical, and meaningless. She quickly tires of the novelty of her experiences with the alien, and she uses and rejects the alien/Charley just as Charley earlier had used and rejected her. As a cold, isolated, precocious manipulator, she is something like a hip kid sister of David Selig in Dying Inside. Initially, Amanda acts as a friendly "little mother" to the alien that has taken the form of a Chicana girl, advising, feeding, and bathing her, and accidentally "doping" her with oregano. But this relationship changes when Amanda, in self-preservation, becomes a femme fatale, convinces the alien to "absorb" her boyfriend and make love to her in the form of Charley's body, then drugs the alien and phones the police. The alien lives by "eating" animals and plants, but at the end, when Amanda finally feeds it the spice drug it craves, the alien is destroyed. Both Amanda and the alien seem to "feed" vicariously on the sexual experiences and emotions of others. The story has three "takes." First, after Amanda befriends the Chicana girl, it appears that the alien will eat Amanda, despite her initial promise not to turn in the alien to the police. Second, it seems that she will make love with the alien in the form of Charley and, as she decides how to outwit the alien, to keep him as some sort of sexual pet. Third, Amanda finally drops the alien/Charley into the arms of the police. Cool and unconcerned, Amanda can always find "a man there" ("A" "man" "da"). In a playful switch on previous Silverberg stories, which also inverts and parodies the usual science fictional cliche, it is not the invading alien who is the dangerous manipulator, but the teenage California girl instead. The major devices or "gimmicks" in Silverberg's stories-psychic powers, mental links, time travel to encounter alter egos, alien contacts and possessions, mind-body exchanges, "rekindled" immortality, religious visions, and so forth-all become metaphors for the attempt by the protagonists to establish a bond of transcendent communication with another person. Yet these devices, whose novelty soon wears off, are also metaphors for the writing and reading of science fiction as a vehicle for interpersonal communication. The ironic twist endings only emphasize the alienation and isolation of the individual in an indifferent society and the immense difficulty, if not impossibility, of establishing such a permanent bond of communication. In summarizing my argument, I wish to be clear about what I am not

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implying. I am not denying that Robert Silverberg's fiction has improved over the decades and that he has become a better, more sophisticated writer. What I am objecting to is the idea of sudden transformations of the writer with distinct phases that lack continuity. It has been said that many authors have only one story with a few characters, which they tell and retell endlessly. This is not true of Silverberg either, as would be shown in sampling other works and other aspects of the five stories discussed. Silverberg did not abruptly blossom into a "literary" author, forsaking his earlier grounding in the craft and experimenting only with avant-garde modernist or postmodemist techniques of writing. If so, he would have jettisoned the twist ending as something most "experimental" writers would consider hackneyed, and perhaps even gotten rid of the existentialist motifs, which many of the recent avant-garde consider passe. Neither is Silverberg a dyed-in-the-wool commercial writer and "good old-fashioned storyteller" who, at one time, when it was fashionable and marketable, pretended to be one of the avant-garde, all the while retaining commercial gimmicks such as the twist ending. First, Silverberg's twist endings are not the norm in the bulk of commercial science fiction of the last two decades. Second, they are unique even among science fiction stories with twist endings. Third, his stylistic experimentation shows a gradual development and continuing concern with technique. It is not surprising that Silverberg, a comparative literature major at Columbia University in the early 1950s, should renovate existentialist themes of alienation using science fiction devices as new metaphors. Nor is it surprising that Silverberg's obsession with technique allowed further stylistic experimentation even while he relied on a formulation of the craft of storytelling he discovered in the 1950s. It may be perceived that there is a brand new Robert Silverberg now, beginning with Lord Valentine's Castle, an author who writes epic fantasy and science fiction about strange landscapes and wonder-filled worlds, stories that are filled with stylistic experimentation and that revamp and recombine familiar themes. But in many respects, this is the same old Robert Silverberg, still obsessed with technique, still refurbishing the "latest thing," still telling interesting stories with new twists.

NOTES 1. Barry Malzberg claims that Silverberg in the 1960s began to treat cliched SF themes with modern literary technique. See Barry Malzberg, "Robert Silverberg," Fantasy and Science Fiction 46 (April 1974): 69. See also Russell Letson, "Falling through Many Trapdoors" Extrapolation 20 (1979): 109-117. 2. Robert Silverberg uses the term "psychiC cannibalism" about his fiction in his introduction to "Flies" in The Best of Robert Silverberg, vol. 1 (New York: Pocket, 1976), p. 80.

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WORKS CITED Clareson, Thomas D. "The Fictions of Robert Silverberg." In Voices for the Future: Essays on Major Scit?llce Fiction Writers, ed. Thomas D. Clareson, vol. 2. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1979, pp.1-33. - - - . Robert Silverberg. Starmont Reader's Guide, No. 18. Mercer Island, W A: Starmont House, 1983. Letson, Russell. " 'Falling through Many Trapdoors': Robert Silverberg." Extrapolation 20 (Summer 1979): 109-17. Poe, Edgar Allan. "The American Drama." The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. James Harrison, New York: Kelmscott SOciety, 1902. 16 vols. Rpt. New York: AMS Press; 1965a, pp. 33-73. - - . Marginalia. Edgar Allan Poe, ed. James Harrison, 16 vols. 1902. Rpt. New York: AMC, 1965b, pp. 1-178. Silverberg, Robert. "Amanda and the Alien" Omni (May 1983): 60-70. - - - . "Born with the Dead." In Silverberg'S Born with the Dead. New York: Random House, 1974, pp. 1-97. Cited as "Born." - - - . "Caliban." In Unfamiliar Territory. New York: Scribner's, 1973, pp. 6376. Cited as "CaJiban." - - - . "Passengers." In The Best of Robert Silverberg. Vol. 1. New York: Pocket. 1976, pp. 151-65. Cited as "Passengers." - - - . Robert Silverberg's Worlds of Wonder: Explorillg the Craft of Scit?llce Fictioll. New York: Warner, 1987. Cited as WoW. - - - . "Sounding Brass, Tinkling Cymbal." In Hell's Cartograpiters, ed. Brian Aldiss and Harry Harrison. New York: Harper and Row, 1975, pp. 7-45. Cited as "Sounding." - - - . "To See the Invisible Man." In The Best of Robert Silverberg, vol. 1. New York: Pocket, 1976, pp. 49-62. Cited as "To See."

5 Personal Identity in the Majipoor Trilogy, To Live Again, and Downward to the Earth JOHN H. FLODSTROM

I

If your memories and personality were recorded and transferred to another body, would that still be you? Dominin Barjazid did it, and the consensus of the characters in Lord Valentine's Castle (1980; rpt. 1981) who have learned of his trickery is that in his new body he remains who he was in his original body. But what are the grounds for saying that the identity of a person can or cannot be transferred from one body to another? Thinkers have been quarreling about the problems of personal identity for centuries without reaching any agreement. One strategy for dealing with the problem of personal identity is to break it into several different problems and attack each of these separately. Much work has been done on such questions as the following: 1. Is bodily continuity a sufficient criterion for establishing the identity of

a person, for reidentifying a person with the certainty that this person is one and the same as he or she was at an earlier time? If we know beyond any shadow of a doubt that the body is the same, are we therefore guaranteed that the person is the same? Can we be absolutely certain, for example, that the person connected with a particular body, with its own uni9ue and identifiable characteristics (e.g., fingerprints, etc.), is the perSon responsible for some past action when we have absolute proof that this is the body involved in the act?

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Robert Silverberg's Many Trapdoors 2. Is the person a bundle of experiences and memories of experience? Is the criterion for determining that this person is the same person who existed at an earlier time and performed a particular action the fact that the individual remembers having performed the action? In this case and that of the bodily criterion, what does it mean to say that the "same" person will continue on into the future? 3. What is it that is most important to the existence of a person, and how is this core related to what is important in other individuals of the same species? The latter question-individuating a particular within a class or species-has weighty implications when considering the related question of what it is that makes one who one truly is.

How these questions might be answered is crucial to an understanding of Robert Silverberg's novels. The first two questions are dealt with in all the novels we shall discuss. The third set of questions is especially important in Downward to the Earth (1970):'Analyzing these and other such questions is essential to understanding and solving the problem of personal identity, but this is only a first step. Each subproblem involves a broader problem, and it is too simplistic to assume that the whole problem has been solved even when we have tentative solutions to each of the subproblems. It is not enough to determine how personal identity is related to the body or to memory without answering the other questions as well. It may be impossible to complete the discussion of one of these areas without having worked out the other areas. An adequate solution must provide an overall picture that relates these different aspects of the general problem to one another. The work of Robert Silverberg is particularly apt for this purpose. He discusses problems of personal identity and proposes models for a variety of integrated solutions for the general problem. Losing the sense of selfhood, forgetting one's earlier existence, transferring memories from one mind to another, discovering aspects and layers of oneself that had been hidden, continuing the existence of the self beyond the life of a specific body-these are themes that impel any number of Silverberg's short stories and novels. The attainment or lack of attainment of selfknowledge that comes from these discoveries and "unions of self and self" (NW 86), determines in his stories whether this knowledge will find expression in activity that produces a fuller, more expanded, more healthy life for both the individual and the SOciety. Silverberg'S insights into the mechanics through which the individual person gains an integrated personality and satisfactorily integrates into the fabric of the community-as well as the insights into the mechanics of failure in these endeavors-make an examination of these problems well worth our while. The numerous conflicting views concerning the basis and criteria for

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personal identity suggest a field in a state of chaos. Writers often attempt to prove all other views wrong before defending their own view. This is not an expedient way to gain the fullest knowledge concerning this issue. Amelie O. Rorty, in the introduction to The Identities of Persons, states that the need is not for more elaborate strategies concerning criteria for personal identity but for "an understanding of these conflicting interpretations of what has been at issue" (Rorty 1976, 1). What is needed in philosophy is often not so much a refutation of views as a harmonization of conflicting interpretations, finding a more c~mprehensive viewpoint that will incorporate the insights found in other positions into a fuller view of the matter. Approaching personal identity from different directions and studying the difficulties and possible outcomes involved in each case, Silverberg's novels give much material that helps to harmonize these different perspectives. Some stories deal with the problem in a context limited by the most ordinary states of everyday consciousness. In other works, the problem is examined in a context in which the characters experience different realities in different state of consciousness that are more comprehensive than ordinary. Reading Silverberg's works, one becomes strongly aware that a successful solution to the problems concerning personal identity must take into account body, mind, and feeling, physiology and psychology, the individual, the environment, and society. II

In works like To Live Again (1969) and The Second Trip (1972; rpt. 1981), Silverberg deals with questions relating personal identity to bodily identity and control of the body. In the former novel, individuals have "psycho-recordings" made during their lifetime, so that after death such a recording might be imprinted onto a living brain, thus granting the implanted personage another chance to live, which that individual might consider a chance at immortality. The advantage of this procedure to the person receiving the implant is that the whole range of the implanted personage-its memories, emotions, ways of thinking and choosing, and so forth-would be available to the recipient of the implant. The danger is that the implanted persona might begin to take over the body of the host, thus gaining autonomous existence at the host's expense. In The Second Trip, a criminal is punished by having his memoriesand, in fact, his whole personality-annihilated. The body is then imprinted with a new set of mental traits and memories, develops a new personality, and is regarded as a different person. (The story line describes the conflicts ~hat arise as the criminal reemerges and attempts a takeover of the body.) In a case of this sort, several problems arise. There are certain simi-

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larities to a case of trauma-induced amnesia and recovery, where the amnesiac begins to recall old memories. In this case of memory annihilation and the construction of a new personality, however, the reemergent original personality associated with the body does not identify with the constructed personality inhabiting the body. This, then, is more similar to a case of multiple personality than to one of a recovering amnesiac. Neither of the personalities in the body is even sure that the "memories" belonging to this new personality correspond to events that actually occurred. If these events did occur, they are known-or at least suspected-by both inhabitants of the body not to have had any relation with the agent and experience that developed in this body. These memories have been impl~ted i.{\ the process of personality construction so that the new personality might bave a "lifetime of memories" like any normal person. ., This break between memory and the recognition of the memory as one's own casts doubt upon the feasibility of taking mere memory of events as the criterion of personal identity. Even if this dubious criterion is accepted, the question arises as to whether this new set of memories, this new "personality," is really a person, since it never had the experiences that would have caused the "memories" that it recalls. There is a pointed contrast between the protagonist of The Second Trip, for whom a set of "memories" is manufactured, and that of Dominin Barjazid in Lord Valentine's Castle. Barjazid is described as moving into another body and having access to the memories of the person to whom the body rightfully belonged; Barjazid is passed off for the person who had lived the remembered events .. Downward to the Earth, To Live Again, The World Inside (1971), and the Majipoor trilogy (Lord Valentine's Castle, Majipoor Chronicles [1982], and Valentine Pontifex [1983] ) are significant studies of self-consciousness and its relation to the problems of personal identity. Silverberg takes selfconsciousness to be fundamental to personal identity. When the self is known only within the boundaries of ordinary experience, the individual is unable to gain sufficient knowledge of the world to be able to act in the world in the manner that circumstances demand: such an individual is deficient in self-consciousness. These works focus upon the struggle of individuals to gain a fullness of life felt to be absent from their ordinary experience. They find the limits of everyday awareness unacceptably restricting in its content and in its span of time. Finitude weighs heavily upon the main characters of these novels, who learn that escaping from finitude depends upon the discovering the wholeness of the self. In these novels, the main characters have some crucial experience that is recognized as providing a level of existence lacking in ordinary experience. Some of the characters grasp the significance of this experience-or have its significance forced upon them-and accept the responsibility

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for doing what is necessary to sustain this higher level of existence. Others do not grasp its significance or fail to make the necessary transition. After some awareness is gained of the possibility of expanding beyond ordinary experience, the protagonists who accept the responsibility for unfolding their fuller potential begin a search that becomes the dominating force in their lives. Everyday objects, values, and experiences are put into a new perspective; these everyday experiences must be totally transcended to regain and master them. Downward to the Earth deals with another problem of personal identity, that of individuating the individual from the species. Individual identity is seen as intimately related to one's relation to the species as a whole. The individual finds true selfhood only after uniting with the species, thus becoming perfected as a member of that species. The protagonist of Downward to the Earth finds fulfillment of his self and also selfknowledge when he transcends the self and gains union with all other minds (and, in fact, with the universe). This novel differs in significant ways from a novel like To Live Again, in which the incorporated personae are subordinate to their host, who intends to maintain control over them. The host mind is enriched by having the persona's experiences, creativity, and ways of thinking at its disposal. There is, however, no real sense of union with the persona(e) that one has incorporated. Neither those who have made thefr persona recordings nor those who have received personae have transcended the self. They have not had Gundersen's experience-an experience providing him insight into his most essential nature. They remain locked within the limits of their own experiences and those of their implanted personae. Their fulfillment, too, remains limited in this way. . In "Survival and Identity," David Lewis lists two qualities that people find important for survival: mental continuity and connectedness (Lewis 1976, 17). The present state of mind must be part of a continuing stream of similar mental states that flow gradually one into the next and that are causally dependent upon their predecessors. We agree that this is the ordinary view of the matter. Many of us want our empirical existence to continue as close to its present state as possible. This is the view that is found in characters like John Roditis in To Live Again, who is the advocate of "the modem materialistic cult of rebirth" (TLA 10), a "materialism" that allows the recirculation/reincarnation/rebirth of "souls." These souls have been recorded and stored with all their memories, feelings, talents, and so forth. They have not experienced "nirvana" (which Roditis equates with oblivion) and do not wish to be "liberated from existence": Roditis shuffled fQrward through clouds of incense, his sandals sliding on the smooth stone floor. Over the arch of the door he found another slogan in letters of gold:

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There are, however, individuals who find mere continuity of earthly material, sensual existence to be an unsatisfactory answer. In most such instances, dissatisfaction is brought about by alleged realizations (often sudden) of a type of experience that transforms one's attitude and outlook on life in general. Such an expansion of the boundaries of one's awareness or deepening of one's state of consciousness is claimed to transform the manner in which one sees oneself to the point that one may no longer wish to return to one's previous state of existence and, should it happen that the earlier state return, one would long to regain the newfound state. That this type of transformation of existence can and does occur is good evidence that what is important about personal identity is not totally caught by David Lewis's position. "What matters in survival is identity" (Lewis 1976, 18). This holds both in the case of someone who has no more than ordinary experience and in the case of one who has had at least a glimpse of heightened experience. In the two cases, what differs is what will count as identity for the person involved. "I" will mean different things in these contrasting states.

III

Downward to the Earth describes the return of Edmund Gundersen to the planet once called "Holman's World" (but now once more called by its original name, "Belzagor"), after Earth had adopted a policy of returning control of all planets possessing intelligent life before their discovery by humans to the intelligent species native to those planets (in this case to the nildoror and the sulidoror of Belzagor). Gundersen returns to Belzagor to undergo the purificatory rites of rebirth. In forcing us to take a serious look at how we are to relate ourselves to others, this novel directly attacks the problems of personhood, self-identity, the essence and limits of human nature, and the nature of consciousness itself. The fundamental answer it suggests is one found since the beginnings of philosophy: Know thyself. Silverberg describes the process

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that must be undergone to gain full self-knowledge. It involves shattering and transcending the old self-the process of rebirth. An important commercial venture on Belzagor is collecting venom produced by certain serpents on the planet. This venom has important human medical uses. The workers at the "serpent station" learn that this venom is also used in the rebirth ceremony of the nildoror and begin to experiment with the venom. Gundersen joins Kurtz, another worker at the station, and three nildoror in consuming some of the venom, thereby attaining a partial union with the consciousness of those nildoror. At the end of this experience, Gundersen is left both with a sense of extreme guilt at having illegitimately entered a realm of awareness reserved to those who had prepared themselves for it through prescribed rites and with a longing to uncover the fullness of that union. The discovery that human awareness can expand well beyond its present limits and that the boundaries of present awareness lead to erroneous ways of thinking and acting make many of the humans who have lived on Belzagor aware of a need for "redemption," impelling them to search for a higher knowledge and transcendent awareness. Gundersen feels guilt about this earlier mistreatment of the native species on Belzagor, which had been based upon an indifference to their nature and values amounting to a refusal to understand them. His dealings with the nildoror had been in the role of superior being who brought them the possibility of raising themselves to the level of human culture (DttE 15). He had been unable to treat them as anything other than very clever animals. His acceptance of the nildoror and the sulidoror as persons will require him to reexamine what it means for him to be a person. The intimation of transcendence that he had when using the venom made him indirectly aware of the seriousness of his transgression against the nildoror. This led him to return to the land of these alien beings in order to attempt their process of rebirth. That there are dangers in this process is very clear to Gundersen. He is warned that should he attempt the process he would "cease to be human." Gundersen replies, "I've tried being human for quite a while. Maybe it's time to try something else" (DttE 118). The rebirth ceremony holds out the promise of an experience infinitely greater than that which he had been living. Those who have successfully undergone rebirth describe the results as "some sort of transcendental merging with the universe, an evolution to the next bodily level, a sublime ascent-that kind of thing" (DttE 139). Gundersen decides to attempt rebirth. This begins with an arduous voyage by foot across the mist country, during which he begins to experience a physical, mental, and spiritual growth. Once he finally enters the mountain of rebirth, Gundersen sees the process taking place. Here he discovers that the' ordinarily observed laws of nature seem to have been replaced by other laws: "He saw nothing but miracles. He was in

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a garden of fantasies where no natural barriers held" (DttE 164). He realizes that in order to be born to a higher level of existence, he must die to the existence and self he had always known. Gundersen accepts this and begins the actual process of rebirth. Having transcended the whole physical world, the process of reorganization of his physiology and consciousness begins. I This radical restructuring of his being transforms him into a person who has realized the ability to go beyond his previous limitations and attain an awareness of his harmony with all that exists. But the transformed Gundersen is not a new person: he is simply one who has actualized the potential that was dormant in his earlier existence. This awareness of his unity with the universe both "awes and humbles him," and he "sees what it is like to live among people who have learned to liberate the prisoner in the skull" (DttE 171). The transformation of his awareness has been accomplished by an equally total transformation of his body. The new body that is developed "glows like transparent glass. He is glistening, a transparent man through whom the light of the great sun at the core of the universe passes without resistance." His new existence is "without limits"; he "partakes of the biological wisdom of the cosmos" (DttE 171). When he returns to the world outside the mountain after the process of rebirth is complete, Gundersen finds that his body appears to be what it was beforehand, but an essential change has taken place. When asked if he could "feel the changes," Gundersen replies: ''The changes are within me," said Gundersen. ''Yes, Now you are at peace." And, surprised bYioy, he realized that that was so. The fears, the conflicts, the tensions, were gone. Guilt was gone. Sorrow was gone .... He smiled. He had never felt so free, so light, so young. (DttE 178-79)

This discovery of his true self leads Gundersen beyond the boundaries that he had accepted throughout his life as limiting what he was and what he could be. He becomes aware of "how little Earthmen knew, and how little they were capable of learning" (DttE 176) when restricted to the accepted human ways of knOWing. The self that Gundersen discovers is a self united with reality itself and through that with all other beings. This unity is both a universal knowledge of the cosmos and a particular ability to know the minds of all who have undergone rebirth. Gundersen discovers that his earlier lack of a sense of identity as a person was a result of his lack of a sense of wholeness and of full selfknowledge. David Hume's description of the self as a bundle of impressions and ideas with no underlying principle of identity would correctly describe Gundersen's experience before he had gained an awareness beyond the level of perception, memory, and ideation. The "rebirth"

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produces an awareness that expands the self beyond its previous "personal" boundaries. This awareness of a unity with all is the basis for the full sense of personal identity that develops in Gundersen. Such a foundation for the identity of an individual person by means of identifying with the universal presents a paradox. How is the individual to be distinguished from the universal? Individual and universal would seem to be polar opposites rather than somehow one. A clue to this relationship is given in the explanation of the mechanics of enlightenment attributed to the Indian sage Gaudapadacharya: enlightenment comes not from the annihilation of the self but from the expansion of the self to infinity (Mandukyopanishad 1949, 3: 35). Experience within the boundaries of individuality would thus appear to be an expression of a more full, unbounded, experience-an experience that transcends perception of particulars. This transcendental, universal experience is a sort of unified field out of which individualities emerge. Since the individual is a manifestation of this unified field, the individual has a reality that is grounded in the universal wholeness. But this individual reality loses its authenticity when it considers itself to be a self-sufficient reality within its own boundaries: cut off from its source, the individual both deceives itself by taking itself for the whole and ultimate reality and loses the basis for responsible and free activity. The individual, ignorant of its true nature, sets its private law against the universal laws of nature, thus undermining its own power. If universal unboundedness is the ground of the personal identity of the individual, the question arises whether the empirical self, the individual who has not had heightened experience, is truly a person. This problem has been discussed in the West at least since the time of Pythagoras, Plato, and Aristotle. Our concern with personal identity has traditionally been with the empirical self. When Aristotle allows only that part of the soul that has attained knowledge of universals to be capable of survival, ruling out all memories of particular events, experiences, and individuals (since nothing that involves sense can be capable of existence without the bodily organs of sense), one feels cheated, wondering, What will become of me? IV

Silverberg addresses this question in the Majipoor trilogy, in which questions concerning the criteria of personal identity are fundamental. Silverberg asks whether the identity of the body, memory, conscious awareness, or even recognition by others establishes the identity of the person. The attempt to reduce personal identity to one or the other of these criteria to the exclusion of the others leaves us with an incomplete account of the human reality. Memories and phYSiology are intimately

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connected. The state of the body and self-awareness are highly interdependent. Aristotle had held that the empirical self's memories could not subsist independently from the body. Silverberg takes all of the above mentioned criteria to be important in considering the constitution of the individual, but certain criteria are much more significant and are the foundation for all the rest. The first novel of the series, Lord Valentine's Castle, is based on the premise that Lord Valentine's awareness (without his memories) has been transferred into a body, not his own, that retains language and motor skills but is basically a tabula rasa. Simultaneously, the mind of the usurper, Dominin Barjazid, has been transferred into Lord Valentine's original body. These transfers have been produced through some sort of mechanical (EEG imprint?) process, similar to the Scheffing process of implanting and erasing persona depicted in To Live Again. Lord Valentine's awareness finds itself in the position of having to start life over without memories of any earlier existence. The first scene of the novel ends with the appearance of the usurper in Lord Valentine's body making a tour of the empire of which Lord Valentine had only recently become ruler. None of the subjects of the kingdom, Valentine included, suspects that there has been foul play or that the person they are greeting is not really their rightful ruler. The novel thus raises the question Which is the true Lord Valentine? The usurper knows the answer, but it is an answer that deposed Lord Valentine will come to discover and accept only much later, later than some of his associates. But are the criteria they use for answering the question legitimate? By separating the awareness that belonged to the person from his body, Silverberg has provided a vivid "thought experiment" to determine whether a person is simply one's body. John Perry, in his essay liThe Problem of Personal Identity" (Perry 1975, 5), attributes this puzzle to the assumption that most people make in identifying a person by means of body in ordinary life, an assumption that makes for a good deal of the novel's plot. Silverberg is aware of this widespread tendency as well as of the importance of body image and the sense of the "lived body" to one's self-image. In his exposition of the process through which Lord Valentine regains his full self-awareness, Silverberg never overlooks bodily awareness (and the awareness that others have of one's body) while exploring the elements involved in selfconsciousness and the identity of the person. In doing this, he implicitly denies the view held by some-Bernard Williams (Rorty 1976, 179-98), for example-that the identity of the person is founded upon the structural and causal continuity of the body. If we start from a behavioristic foundation in the study of personal identity, it is likely that we will confuse the legal criteria for determining personal identity with the definition of personal identity. These are two

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different questions. The legal criteria are concerned with assigning praise or blame. That a particular body went through a series of motions is evidence that the person performed an act but is not sufficient to attribute responsibility for the act to the person. Responsibility entails that the person was aware of performing the act and had chosen to perform it. A behavioristic approach is not adequate on the level of responsibility; although it may be all we have to go on in a court of law, it does not work in the confessional. Morality is not determined on the basis of external actions alone. For this reason, as is pointed out by Amelie Oksenberg Rorty, by focusing upon legal liability, John Locke finds that the criterion for personal identity involves the conditions for being a responsible agent, and demands "continuity of reflective consciousness, established primarily by memory" (Rorty 1976, 4). Silverberg is concerned with both liability for past actions and responsibility for future acts. He seems to find the basis for the identity of the self in an "I" which is the foundation for memory and personality traits. Decisions concerning personal identity involve attributions of reward and punishment, intention and responsibility, character and motivation. The people inhabiting Majipoor's provinces are concerned with establishing who their true ruler is. Usurpation of the body upon which the crown rests raises new kinds of questions about the procedures for determining regal status. The question is asked whether the people should take their oath to "the soul and spirit of Lord Valentine or to his face and beard" (LVC 357). There is, however, something more than accumulated events and memories that creates the person. At the opening of Lord Valentine's Castle, Valentine has lost his memories: the whole novel describes his growth in "his return to self-awareness" (LVC 251), which is the basis for his search for his memories. Rather than constituting his self, the regaining of memories reminds Valentine of who he is, of "the Lord Valentine he had once been, that he might someday be again, [that] was a hidden substratum in his spirit, rarely operative but never to be ignored" (LVC 248). Valentine's loss of memory has taken place on two levels: he has forgotten the individual events that had occurred throughout his life, and he has forgotten "who he is"-the underlying self that lived these individual experiences and incorporated them into the wholeness of a single life. This underlying self turns out to be the crucial element. Though it is more difficult to identify, this is what is recognized as the true reality by the Lady of the Isle of Sleep (LVC 287-89), Valentine's mother, and by others, like the wizard Autifon Deliamber (LVC 98-99) and the dream-speaker, Tisana (LVC 77-83), who had developed the ability to see the deeper workings of the mind. Lord Valentine's Castle follows the growth of Valentine's recovery of his self and kingdom. Like Downward to the Earth, it is the account of an

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odyssey. Valentine has fallen from a position of great height and spends time wandering over the face of the world, undergoing many hardships and adventures in the process of regaining memory of his self, a self much more whole and wise as a result of the knowledge gained in the course of his wandering. Much of this knowledge is gained through the use of techniques for deepening awareness of the inner workings of the mind. As Valentine develops the ability to experience the subtler levels of his own mind, he begins to gain the ability to communicate directly with other minds. Valentine became increasingly skilled in the use of a technique that he had been taught in childhood, the technique of slipping into the "trance-like" state intermediate between sleeping and waking, the "floating-point" (LVC 284) at the center of his soul (L VC 309), which permitted him to place himself "at a distance from [a dream] and watch it unfold" (LVC 14). He also develops self-awareness through learning the art of juggling, having been adopted by a troupe of carnival jugglers. Juggling "teaches calmness, control, balance, a sense of the placement of things and the underlying structure of motion. There is silent music to it. Above all there is discipline." It teaches how to "travel to the center of your being and hold yourself there" (LVC 30). Before long, Valentine begins to master the art of juggling and that of unfolding himself. As juggling becomes natural and effortless, Valentine finds that "somehow his consciousness was split, one part making precise and accurate catches and tosses, the other monitoring the floating and descending balls." Time stands still and, having moved to "the inner nature of movement," he discovers that movement is really an illusion. "Now Valentine saw the mystery of the art. He had entered into infinity. By splitting his consciousness he had unified it" (L VC 33). This development within his consciousness gives Valentine new and more profound experiences within the realm of awareness and knowledge. As his awareness grows, he gains both an increasing sense of his own identity as a person and a sense of harmony with and control over the environment. In the face of new adventures and crises, his stronger sense of self-identity gives him the ability to make proper and decisive choices and perform the actions required for the restoration of order to his world. As he moves from being a "cheerful and simple idler" (LVC 158) to a person with greater comprehension of his overwhelming responsibilities, he feels himself undergOing an "inner transition" accompanied by "a growing ability to discern and discard the irrelevant" (LVC 271).

After he becomes convinced that he truly is the rightful Coronal of Majipoor, Valentine makes his way to his mother on the Isle of Sleep. (The mother of the Coronal automatically becomes one of the major powers of Majipoor, the others being Coronal, Pontifex, and the King

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of Dreams.) When Valentine at last arrives in her presence, she confirms that he truly is her son, the true Coronal, who had been cast out of his body by the usurper Dominin Barjazid. She then tests his mind and finds that much of his original self remains--"far more than your enemies could ever suspect. Their scheme was faulty; they thought they had expunged you, when they only fuddled and disordered you" (LVC 290). Through his own discipline, under the guidance of his mother, Valentine finally gains remembrance of his former self. This knowledge is integrated with the experiences he has had since his new embodiment. When he finally gains complete control over his self and his emotions, he becomes ready to assume the role of ruler: "Conquest over self was the finest of victories: all else must follow, Valentine knew" (LVC 433). V

The second book of the Majipoor trilogy, the Majipoor Chronicles, is a sort of interlude in the development of the Lord Valentine story. It gives us glimpses of important incidents in the history of the planet and, especially, in the education of Hissune, Lord Valentine's successor as Coronal. A technology similar to that found in To Live Again is used: for the past 9,000 years, citizens of Majipoor had been making "memoryreadings," which are stored in the Register of Souls, a branch of the House of Records. Hissune, who had been Valentine's ten-year-old guide through the Labyrinth in the days of his wandering, had been recognized as special by Valentine and assigned to a job in the House of Records as part of his training for a government post. To overcome the boredom of shuffling papers, Hissune forges a pass and without official approval, or so he thinks, begins to "roam the minds of millions of folk long dead, explorers, pioneers, even Coronals and Pontifexes" (MC 20). A major difference between To Live Again and Majipoor Chronicles is that in the latter novel the memories recorded in the capsules, though experienced vividly and completely on all levels of the senses, mind, and feelings, are not incorporated into the viewer as separate selves. They are always considered by the viewer to be the memories of another person. They may have an extremely strong effect upon the viewer, often giving a whole new direction to the viewer's life and, as we see in Hissune's case, giving him knowledge and experience that dramatically change his personality; but they do this in the same way that a good theater performance does. Any change that comes about is a change from within in reaction to the events experienced. Though powerful, what Hissune ~xperiences in the Register of Souls is still an ordinary experience in" the growth of a person. The characters whose memory-readings he observes do not actively attempt to take over his

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self. He merely observes them in a most intimate manner. He is changed by what he has observed but is still Hissune, Hissune enriched by new perspectives and perceptions. Unlike Valentine, there is never any question concerning who Hissune is. It is interesting to watch the development of Hissune as he grows through the three novels. At first he is seen to be most clever, talented, and multifaceted. Nonetheless, he does not yet have the depth that Valentine has or that possessed by Gundersen, or even by characters such as Siegmund in The World Inside or Charles Noyes and John Roditis in To Live Again. Hissune has faced neither absolute awareness nor the real possibility of his own annihilation. All of his choices have been within the realm of everyday, albeit highly unusual, existence. Hissune is a good and extremely competent person and will obviously make a good Coronal. Hissune will be the first Coronal within memory that has not come from the nobility. In many ways he is as exceptional as Valentine. He is more disciplined than any of his peers. He has many ideas and can leave behind ways of thinking that are limited or that no longer apply. Hissune's early education causes him to break many boundaries, but none of these are radical breaks into another mode of awareness. Lord Valentine has the additional dimension of the transcendent. However, like Valentine, Hissune begins to make his entry into the deeper levels of his consciousness. He does this through the discipline gained through the sport of "wielding the baton." The instruction he receives in this sport, more a discipline of the spirit than a pastime, teaches Hissune to modify his perception of the flow of time, thus allowing him to overcome the limitations imposed by time: As he had for many months been training himself to do, he shifted into the time-splitting mode of perception that Thani had instilled in him: viewing each second as the sum of ten tenths of itself, he allowed himself to dwell in each of those tenths in turn, the way one might dwell in each of ten caves on successive nights during the crossing of a desert. His perspective now was profoundly altered .... With the greatest simplicity of effort Hissune slipped himself into the interval between two slices of a moment and knocked Stimion's baton aside. (VP 164)

Silverberg puts much emphasis upon the process of education in the formation of his major characters. Few of them are static. They are thrown into situations that force them to grow or to fail. Some do not learn: these either meet tragic ends or go on living without awareness. Others show in their final moments that they actually have learnedsometimes too late, sometimes more than they could accept. More often than not, the protagonists in Silverberg's novels who succeed do so

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because of what they have discovered about the world and about themselves. They achieve a breadth and depth of knowledge that allow them to adjust to circumstances and take control of their lives and the situations in which they find themselves. Their education is a result of the individual character's interest in learning and of the efforts to face difficulties and surpass them, supplemented when needed by guidance from one who has achieved insight into reality and the means of leading others beyond their limitations. Silverberg is aware of the need for both experience and understanding to achieve full knowledge as well as of the need for full knowledge in order to attain wholeness of the self. The struggles and joys of learning appear throughout the novels we have discussed. Valentine Pontifex, the last of the Majipoor novels, gives an excellent illustration of how the learning process can continue after formal education has ended. VI

Lord Valentine, spurred on by events and the expectations of his subjects and his position, grows throughout Valentine Pontifex, the final novel of the series, in the knowledge of himself and his relationship with his world. Early in the novel, Hornkast, the high spokesman of the Pontifex, describes Valentine's task as Valentine is about to begin his grand processional through the continents of Majipoor. Valentine as Coronal is presented as being "the embodiment of Majipoor." This is more than a throwback to the traditional manner of referring to a ruler by the name of the country ruled (d., for example, Shakespeare's Henry V [5.2.2] ). No distinction is seen between the Coronal and the world he rules. He is identified with the world. As the Coronal is about to set out on this official visit to the people of his world, Hornkast explains the fuller significance of this journey: "He is not only going forth to the world, but he is going forth to himself-to a voyage into his own soul, to an encounter with the deepest roots of his identity." (VP 46). This speech of Hornkast's triggers in Valentine the remembrance of the time when the unity of his self and of his self with his world had earlier been shattered. This opens to him an awareness of "some great dark tunnel of mysteries" that leads to a fear born of a possible new loss of unity and of his ignorance of what was about to happen in his world and what he must do to restore and maintain order. At this point he feels that "some grim knowledge was striving to break through to his awareness" (VP 46), and he is overwhelmed by an experience of unity with the totality of his world, a totality that includes all the richness of his world and all its contradictions. The experience of union with this enormously varied World is not, however, at this point an experience of wholeness and harmony. The cause of this lack of wholeness appears

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to be Hornkast's lack of knowledge of what he must do, the limitation of his knowledge of this world and, since he is this world, of himself. He thus feels the weight of the world. He is overwhelmed by its diversity and plunged into a state of utter chaos: He felt a throbbing in his forehead, a humming in his ears. Then he experienced a powerful sense of himself here in the Labyrinth as on:upying a place at the precise center of the world, the core of the whole gigantic globe. But some irresistible force was pulling him from that place. Between one moment and the next his soul went surging from him as though it were a great mantle of light. ... In that dizzying moment he felt that he and the planet were one, that he embodied in himself the twenty billion people of Majipoor, humans and Skandars and Hjorts and Metamorphs and all the rest, moving within him like the corpuscles of his blood .... He was a boiling universe of contradictions and conflicts .... In the oceans of his soul vast sea dragons breached the surface and let forth monstrous bleating roars and dived again, to the uttermost depths. Faces without eyes hovered before him, grinning, leering. All at once, at once, at once, a terrible lunatic simultaneity. He stood in silence, bewildered, lost, as the room reeled wildlv about him .... With a desperate effort he pulled himself free of that grotesque hallucination .... He must speak. He must say words to these people. "Friends-" he began. And then came the dizzying plunge into chaos. (VP 47-48)

In the Majipoor trilogy, as it had been in DVU'I/'l{'tlrd to thc Earth, consciousness that has attained unity with the world is intimately tied to the attainment of full self-knowledge. Self-knowledge and self-mastery are prerequisites for governing. Faraataa, the leader of the Metamorph rebels, has an approximation of an experience of unity. However, his refusal to give up his hatred, his insistence upon vengeance, and hie; lust for destruction prevent him from transcending the limitations that would permit complete union. He attained a degree of union with the sea dragons, the "water-kings," but used it merely for his private purposes-for the purpose of communicating messages to other Metamorphs-and could not move beyond his limited ego: Faraataa felt the pull, and yielded himself to it, and was lifted upwJ.rd and out, leaving his body behind. In an instant ... he and Maazmoorn were one. Ecstasy overwhelmed him: that joining; that communion, was so potent that it could easily be an end in itself, a delight that fulfilled all yearnings, if he would allow it. But he never would allow it. The seat of the water-king's towering intelligence was itself like an ocean-limitless, all-enfolding, infinitely deep. Faraataa, sinking down and down and down, lost himself in it. But he never did lose awareness of his task. Through the strength of the water-king he would achieve what he never could have done unaided. (VP 90)

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It was his refusal to veer from his self-imposed task, grounded in hatred and the need for revenge, and his inability to see the broader social needs that prevented him from attaining real unity and thereby making himself worthy of governing. Lord Valentine, on the other hand, continued to grow in knowledge of the world and of himself. Willing to accept the guidance of others, perhaps a result of the time when he lived in his new body without memories, he was easily able to move beyond his previous limitations. He develops that ability to slip into "the walking trance" (VP 315; see LVC 283,308) that allows him to communicate with the minds of others. His continued practice of mental disciplines makes him capable of moving "deeper and deeper each day into a realm [the others] could not enter" (VP 310). Soon, "with scarcely an effort, ... awake or asleep, he moved deep into the soul of the world" (VP 310). As he becomes increasingly strong in his self-knowledge, he comes to feel "beyond all trifling concern with security, invulnerable, invincible" (VP 311). By allowing himself to transcend his own particularity, Valentine was able to unite with the soul of the world, by allowing himself to unite with the soul of the world, he came to know his own deepest self. Having gained knowledge of the deepest parts of his self, he thereby secured the roots of his identity. This gave him the ability to identify with all others, whether loyal subject and friend or longtime enemy. Such union and knowledge provided the ground upon which he could claim authority to govern. As Valentine Pontifex nears its conclusion, Valentine once again has the experience of union with his world. The experience is identical to the one he had earlier, with the difference that now he possesses the knowledge and self-mastery that allows him to see the wholeness of the universe. As unity has come to dominate his consciousness, he has gained the knowledge that gives the strength necessary to see the true nature of the world which he is one: In the oceans of his soul vast sea dragons breached the surface and let forth monstrous bleating roars and dived again, to the uttermost depths. He looked down and saw the broken places of the world, the wounded and shattered places where the land had risen and crashed against itself, and he saw how it all could be healed, how it could be made whole and serene again. For everything tended to return to serenity. Everything enfolded itself into That Which Is. Everything was a part of a vast seamless

harmony. (VP 340) VII

Robert Silverberg has introduced his readers to worlds of vast richness and diversity. The richest of these worlds is that of the mind and spirit

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of his characters. In novel after novel, the characters search for the fullness of experience, striving to unfold the greatness that is sensed to be their nature. In this attempt, the question Who am I? repeatedly comes to the foreground. Involved in answering this question is the search for one's true identity. What is it that continues throughout one's life that makes one the person that she or he accepts as being herself or himself? More generally, what is it that makes one truly human? What is that most important aspect of oneself, that core with which one identifies oneself, that which makes one's life a truly human life, a life worth living? Continuity of one's body does not suffice for Silverberg: Valentine unfolds the fullness of his self in a body that has not merely changed radically throughout his life but is the body in which another person not himself was born. Most of the characters we meet in To Live Again carry within themselves the implanted personae of one or more other selves. These cases are extreme notions. It seems probable, in spite of the remarkable successes that have been made in the area of organ transplants, that the sort of brain and nervous system transplant needed to place a person's consciousness in a new body will never be accomplished. The connection between physiology and mental life is intimate. Silverberg is well aware of this intimacy and explicitly recognizes both the impact that the new body has upon Valentine's body image and self image and the manner in which his bodily states and his conscious states influence one another. The field of psychology/psychiatry, however, is not at all unfamiliar with cases of multiple personalities in one body or with cases of amnesiacs who begin to recall their former lives after having developed into what most would consider to be a new person. In all such cases, what Silverberg sees as most essential is the relation of selfknowledge to self-identity. Memory would seem to play an essential role in the construction of this person. But the analyses that we have found in Silverberg's works shows that mere memory of events is not sufficient to produce personal identity. What does the remembering is much more fundamental, and this not in the sense of the grandeur of the events remembered, for a machine could record the greatest of events without developing anything that would resemble a self, much less an identical person. Memory, then, though important, is a secondary consideration. What is primary is consciousness: the fullness and depth and quality of the awareness that experiences, knows, feels, remembers, and creates. Silverberg does not limit his conception of consciousness to the fact of attending to an object. Mere awareness of an object or of a perception does not give the whole essence of consciousness since it leaves out of consideration the enormous range of possible qualities of awareness. The characters of his novels find that consciousness can be limited or

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unbounded, temporal or beyond the conditions of time and space. The self can identify with a whole range of events and perceptions as well as with a whole range of manners of being aware of these events and perceptions. Characters like Gundersen and Valentine achieve the status of whole selves who can recognize their selfhood and see it as that which gives meaning and wholeness to their lives. Other characters, like John Roditis in To Live Again and the false Coronals in Valentine Pontifex, identify with the particulars of their lives and never gain final realization of what their full potential is. Personal identity thus comes to ground itself in a paradox: one can achieve true personal identity only by attaining the fullness of consciousness, but full consciousness involves transcending the boundaries of one's individual self. The realization of the most profound level of one's own conscious life is found to be the basis of the person. Identity of the person is based upon the recognition of the continuity of this consciousness. Ultimate self-knowledge comes from awareness of the most fundamental level of one's consciousness. This is the self, the truth of the person, that which gives one the capacity to act properly and to fulfill one's responsibilities and therefore to fulfill one's self. The works of Robert Silverberg present us with possibilities within the realm of the human mind that may at first seem impossible or unreal. They have a certain power, however, that speaks for at least the hope that some of the expansion that his characters achieve might be within our own grasp. On the one hand, Eastern philosophy-which is not absent from Silverberg's writings-as well as important works in Western thought and literature describe states of consciousness that are beyond what most people experience. On the other hand, scientific research on the Transcendental Meditation (TM) technique, to take a familiar instance, shows that college students, baseball players, and people from all walks of life are regularly having experiences identical in kind with those recorded in the classic texts written by sages and saints, and this in spite of the fact that they may have begun the practice simply to reduce their blood pressure or to get a better night's sleep. The effect of such states of consciousness upon activity is seen to be positive, often more remarkable than that seen in the novels we have been discussing. The outcome of these meditative techniques is best described as allowing a person to transcend the localized experiences and states of mind with which one had identified oneself. The unboundedness of pure awareness then experienced is found to be a state of pure subjectivity, a state in which knower, object known, and process of knowing are one. Out of this pure field of self-referential consciousness emerge all particular events and experiences. Contact with this transcendental state reestablishes the balanced functioning of the physiology and de-

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velops a corresponding enlivenment of awareness. The meditators report an increased sense of well-being, self-realization, and freedom, along with more social and life-supporting behavioral patterns. Greater awareness of the more fundamental levels of their own natures appears to bring about increasing harmony with and support from the laws of nature active in the environment. The last few years have seen an increasing literature discussing the phenomenon of collective consciousness and its relation to higher states of consciousness. 2 From these reports, it appears that the practice of Transcendental Meditation and its related advanced techniques in a large group is particularly helpful both in developing the individual from ordinary wakefulness through the various states of enlightenment and in producing a profound effect upon the environment of this group of meditators. Such a system that gives an account of the various ordinary and higher states of consciousness, along with an account of their corresponding views of reality, provides a comprehensive viewpoint that allows many apparently conflicting descriptions of the mind, its experiences, and the realities experienced to be incorporated into an adequate worldview. Silverberg's descriptions of Gundersen's experience during "rebirth" and of Valentine's experiences of unity with his world thus may not be pure fantasy. They give us a vision of possibilities for individual awareness and for communication between individuals based upon the common attainment of what lies at the core of our being. We are forced to consider the possibility that what prevents this communication is the wall that the individual erects around his or her individual self and that communication with others may require that one transcend the boundaries one has set up, boundaries that bind one within the limited self, causing one to exist in isolation from others. One must transcend oneself in order to gain oneself. The integrity of the individual arises out of a union with something greater than the individual, with a universal reality that allows communion with a wholeness that can then impart wholeness to the individual person. Though the question remains whether enough people will take the message seriously in time to overcome the chaotic elements in society (and indeed in the universe), Silverberg expresses optimism through characters like Gundersen-an optimism not always found in his works-a character who, after an experience of unity, quietly returns to his friends and society to let them know of this possibility that can set things right. In his short stories as well as his novels (and even in his trilogies!), Robert Silverberg presents ideas in a manner that fully engages our intellect, emotions, and imagination. His masterful story-telling ability brings characters and situations alive. As we enter into the lives of his characters, we find ourselves grappling with the issues they face.

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Though his settings may be far removed from our contemporary world, we soon realize that his stories are very "true to life" and that we are thinking on a profound level about issues of universal import. The works we have examined give an example of Silverberg's capacity to deftly unfold philosophical arguments concerning fundamental human issues without ever falling into didacticism. In some powerful and beautiful pages, Silverberg describes a fantastic world that had long been relegated to "mystical" literature and poetry but has recently become the material described by physiologists, biochemists, and electroencephalographers. We may find that a literature that had been dismissed by some as mere entertainment has given us a glimpse of a reality that is truly hidden within each one of us and has the capacity to playa significant role in bringing about a fulfilled society that would resemble a heaven on earth.

NOTES 1. Upon first reading, this process of transformation-which involves the breakdown and reconstruction of the whole physiology-seemed to be a piece of pure and impossible fantasy. I have recently happened upon a description in the Indian Ayurvedic medical text by Caraka of a procedure that is remarkably parallel to that described by Silverberg: the transformation of the physiology of the person who has undergone the soma purification: Brahmasuvarcala is the herb having golden latex [sap] and lotus-like leaves: [Adityapami) is the herb which is known as "the sun's beloved" and has golden latex and flowers like the sun disc; ... soma is the king of herbs having fifteen nodes and increasing and decreasing according to the conditions of the moon; padma is the herb having shape, colour (red) and fragrance like that of lotus; ... nila is the climber plant having blue latex and flowers and diffused branches. Of these plants whichever are available should be [taken) in the form of juice in full quantity. Thereafter one should sleep naked in the covered tub made of wet palasa wood and anointed with fat. [After a while] he disappears and reappears in six months, then he should be maintained on goat's milk. In six months he becomes similar to gods in age, complexion, voice, face, strength and lustre; all the knowledge appears intuitively, he attains divine vision and audition, movement up to thousand yojanas [8,000 miles) and unafflicted life-span of the thousand years. (Caraka-Samhita 1, 4, 7)

As Kurtz is warned that one must prepare oneself properly for the "rebirth ceremony," so Caraka warns that "the effect of the divine herbs can be tolerated only by persons like [sages, hermits, and mendicants] and not by those with uncontrolled self." Nonetheless, these herbs can be used by householders as well as forest dwellers, as long as done "with proper carefulness and self control" (Caraka-Samhita 1, 4, 8-10). 2. In the large body of literature reporting the scientific research on the Transcendental Meditation lmd TM-Siddhis programs, the following works are especially relevant to some of the concepts we have discussed:

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Charles N. Alexander, Robert W. Boyer, and Victoria K. Alexander. "Higher States of Consciousness in the Vedic Psychology of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi." Modern Science and Vedic Science 1, no. 1 (1987): 88-126. Jean-Paul Banquet, "Spectral Analysis of the EEG in Meditation." ElectroenceI'ilalograpily and Ciil/ical Neurophysiulugy 35 (1973): 143-51. Reprint. David W. OrmeJohnson and John T. Farrow, eds., S"ientific Rl'sl'arcil Ull the Transcendental Meditation Programme; Col/ected PalJI'YS, vol. I. RheiweiJer, Germany: Maharishi European Research University Press, 1977. Michael C. Dillbeck, et al. "Consciousness as a Field: The Transcendental Meditation and the TM-Siddhi Program and Changes in Social Indicators." Journal of Mind and Behavior 8 (1987): 67-104.

WORKS CITED Caraka. Carako-Samhita: Agnivesa's Treatise Refined and Annotated by Carako and Reacted by Drdhabala: Text with English Translation/Editor-Translator, Priyavrat Sluirm. Varanasi: Chaukhambha Onentalia, 1981-(1983). Lewis, David. "Survival and Identity." In The Identities of Persons, ed. Amelie Rorty. Mandukyopanishad with Gaudapada's Karikn and Sanknra's Commentary, vol. 3. Swami Nikhilananda, trans. Mysore, India: Sri Ramakrishna Ashrama, 1949, p. 35. Perry, John. "The Problem of Personal Identity." In Personal Identity, ed. John Perry. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975. Rorty, Amelie Oksenberg. "Introduction." In The Identities of PerSOIlS, ed. Amelie Rorty. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976. Silverberg, Robert. Downward to the Earth. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1970. Cited as DttE. - - - . Lord Valentine's Castle. New York: Harper and Row, 1980. Reprint. New York: Bantam, 1981. Cited as LVe. (Page references are to the Bantam edition.) - - - . Majipoor Chronicles. New York: Arbor House, 1982. Cited as MC - - . Nightwings. New York: Avon, 1969. Cited as NW. - - . To Live Again. Garden City, NY; Doubleday, 1969. Reprint. New York: Warner Books, 1969. Cited as TLA. (Page references are to the Warner edition.) - - . Valentine Pontifex. New York: Arbor House, 1983. Cited as VP. - - . The Second Trip. 1972. New York: Avon, 1981. - - . The World Inside. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1971. Williams, Bernard. "The Self and the Future." In Personal Identity, ed. John Perry.

6 Robert Silverberg's The World Inside as an Ambiguous Dystopia FRANK DIETZ

Robert Silverberg's novel The World Inside (1971) appears at first sight to be a dystopia par excellence. While it has received relatively little attention so far, the majority of reviews (for a survey of book reviews, see Clareson) and critical studies (Dunn and Erlich [1980] of Suerbaum, Broich, and Borgmeier [1981] ) maintain that The World Inside represents merely one of the many science fiction novels that closely follow the dystopian paradigm established by works such as Evgenii Zamiatin's We or George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. They argue that the portrayal of a repressive future society and the description of a rebellion (most often futile) against a technocratic system is one of the stereotypical plots of postwar American science fiction. In The World Inside, however, Silverberg did not merely imitate the patterns found in the classics of dystopian fiction; instead, he manipulated them to show that they had become as stereotypical as the older conventions of utopian literature. Accordingly, The World Inside proves to be a work of greater complexity than the majority of dystopias, a text that undercuts the simplistic but reassuring dichotomies of good and bad that structure most utopias and dystopias. Silverberg's book achieves this effect by employing elements of traditional dystopias in an ironic context. Among the conventional features of dystopian fiction present in The World Inside, we find the description of a rigidly structured society, the figure of the rebel against society,

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and the attempt to flee from the dystopian city into a pastoral world. Typically, most of the rebels in Silverberg's book are males; women's rebellions are associated less with lofty ideals than with disappointed emotions. The World Inside thus repeats a stereotype familiar from dystopias such as Ayn Rand's Anthem or Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, where Julia is called "a rebel from the waist downward" (Orwell 157). Furthermore, one finds the cliche of the artist as the outsider in a materialistic world. All of these traditional elements are counterbalanced, however, by the fact that The World Inside lacks the unambiguous affirmation of the hero's rebellion central to popular dystopias such as We or Nineteen Eighty-Four. This ironic tension does not suffice to turn The World Inside into a positive utopia; instead it questions the categorical distinctions between utopia and dystopia. Merritt Abrash's statement that this book "is a dystopia because its author uses his literary skill to make it sound like one, not because he demonstrates that a society organized like an urbmon will inevitably be a dystopian place to live" (Abrash 1983, 242) is exaggerated, but not completely mistaken. What sets Silverberg'S book apart from the large number of epigonic dystopias published since 1945 is the fact that it rejects clear contrasts in favor of an ambiguity rarely found in dystopian novels. There is no doubt that there is a tension between the individual and society in The World Inside, but most of the characters in the book are quite unlike the stereotypical outsiders or "Big Brothers" of many earlier dystopias. Silverberg's rebels neither succeed in liberating their society nor undergo a genuinely tragic ordeal in the name of freedom or justice. The people who occupy the huge "urban monads" (urbmons) of the twenty-fourth century have no ideology to fight for. Their rebellion and their dreams of a better world appear at times as questionable as the social conventions they rebel against. In its tone of pervasive irony, Silverberg'S novel more closely resembles Aldous Huxley'S masterpiece Brave New World or his lesser-known Ape and Essence than Orwell's grimmer Nineteen Eighty-Four. Like Huxley's novels, The World Inside extends its ironic treatment to what has been called the "implicit utopia," the contrasting vision of a sane life that justifies the protagonist's attack on the dystopian system. Many dystopias actually portray the Western democratic system of twentieth century as this implicit utopia (Anthem, Nineteen Eight-Four), a fact that has caused Marxist critics such as Frank Rainer Scheck (1972, passim) to condemn the entire genre as reactionary. The most extreme example for this dystopian nostalgia is Rand's Anthem, in which the hero flees from the horrors of collectivism and eventually recreates the patriarchal family. Silverberg not only avoids the nostalgia for the good old times but even presents an obvious parody of these primitivist tendencies in the Michael Statler episode. Both the pastoral landscape and the utopian

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city are exposed as social myths removed from reality. In his ironic stance toward all systems, utopia or dystopia, urban or pastoral life, The World Inside resembles the" open-ended utopias" (Somay 1984, 25) of the 1970s, which constantly question the authority of their own utopian constructs, thus rejecting the closure of social perfection and leaving the reader to the "necessarily unfinished dialogues of his own imagination" (Ruppert 1986, 103). While Silverberg's novel lacks the optimism observable even in ambiguous utopias, it nevertheless replaces the pure didacticism of most dystopias with what John Huntington has called "a type of skeptical imagining that is opposed to the consistencies of utopia-dystopia" (Huntington 1982, 124). The World Inside was created as a novelization or "fix-up" of several stories that Silverberg had published in 1970 (Nicholls 1979, 546). The book is unified by a circular structure (the text both begins and ends with the words "here begins another happy day"), the limited setting (one giant building, Urbmon 116, except for Michael Statler's, short excursion), as well as the small cast of characters, most of whom appear in several episodes. While Silverberg himself has stressed the essential unity of his book (Dunn and Erlich 1980, 338), there are diverging elements in The World Inside that may be due to the origin of the text as a series of short stories. Instead of the unified perspective of most utopias and dystopias, one encounters a variety of viewpoints and value systems that undermine the totalizing view of pure utopia or dystopia. Several episodes from The World Inside demonstrate how Silverberg plays with traditional elements of utopian and dystopian fiction. He does this by juxtaposing these conventional scenes in such a way that unexpected and disconcerting contrasts are produced. One sees, for instance, a naive utopian traveler confronted with the spectacle of a public execution or a dystopian rebel whose rebellion is directed at a reconciliation with the social system. Similarly, the climactic moment of epiphany, of spiritual communion with the collective mind of the utopian society, is treated ironically, and the arcadian refuge so cherished in many utopias is revealed to be a pious myth. If one regards dystopias as a parodic genre, as Gary Saul Morson does, one can classify The World Inside as a "metaparody" of both utopian and dystopian conventions (Morson 1981, 77). Ironically, the first chapter leads the reader to expect a traditional utopian narrative. The situation follows the classical discussion between a naive, extremely curious utopian traveler from the colonies on Venus, Nicanor Gortman, and his utopian guide, Charles Mattern. Gortman is a typical utopian traveler; he represents a society and a system of values that is very similar to the world of the contemporary reader. The exchange between Gortman and Mattern provides a recapitulation of the history of utopian literature by beginning as a utopian dialogue and

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ending in a despairing dystopian episode. This form of the dialogue (or rather the utopian guide's monologue) has been frequently used by twentieth-century dystopian writers in order to have the guide inadvertently reveal the inhumane character of the dystopian social system. The beginning chapter of Huxley's Brave New World is the most successful example for this parodic reversal of a standard utopian feature. Like the garrulous hatchery director in Brave New World, Mattern knows his world extremely well and takes his guest on a guided tour of the most significant aspects of the social system. He spouts forth statistics on population growth as they walk through different parts of the gigantic building. Eventually, even Gortman asks himself whether Mattern is trying to be ironic. His guide, however, asserts that he means exactly what he says, and his intellectual shallowness disqualifies all his further comments on urbmon society. Like the happy people in Huxley's brave new society, Mattern and his wife Principessa are representatives of the society's values and eagerly repeat -slogans and tired cliches. Mattern explains to Gortman everything the reader will need to know in order to understand the structure of this society. He shows how the huge building is divided into "cities," each occupying several floors, according to social status. Mattern also mentions the custom of "nightwalking" that allows people to claim anyone as a sexual partner. Finally, he elaborates on the urbmon's recycling of energy and the interdependence between urbmons and the farming communes that occupy the land between the urban constellations. Mattern cannot help but reveal to his visitor-and the reader-the sordid underside of the "utopian" society. Just as Mattern is emphasizing the perfect adaptation of each inhabitant of Urbmon ll6 to an overcrowded environment, they encounter a "flippo." Breaking under the immense psychological pressure of a life without privacy, this man has gone berserk and attacked his pregnant wife. Immediately following his arrest by the urbmon's security forces, he is accused of "'atrocious assault on woman of childbearing years currently carrying unborn life, dangerous countersocial tendencies, menace to harmony and stability" and pronounced guilty. The rapid execution of the transgressor ("Down the chute with the bastard") destroys the image of tranquil felicity that Mattern had constructed for his visitor. Mattern's only reaction is the weak argument "It isn't typical! It isn't typical'" (TWI1S). His statement, though is invalidated by the fact that the urbmon society has developed a special term for this type of behavior ("going flippo"). Furthermore, the context of the utopian dialogue in which this event occurred should predispose readers to regard the flippo episode as a typical example of the conditions in the society of the twenty-fourth century. The end of the first chapter ironically affirms that it "has been a happy

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day in 23~1, and now it is over" (TWI17). If the text as a whole recapitulate'> the generic evolution from utopia to dystopia, then this episode i., turn repre.,ent~ a ~mall-"caJe model of the text as a whole, which also begin~ in an insincere profes~ion of universal happiness and ends in discontent and futile rebellion. While Chapter 1 lends irony to the form of the utopian dialogue, eguent chapter'> '>atirize the figure of the dystopian rebel. In doing .,0, Silverberg's book undermine~ one of the mainstays of dystopian fiction, the ritualized conflict between the heroic protagonist and the totalitarian villain. Most of the adverse criticism of positive literary utopias ha~ focu~ed on the "flatness" of their protagonists, while dystopian texts "uch a" We or Nineteen fi~hty-Four have been praised for their '>uperior characterization. Michael Holguist has attacked this mode of critici"m and has stressed that literary utopias portray typical rather than individualized characters (Holguist 1976, 132). Moreover, the rebel figure in many dy"topia'> also represents a personification of social values, and hi" actions follow a relatively rigid pattern. While some writers of dystopia.., have created truly memorable characters, there remains always the danger of hero worship, sentimentality and bathos, as Rand's Anthem or Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 exemplify. Silverberg's characters in The World Inside neither resemble the nameless cardboard figures of traditional utopias nor reach the heroic stature associated with dystopian rebels. His characters must fall short of the tragic dignity associated with the dystopian outsider, because the social system has become so unassailable that individual rebellion has been reduced to a series of futile gestures. While Silverberg adheres to one of the conventions of dystopian literature in employing "middle" characters who are neither rulers nor members of the masses--a middle-class bias found in many dystopias-he denies them the aura of righteousness that the dystopian rebel usually possesses. The unheroic nature of his protagonists can be interpreted as a result of the "triumph of the mechanized hive antagonist over the novel's philosophical protagonist, the human spirit" (Dunn and Erlich 19~O, 345), but it also casts irony on the glorification of the rebel or superman found in dystopias such as Anthem, Fahrenheit 451, or John Brunner's The Shockwave Rider. The second chapter of The World Inside provides a good example for this debunking of the heroic dystopian rebel. Aurea Holston, the protagonist of this episode, cannot really imagine any alternative to the life in an urban monad of 880,000 people. She is at odds with society solely because she has been commanded to leave Urbmon 116 in order to join a group trying to start a new urbmon. Aurea is frightened by the idea of leaving the familiar environment within which she grew up. While she regards the inside of the urbmon as a

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protective sphere, she envisions the tower of the urbmon, seen from the outside, as a giant phallic symbol: "And she sees the spiky tips of Chippits' fifty towers below her, but now there is a new tower, a fiftyfirst, and she drops toward a gleaming bronzed needle-sharp summit, and she cries out as it penetrates her and she is impaled" (TWI 28-29). Aurea's dream exhibits oppositions very common in science fiction. As Gary K. Wolfe has exhaustively demonstrated, the contrasts of insideoutside represent the tension between the known and the unknown central to most science fiction (Wolfe 13-16). Here, interestingly enough, Aurea prefers the familiar space of the urbmon. Her conservative attitude is in sharp contrast to her alleged rebelliousness. Furthermore, Aurea, while presented as the first rebel against the system, is still depicted as a person incapable of independent thought. In this episode, Silverberg has used the same stereotype of the woman as an irrational, merely emotionally motivated rebel that Rand and Orwell employed. Aurea regards only the new (the fifty-first) urbmon and the change of the status quo it implies as a threat to her happiness, not the system as a whole. Consequently, she attempts to change her new posting by pleading with influential men or by trying to seduce them-an action greatly at odds with the alleged promiscuity of urbmon society. Her rebellion-if it can be called one-is ineffective and easily eliminated by the so-called moral engineers. Aurea emerges as a happy woman from the womblike flotation chamber: "She floats idly in a pulsing tide, thinking of the huge Urbmon as a wondrous pedestal on which she sits" (TWI 36). As a result of this rebirth, she once again becomes a well-adapted member of the hive society. The horror a reader might have felt at the torture and the psychological annihilation of Winston Smith in Nineteen Eighty-Four is reduced to mere pity for Aurea, who "wishes she could apologize to the university for her foolishness" (TWI 39). In the end, Aurea joins the group of settlers who, like swarming bees forming a new hive, help to perpetuate the system by starting a new urbmon. Before condemning Silverberg'S characterization of Aurea as hopelessly sexist, one has to consider the role of this episode in the context of the book as a whole. Aurea's passivity leads to failure, but Michael Statler's activity does not succeed, either. While Silverberg portrays Aurea as a helpless female, he later contrasts Michael's romantic delusions with the common sense of Artha. If the potential tragedy of the individual's rebellion against a hierarchic society becomes a mere farce in The World Inside, the same holds true for the moment of enlightenment that plays a central role in utopias such as Bellamy's Looking Backward or B. F. Skinner's Walden Two and later Ernest Callenbach's Ecotopia or Dorothy Bryant's The Kin of Ata Are Waiting for You. In these books, the skeptical utopian traveler experiences a quasi-religious moment of epiphany that convinces him of the supe-

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riority of utopian institutions. This moment of conversion offers the promise of a spiritual communion with the social organism and eliminates any doubts the utopian traveler might have had left concerning the superiority of the utopian society. Thus the rational discourse between utopian traveler and utopian guide is replaced by the utopian traveler's intuitive understanding of utopian principles. In The World Inside, this conversion pattern is modified and satirized in the quest of the musician Dillon Chrimes. Unlike the utopian travelers mentioned above, he is not a visitor from outside, but grew up in the urbmon. Like Aurea Holston, Dillon exhibits a diffuse sense of discontent while being unable to imagine a rational alternative to the present system. As a popular musician who plays the "vibrastar" in a "cosmos group," he actually fulfills an important function in a society that provides everyone with "excesses of bread and circuses" (TWI 41). The description of one of these concerns shows how the multimedia event produced by the cosmos group ignores the realities of urbmon life and offers the audience dreams of space flight instead. In the world of Urbmon 116, art merely creates escapist fantasies and eases social tensions. Dillon never questions this arrangement and is actually proud of his skills as a musician. Eventually Dillon's vague discontent increases, and he embarks on a quest for spiritual fulfillment, attempting to merge with what he perceives as the collective mind of the urbmon: "Right now he feels he could almost soar on its multiplicity the way others might soar on a drug" (TWI 45). After playing a concert, he takes a mind-enhancing drug and has a ecstatic vision of unity: "He is flooded with percepts. People moving, talking, sleeping, dancing, coupling, bending, reaching, eating, reading. I am all of you. You are all part of me .... Oh what a beautiful place. Oh how I love it here. Oh this is the real thing. Oh!" (TWI 5960). Dillon's ecstasy is followed by the sobering realization that his moment of vision was merely drug induced: "What went wrong? He should have expected it. You go all the way up, then you come all the way down" (TWI 61). Although this episode adds to the novel's growing pattern of discontent and alienation, it does not present art as the last defense of culture and humanistic values (as in Brave New World, Ape and Essence or Fahrenheit 451), nor does Dillon embody an alternative artistic ideal. Dillon's dilemma reflects the quandary of art in an absolutely static society, where it is relegated to function as entertainment or propaganda. At the same time, Dillon himself lacks the alternative vision necessary to challenge his society in the name of a higher principle. The Michael Statler episode, which is by far the longest in the book (almost fifty pages); also contains a parody of the dystopian paradigm. At first Michael's actions appear to be typical for the dystopian outsider.

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He rebels against his society by leaving the city and enters a pastoral realm supposedly embodying an idyllic alternative to the mechanized city. In the course of the sixth chapter, however, the seemingly clear dichotomies of city versus country, technology versus nature, and corruption versus innocence are all dissolved. The overall effect of this episode critiques the stereotypes embodied in these traditional oppositions. Michael is driven by a romantic dream. He wants to leave the urbmon, with its constant temperature, its processed food, and its standardized way of living. From old films he has created an idyllic conception of unspoiled nature outside the urbmon. These images of beaches and forests haunt his mind and create an intense longing: "He feels the centrifugal yank toward freedom, and wants to taste a bit of it" (TWI 117). As the second part of this sentence indicates, Michael merely wants to taste freedom instead of establishing a new existence outside the protection offered by the urbmon. Consequently, he plans only a short excursion to the sea coast, having no concept of the distance he would have to travel. His flight from the city is not the supreme act of rebellion against the values of his society or the result of a long course of social alienation (as in Anthem or Fahrenheit 451), because Michael carefully manipulates the central computer to issue him a pass to leave the urbmon and to reenter it. The world outside the urbmon (lithe world inside") does not at all conform to Michael's romantic dream of a pastoral landscape. After wandering through fields tended by robots, he is arrested by members of a farming commune. These country people turn out to live a barbaric life, and Michael is nearly sacrificed to their fertility deity. The green world of arcadia presented as a social alternative by so many dystopias (We, Anthem, Fahrenheit 451, Nineteell Eigltty-Four, The Space Merchants) is thoroughly discredited in Silverberg's novel. Similarly, the trope of the virtuous country people is exposed as a cultural convention that is actually dangerous, since it makes it easy for the farmers to capture the unsuspecting Michael Statler. If the gleaming towers of technological utopianism turn out to be the landscape of nightmares, the simplistic world of rural communities is likewise revealed to harbor aggression and ignorance. Michael escapes only through the help of Artha, a woman who works as an interpreter and intermediary in the business transactions between urbmons and communes. Artha is totally different from the stereotypical figure of the utopian girl who falls in love with the visitor (as in Edward Bulwer-Lytton's The Comillg Race, Bellamy's Looking Backward or Callenbach's Ecotopia), and she clearly rejects Michael's amorous advances. After a few days the hero who set out on a quest for a better world returns completely disillusioned: "He is willing to admit defeat. He has

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gone as far as he dares, and for as much time as he can permit himself; now with all his soul he longs for home. His conditioning is asserting itself after all. Environment conquering genetics" (TWI 156). Michael's ultimate defeat is already obvious at this moment; the fact that he is arrested by the urbmon's security forces on return and thrown down the chute only underscores the absolute supremacy of the urban monad as the hero-villain of the story (Dunn and Erlich 1980, 338). None of Silverberg'S protagonists manages to oppose the hive-mind of the city, and The World Inside therefore lacks the sustained conflict characteristic of dystopian fiction. The forces of stability and entropy completely dominate the society of the future. The rebellion of the individual remains merely an episode in the unbroken reign of technocracy. The World Inside thus rejects the clear and comforting oppositions of utopia or dystopia. Like Huxley's Brave New World, it refuses to limit its irony to the values of a dystopian society. At times Huxley's novel obviously ridicules the rebels and their romantic aspirations, most notably so in the pivotal debate between the World Controller and the Savage, where the fonner's quest for stability meets with the latter's plea for liberty, hunger, and pain. In the end, the World Controller appears to be the more rational of the two. While The World Inside does not present a similarly eloquent advocatus diaboli, the protagonists' inchoate longings for a freer world express themselves through romantic stereotypes, as in the case of Michael Statler, whose rhapsodies about nature resemble those of Huxley's Savage. In The World Inside, the oppressive social system has become so depersonalized that individual rebellion no longer encounters a human opponent. In the book's final episode, Siegmund Kluver, the bright young protege of the rulers of the urbmon, is forced to realize just this. While he is disgusted with the superficiality and licentiousness of his superiors, he finds no object on which to channel his rebellious energy. There are no villains ruling the urbmon, as the system has moved beyond human control. To Kluver, the urbmon finally becomes synonymous with the universe. The only act of defiance left to him is suicide-an option rarely chosen by dystopian rebels (except by the Savage in Huxley's Brave New World). After a futile quest for some sense of value or meaning that takes him through all of the 700-floor building, he arrives at the top of the urbmon and "sails towards god in a splendid leap" (1Wf 184).

Meaningless rebellions, false pastorals and quests leading to deaththat is the reader's overall impression of The World Inside. At the same time, Silverberg's novel offers us a tragicomic vision of man's future, eschewing both the heroic dignity of dystopian tragedy and the bland reassurance of happiness expressed in most literary utopias. While none of the characters in The World Inside can achieve the emo-

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tional appeal of 0-503 in We or Winston Smith in Nineteen Eighty-Four, the novel's rejection of the black-and-white world of so many of its dystopian predecessors moves it toward a greater complexity and ambiguity, offering a possibility of renewal to a genre that had seemingly degenerated into mere formula fiction. The World Inside can therefore be linked to similar developments in the positive utopias of the 1970s, which revived a genre that had no longer seemed viable. As these ambiguous utopias offer no solution, the reader is left with a critique of the belief in stable societies, whether they are depicted in utopias or, implicitly, in dystopias. If utopias deny the force of history by describing stagnant societies, the implicit utopian visions of most dystopias also display a trust in stable solutions and an unchanging human nature. The World Inside reveals the contradictions inherent in the dystopian nostalgia for a Golden Age of pastoral bliss, thus questioning the very possibility of utopia as anything short of an unfinished and unfinishable process. Seen in the context of the further development of American utopian literature in the 1970s, The World Inside appears in a different light from what it might have when the book was first published. One perceives several of the traits of Silverberg's ironic dystopias in the ambiguous utopias or "heterotopias" written in this decade. Joanna Russ's The Female Man, Ursula K. LeGuin's The Dispossessed, and Samuel R. Delany's Triton all exhibit an ironic or parodistic attitude toward the convention of utopia and dystopia. Bron Helstrom, the protagonist of Tritoll, provides the best example of a character who temporarily uses the pose of a dystopian rebel while searching for self-definition in a society that transcends the rigid oppositions of utopia or dystopia. In its multiple ironies and its extensive intertextuality, The World Inside thus represents a metadystopian work that exposes the shortcomings of this genre. The very fact that the central plot elements of dystopian fiction could be combined and recombined at will points out that they have become mere cliches. Silverberg's parody not only anticipates a reader's familiarity with these dystopian conventions, but also assumes that they are no longer taken quite seriously. The World Illside therefore demonstrates that the traditional dystopian formula had reached a point of thematic exhaustion, a conclusion supported by the subsequent development of utopian literature in the United States during the 1970s and 1980s. While dystopian literature offered an important critique of utopian dreams, its own presuppositions often remained unchallenged. It is the critical attitude toward the dystopian celebration of extreme individualism and the salutary influence of nature, both inherited from romanticism, that sets Silverberg'S book apart from the traditional dystopias. The World Inside, although still connected to the dystopian mode, points

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toward the greater emphasis on ambivalence that American utopian literature would exhibit in the following years. WORKS CITED Abrash, Merritt. "Robert Silverberg's The World Inside." In No Place Else: Explorations in Utopian and Dystopian Fiction, ed. Eric S. Rabkin, Martin Greenberg, and Joseph Olander. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1983, pp. 225-43. Clareson, Thomas D. Robert Silverberg. A Primary and Secondary Bibliography. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1983. Dunn, Thomas P., and Richard D. Erlich. "The Mechanical Hive: Urbmon 116 as the Villain-Hero of Silverberg'S The World Inside." Extrapolation 21 (Winter 1980): 338-47. Holquist, Michael. "How to Play Utopia: Some Brief Notes on the Distinctiveness of Utopian Fiction." In Science Fiction: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Mark Rose. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1976, pp. 132-46. Huntington, John. "Utopian and Anti-Utopian Logic: H. G. Wells and his Successors." Science-Fiction Studies 9, no. 2 (1982): 122-45. Huxley, Aldous. Brave New World. London: Chatto and Windus, 1932. New York: Doubleday, 1932. Morson, Gary Saul. The Boundaries Genre: Dostoyevsky's Diary of a Writer and the Tradition of Literary Utdpia. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981. Nicholls, Peter, ed. The Science Fiction Encyclopedia. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1979. Orwell, George. Nineteen Eighty-Four. 1949. Reprint. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1984. Ruppert, Peter. Reader in a Strange Land: The Experience of Reading Literary Utopias. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1986. Scheck, Frank Rainer. "Augenschein und Zukunft. Die anti-utopische Reaktion (Samjatin, Huxley, Orwell)." In Science Fiction, ed. Eike Barmeyer. Munich: Fink, 1972, pp. 259-74. Silverberg, Robert. The World Inside. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1971. Cited as TWI. Somay, Bulent. "Towards an Open-Ended Utopia." Science-Fiction Studies 11, no. 1 (1984): 25-38. Suerbaum, Ulrich, Ulrich Broich, and Raimund Borgmeier. Science Fiction: Theorie und Geschichte-Thenzen und Typen-Form und Weltbild. Stuttgart: Reclam, 1981. Wolfe, Gary K. The Known and the Unknown: The Iconography of Science Fiction. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1979.

7

Silverberg's Ambiguous Transcendence ROBERT REILLY

In numbers of his works, Robert Silverberg explores the idea of transcendence in various forms. Two of these, The Feast of St. Dionysus (first published 1973) and Tower of Glass (first published 1970), may well represent extremes in the range of meanings that transcendence implies. These two works also suggest that, while the type of transcendence and the means of attaining it may be fundamentally different, the underlying motivation toward transcendence is essentially the same. Moreover, Silverberg finally takes an ambiguous attitude toward transcendence in both of these works. All the contemporary meanings of transcend and transcendence retain some of the same root meaning-the basic idea of going out or beyond. These meanings apply to three general categories: physical, psychological, and theological. Robert Galbraith, writing about fantastic literature, asserts that it "exemplifies a modern version of gnosis as revelatory saving knowledge of the transcendental" (1987, 5). Combined with the basic meaning, this suggests "a kind of knowledge that transcends consensus reality" (5). In both these works, the idea of transcendence is directly related to the concept of enthusiasm, which also has both theological and secular meanings. The theological meanings include or are closely related to a number of ideas: divine possession, inspiration (either prophetic or poetic), and frenzy. At some points enthusiasm shades off into ecstasy, a

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state of the soul characterized by raptures and detached contemplation of the divine, but also a state closely related to insanity. The secular meanings of the word are similar in that they connote extreme emotional responses (sometimes regarded as insane by observers) analogous to the divine possession and frenzy of the theological senses.

I

Authors do not always provide keys to the inspiration or significance of their work. The Feast of St. Dionysus is an exception. The epigram, from Love's Body by Norman O. Brown, directs the reader's attention to a work that Silverberg has thoroughly assimilated, a work that can contribute much to the understanding of his novella. Brown advocates a new, paradoxical, symbolic Protestantism, what he caUs "a Dionysian Christianity" (1966, 196). Silverberg has WTitten a specific, concrete description of such a "Dionysian Christianity" and chosen to explore the impact of this religion on the life and within the mind of John Oxenshuer. Even though most of what happens is related to or through the consciousness of John Oxenshuer, the significant events aU involve his relationship to the members of the sect (Brown's "Dionysian Christians") who live in the City of the Word of God. Thus the term enthusiasm very accurately applies to many of the events in this novella. Silverberg has set up a series of events designed to test, in revealing ways, psychosexual-religious elements in the character of John Oxenshuer. Raised as a Catholic, Oxenshuer has become a person of not very strong religious belief. Yet he seems to be searching for something to believe in. His comments to a reporter before the Mars trip imply that his beliefs are rational, but his search emotional. His beliefs seem to have been condensed from his Catholic heritage: "an organizing force in the universe, a power of sublime reason that makes everything hang together, an underlying principle of rightness. Which we can call God for lack of a better name" ("Feast" 36). This has a very rational, Thomistic ring about it. The emotional search seems to have developed from his experience as an astronaut: "an awareness that there may be real forces just beyond my reach, not abstractions, but actual functioning dynamic entities, which I could attune myself to if I only knew how to find the key" ("Feast" 36). His need to find that key, to complete his search in some way, actually represents a desire for a kind of religious transcendence. It received a profound impetus from the events on Mars. While on an extended exploration of the Martian surface, his two shipmates, Richardson and Vogel, have been buried alive by an intense sandstorm. Oxenshuer, alone in the ship, cannot assist them in any way. He feels guilty because

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of that and because he has been unable at least to recover their bodies. (Later he fantasizes about another trip to Mars just for that purpose.) Upon his return to Earth he experiences a profound alienation, even finding it hard to be with himself. Because he cannot resume a normal relationship with his wife, their marriage breaks up. At the same time, perhaps as an offshoot of his guilt, he has an affair with Claire Vogel, the widow of his best friend (one of the men who died on Mars). Oxenshuer's serious psychological problems, his sense of alienation and feelings of guilt about the death of his shipmates, lead directly to his sexual problem. The alienation separates him from his wife; the guilt drives him to substitute himself for the man Claire has lost. Both alienation and guilt relate to his religious search, for he seeks "atonement," or AT-ONE-MENT: a simultaneous release from guilt and reunification between self and others, between self and God. What he desires is a transcendent experience which will reestablish his communication with other human beings and with God. The novella, through a complex series of flashbacks, juxtaposes the development of his problems and their resolution. Everything in the novella is presented through Oxenshuer's consciousness, part as observation of contemporary events and part as memory of past actions. Since this is so, it becomes important to bear in mind that his sanity is rather consistently questioned-one can never be absolutely certain just how rational he is. He even fears his remarks about madness might cause his exclusion from the Mars trip. The central action of the novella takes place nineteen months after Oxenshuer's return from Mars. Leaving Los Angeles, he drives east into the desert, parks, walks away into the wilderness, and camps for the night. There he is discovered by three men from the City of the Word of God who invite him to come live with them. Eventually, after a period of indoctrination, he is initiated into their sect. Put as baldly as this, the plot seems trivial. In reality, Silverberg's plot is important only as a skeleton to which the symbolic flesh of his story attaches. Ideas and images are far more important than action here. The chief ideas are search, escape, death and rebirth, and brotherhood. They are presented and explored through a series of images: the desert, water (with associated activities of washing and drowning), the City with its maze, fire, and wine. These ideas and images form a complex relationship centered on Oxenshuer's search for transcendence and the ways in which the City fulfills his needs. Closer examination of these ideas and images will help to clarify their significances and the ways in which they interrelate. By going into the desert, Oxenshuer attempts several things simultaneously. He wants 1'0 escape from the present, which he finds intolerable. The guilt he feels about failing to rescue his friend has been

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compounded rather than alleviated by his love for the friend's wife, Claire. Going into the desert, a place very like Mars, is also a journey into the past. Somehow he hopes to exorcise that past by putting himself in a similar setting. He is also escaping from his guilty love for Claire. At the same time he is engaged in a religious quest reminiscent of early Christian anchorites. His purpose, like theirs, is the atonement already mentioned. The "bargain" he makes with God shows this most clearly: Can you drown in the desert? Let's give it a try, God. I'll make a bargain with You. You let me drown out there. All right? And I'll give myself to You. Let me sink into the sand, let me bathe in it, let it wash Mars out of my soul, let it drow~ me, God, let it drown me. Free me from Mars and I'm yours, God. Is it a deal? Drown me in the desert and I'll surrender at last. I'll surrender. ("Feast" 15-16)

The washing imagery of this passage is. most important. The desert takes on a sacramental aspect. It is to be the cleansing means of his release from guilt and also the means of his union, through surrender to God. The emphasis on drowning fits into this context particularly well by suggesting the sort of spiritual death and rebirth symbolized by baptism. John hopes to atone for the death of his best friend by his own death under very similar circumstances. This hope ultimately comes to fulfillment in a symbolic rather than a literal way. In another sense the desert imagery represents John's interior state-the sense of emptiness, sterility, and futility that he is experiencing. In a symbolic sense, John Oxenshuer has died when he commits himself to the desert. By a deliberate act he has cut himself off from his entire past without hope of any particular future. The terms of his "bargain" with God suggest that his act has resulted from a failure of faith, that it is a sort of suicide. John's rebirth, his spiritual resurrection, begins when Matt and his two companions find him. Immediately, without the least prompting on his part, they promise him exactly the thing he has been looking for (although in a thoroughly unexpected form): "You've been brought to us almost in time for the Feast of St. Dionysus. When all men are made one. When every ill is healed" ("Feast" 28). This promise of atonement, of healing and unification, is the beginning of his rebirth. The actual process of his rebirth, in some sense also the process of dying to his previous existence, takes place as his indoctrination to the beliefs of the sect living in the City of the Word of God. His first sight of the City foreshadows the process: "He felt the city's golden luminosity as a fiery tangible force on his cheeks, like the outpouring of heat from a crucible of molten metal" ("Feast" 30). In this crucible the metal of Oxenshuer's personality will be melted down and recast in a new mold.

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Process involves change, becoming. But not only the image of melting applies to the process that John Oxenshuer undergoes. Other imagesfire, water, and wine-in one way or another suggest some sort of dissolution. Fire reduces metal to the molten state from which it can be reformed into a new, and perhaps more useful, object. Water, the almost universal solvent, also frequently symbolizes cleansing and renewal of life. Wine represents a sort of mental dissolution that can indicate a joyful break with the past, a celebration of life. Seen in this way, the dissolution aspect of these various symbols is subordinate to the aspect of renewal. As the Speaker puts it: "We integrate through disintegration. We dissolve in the great ocean. We burn in the great fire" ("Feast" 55). This renewal is at once rebirth and atonement; it is the fullness of the religious experience that John Oxenshuer has been seeking. Yet it is not achieved quickly or easily. The process involves both learning and self-surrender. John has begun this process by going into the desert; he completes it by participating in the orgiastic celebration of the Feast of St. Dionysus. Between these two events is the maze pattern in which the city's streets are laid out. When he is first taken to the center of the city, Oxenshuer notes "a labyrinthine tangle of smaller streets" ("Feast" 32). Fascinated by this labyrinth, he explores it again and again. Yet all his efforts to penetrate the maze fail. He concludes that it symbolizes the only way to union with the community. This maze of streets within the holy city has another symbolic sense, however. Norman O. Brown (1966) comments on it: "Meandering or labyrinthine paths, ... represent the archetypal endeavors of the divine ancestor, the prototypical man, to emerge into this world, to be born" (38).

John Oxenshuer is indeed struggling to be born, but in a spiritual rather than a physical sense. As a child, to continue physical growth, must break out of its mother (a type of physical transcendence), so John, to continue spiritual growth, must break out of the inhibiting rationalistic set of religiOUS concepts that his culture and his upbringing have imposed upon him (a type of theological transcendence). In Norman O. Brown's formulation, "generation is only an image of Regeneration. The real birth would be birth from the womb of the dream world. The real death is the death we are dead with here and now" (53). Having melted in the fire, dissolved in the ocean and in the wine, he is ready for selftranscendence, ready to become a new entity, a part of a larger community. That larger community is a religious one, based on the universal brotherhood of man. The residents of the City implicitly claim to have achieved the state in which universal brotherhood is a reality, not an optimistic, meaningless, rhetorical expression. During one of John's indoctrination

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sessions, the Speaker further explains that it really goes beyond brotherhood: "When we were in Eden we were more than simply one family, we were one being, one universal entity; and we came forth from Eden as individuals" ("Feast'" 53). For Oxenshuer things have fallen apart in a very personal and psychologically devastating way. Although they were not brothers in the flesh, his relationship with Dave Vogel was of such long standing and intimacy that they seem more like brothers than merely friends. John's experience of Dave's death recapitulates on the personal psychic level the sort of loss that the Speaker refers to. Oxenshuer misses Vogel not only because they have been close friends but because they have also been the closest of competitors, at least subconsciously. That is why, when he wrestles with Matt during his initiation, he suddenly believes that he is actually wrestling with pave Vogel. Because brotherhood implies this sort of fraternal struggle, the resolution of the struggle must somehow transcend brotherhood itself. Norman O. Brown calls attention to this when he says, "It is the erotic sense of reality that discovers the inadequacy of fraternity, of brotherhood. It is not adequate as a form for the reunification of the human race: we must be either far more deeply unified or not at all" (Brown 1966, 82). A reader's initial response may be that Oxenshuer has failed on the erotic level as well as on the level of brotherhood. The collapse of his marriage and the frustration of his subsequent affair with Claire Vogel seem to support such as interpretation. But only superficially so. Each of these relationships arises from some desire on Oxenshuer's part to satisfy a drive of his own ego. This is especially true of the affair with Claire, which seems to be solely an attempt to assuage his own sense of guilt. All such egocentric acts are doomed to fail. "The inner voice, the personal salvation, the private experience are all based on an illusory distinction" (Brown 1966, 87). Because John is locked into such illusory distinctions, he cannot achieve the "erotic sense of reality"; he cannot penetrate the maze; he cannot enter the fullest human community. Only by letting go completely, by abandoning his own ego, can he be released from illusion. Such a departure must be emotional rather than rational. The people in the City have themselves departed from rationalism. They have let go completely. Every aspect of their religion emphasizes emotion. It is a religion of continuously renewed celebration-"singing soaring joining loving" ("Feast" 47)-of a divinity "who bums like fire ... whose name is music ... whose soul is wine" ("Feast" passim). Theirs is a religion in which all distinctions are broken down-Jesus, Dionysus, Buddha, all are one. The Speaker clarifies their purpose for John: "To achieve contact with the god in the most direct way. To experience the rapture of the ecstatic state, when one is possessed by

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the gods. To unite that which society has forced asunder. To break down all boundaries. To rip off all shackles" ("Feast" 55).

The Speaker, Matt, and all the others are anxious to have John join them, but they do not rush the process. They welcome him but hold him on the edge of their community. He must cure himself; he must let go of the rational, illusionary reality that he wishes to be free of, but to which he still clings. He must achieve "the Dionysian, or drunken principle of union, or communion, between man and man and between man and nature. The integration of the psyche is the integration of the human race, and the integration of the world with which we are inseparably connected" (Brown 1966, 87). Only gradually does Oxenshuer surrender to this Dionysian principle, drinking a little more wine each day. Eventually he drinks himself almost to the point of insensibility on a regular nightly basis. Then he has visions. In one of these St. Dionysus invites him to enter the sea, explaining, "God is the ocean. And God is within you" ("Feast" 61). These visions constitute the preliminary step to his self-surrender, a promise of what he can gain by loss of individuality. The intermediate steps occur on the day of the Feast itself. On that day he is led through the maze and participates for the first time in the drunken, orgia~tic rituals of the community. Then he engages in a wrestling match with Matt, an agon representative of the fact that he has transcended brotherhood or perhaps achieved the transcendent brotherhood. His ecstatic conviction that he is wrestling with Vogel (aside from representing possession by the god) symbolizes his recognition of universal brotherhood (Matt and Vogel become one, and John conquers both) and also his transcendence of it-he pins Matt, who previously outclassed him as a wrestler. In addition, the identification of Matt with Vogel serves to suggest rather strongly that there is no distinction between the living and the dead, or at least that such a distinction is illusory. The final step in Oxenshuer' 5 initiation, and the final stage of his surrender of individuality, takes place when he participates in a communion service immediately after the wrestling match. As a consequence of the wine, the dancing, and the wrestling, he is far beyond the possibility of any rational process by the time he receives the communion of dark bread and wine. His experience at this communion is described as a diminution (perhaps even an extinction) of his individuality, his ego, accompanied by an infinite expansion of consciousness: "{ float. I go forth. I. I. I. John Oxenshuer. John Oxenshuer does not exist. John Oxenshuer is the universe. The universe is John Oxenshuer .... All things dissolve. All things become one" ("Feast" 69). In this culmination of unity Oxenshuer1s initiation to the cult of St. Dionysus concludes. But the story does not. Four sections remain, two of them devoted to

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a fantasy in which Oxenshuer returns to Mars, recovers the bodies of Richardson and Voget and comes home to a hero's welcome, both from the public and from Claire Vogel. Following directly from the climax of his initiation, these sections come as something of a surprise because they seem to represent a retrogression, a representation of an earlier stage of his psychological history. The last two sections may be read as confirming that retrogression. In the first of these, John unsuccessfully tries to bring Claire to the City. He fails to find it and loses Claire in the process. The last section, set in his Los Angeles apartment, includes an auditory message from the Speaker, who tells John he has been dreaming, that it is time to wake, to come live permanently in the city. Both these sections imply, through numbers of details, that John, after the day of the Feast, has relapsed into his egocentric world of illusion, effectively cutting himself off from Claire as well as from the City. The final two paragraphs of the novella, describing as they do Oxenshuer's return to the City without leaving his apartment, pose the most serious problem of interpretation. These paragraphs, and especially the last sentence, indicate John's ultimate surrender of self and union or communion with the universe. One must wonder how this consciousness-expanding union is achieved, however. As one thinks back over the events of the story, three distinct explanations for the ending seem possible. First, Oxenshuer has, quite simply, gone mad. His earlier remarks to the reporter, the connection of ecstasy itself with the ideas of frenzy or insanity, and the somewhat disjointed manner in which the parts of the story are presented collectively support this interpretation. Second, the expansion of consciousness can be regarded as drug induced. The ever-present wine may have caused this. Or, as John wonders himself, could the communion wine have contained some other drug? Third, the entire experience is mystical. John has, in fact, achieved complete detachment from self and by so doing, has become one with the universe. For him, space, time, and personality have become meaningless concepts, for they all flow together, part of one ocean. He has transcended his former self. I feel that the preponderant evidence within the story supports the third possibility. Oxenshuer's character, alienated yet searching; the dominant images of fire, water, and wine which in context are all filled with religious connotations; the fact that much of the action involves a tightly knit religious community-all these elements strongly support the conclusion that John Oxenshuer has achieved transcendence through an ecstatic communion. II

The case of Simeon Krug is fundamentally different from John Oxenshuer's. Krug himself is a hard-nosed, driving businessman who has

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little or no interest in religion or any sort of introspective activity. His lifelong development pattern has been characterized by a "You bastards can't keep me down" attitude. Self-taught and self-motivated, he thinks primarily in technological terms and concerns himself with the social, political or moral consequences of his actions only when driven to do so. Yet Krug is framed by a context that not only implies transcendence but makes this ordinary businessman himself a transcendent, even a godlike, character. The image with which Tower of Glass opens (ToG 1), an image that is later repeated in its entirety (ToG 54-55), not only parallels Krug's career but is a metaphor describing it Games Gunn has commented on the overall metaphorical quality of this novel [1979, 2305] ). Throughout the novel Krug is like that first fish struggling to survive in the hostile environment of the land. Just as that fish transcends itself, changing and expanding its own nature, so Krug has transcended himself in the Horatio Alger-like rise to wealth and corporate dominance. The poor slum boy, victim of his environment, has made himself over, becoming the multibillionaire who controls the lives of others. He is as different from his former self as the fish out of water. Moreover, like that first fish, he has wrought a change that effects his entire species. By inventing and perfecting the androids, Krug has inadvertently and unwittingly changed the entire political and social structure of the human race. Throughout the novel he is in the process of yet another such change-building the tower to communicate with the aliens whose cryptic messages so tantalize him. At the end he becomes even more like the fish, going off in his starship to the planetary nebula that has an environment in which he cannot possibly survive. Each of these changes-his personal history, the effect of his invention, and the final launch into space-is a sort of transcendence, but a transcendence of a purely physical kind. Krug is like the fish coming out of the sea; his transcendence, like the fish's, is restricted to the material order. More important, Krug is not only incapable of spiritual transcendence, but indifferent to it. In part, this is due to his inability to believe in anything beyond the material order. Nothing in the novel suggests that he has any spiritual interests. All of his attempts at self-fulfillment center around material goals. His development of the androids exemplifies this perfectly. When pushed to explain what he intended when he created the androids he responds: "Things. Factory-made things. I was building a better kind of robot. I wasn't building men" (ToG 135). Even within the material order his powers of belief are limited. After Dr. Vargas describes the planetary nebula, Krug refuses to believe it could sustain life. He rejects Vargas's explanatory hypothesis as a "fairy tale" (ToG 92-93). From his son (and daughter-in-law) Krug wants nothing but a male heir, a physical being to carry on his dynasty. He fails to perceive

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that Manuel is not the least interested in perpetuating that dynasty. If Krug is searching for anything, that search is certainly not interior or spiritual. While he may not be searching, on one level he is totally involved with communication. The tower in which he invests a large portion of his fortune and almost his entire emotional capital has the sole purpose of answering the messages from the stars. "Look," Krug said, ''I'm not interested in monuments. Monuments I got. What I'm after is contact" (ToG 53). Krug's imagination has been captivated by the idea that there are "others" (entirely different from ourselves) to contact. His enthusiasm for this idea blinds him to those much nearer "others" (like himself but different nevertheless) with whom he might communicate. Because he is so completely focused on contacting the "others" among the stars, he blinds himself to the possibility of communicating with those in his immediate vicinity; the needs of his own son, Manuel, and of Thor Watchman are simply outside his range of perception. Indeed, he feels inadequate to communicate with any other human being: "The words were there inside Krug all the time, but it was so hard for him to get them out" (ToG 56). This fascination with communication, coupled with an inability to get the words out, contrasts significantly with Oxenshuer's situation. Oxenshuer achieves communion by going beyond himself, shedding his own limitations. Krug never goes beyond himself-even his tower is a kind of self extension, a vast phallic member thrust into the unknown. Unconcerned or unable to communicate with those around him, Krug is also beyond the range of their communicating with him. Manuel, during most of the book, says nothing much to his father except sort of "Yes, sir" responses to questions or directives. Thor talks to him somewhat more, but only about matters relating to the construction of the tower. About what really matters to him, the liberation of the androids, he remains silent, restrained by his religious beliefs. With Dr. Vargas and his other business associates Krug talks only about technical matters. Even though he communicates with superficially with those closest to him, Krug evidences no symptoms of alienation. Total self-sufficiency is one of the traits that contribute to his godlike appearance. At moments when self-doubt might be expected, he responds by self-reassertion. The incident just mentioned with Dr. Vargas is a case in point. He wants explanations but rejects those that are offered. Rather than reevaluating the tower project, he accelerates it and adds resources to the spaceship development. But self-sufficiency is not his only godlike quality. He is, after all, a creator. The androids are, in the fullest sense of the colloquial phrase, "his babies." They are the products of his brain and of his effort. At several points in the book (e.g., ToG 96) we encounter images of Krug

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working over the vats, almost shaping with his hands the basic molecules from which the androids come. Many of them realize this. They have deified him, have made him the center of their religion. Indeed, they have developed a complex scripture, theology, and ritual, all centered upon the "divine" Krug. Their scripture, a marvelous imitation of Biblical style (Clareson 1983, 55), strongly emphasizes the creative aspect of Krug, but also looks to him for the salvation (in the form of liberation and recognition of equality) so psychologically necessary for the androids. The rituals are prayer services, again directed toward Krug, conducted before altars of living android flesh, and consisting in large part of litanies formed from the genetic codes. The reader cannot avoid comparing the android view of Krug as god and the other evidence that clearly indicates his many human failings. This comparison certainly makes him into a tragic character. In numbers of ways he could be seen as the modern equivalent of a king whose actions evoke the qualities of "pity and fear" characteristic of Aristotelian tragedy. Viewed in this light, his "tragic flaw" might be regarded as an overweening ego. Everything he does seems to be an assertion of self. The enormous tower he is building, with its obvious allusion to the Tower of Babel and its almost comic Freudian implications, is an extension of his own ego. Unsatisfied with a lifetime of earthly accomplishment, he reaches out to let the rest of the universe know he exists. The possibility that his actions might affect others never seems to occur to him. His actions indicate an implicit rejection of human brotherhood. His avid pursuit of the aliens (whose nature and living conditions defy comprehension) and his welcoming them as "brothers" (ToG 20-21) is particularly ironic in the light of his rejection of the androids (whom he ought to understand completely). Oxenshuer actively seeks to achieve union with his fellow men. Krug, who has two opportunities for union at home (men and androids), rejects both. The events toward the end of the novel make that rejection explicit while simultaneously demonstrating Krug's failure to transcend himself spiritually. After Lileth Meson has taken Manuel to an android chapel, thus introducing him to their belief in Krug's divinity, Manuel confronts his father with the android "bible," implicitly challenging him to do something for the androids. At first Krug is simply incredulous, thinking that the whole thing is some sort of "joke. An aberration" (ToG 158). "What concern of mine?" he says (ToG 159). Indeed, at first he is more concerned about Manuel sleeping with an android than about the android religion. But as Manuel explains its details and implications, Krug explodes: The universe seeined to be wrenching free of its roots. Rage and terror swept him. The androids were servants to man; that had been all he had

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intended them to be; how could they now demand an independent existence? ... A religious cult, calling on who knew what dark emotions? And himself as savior? Himself as the dreamed-of Messiah? No. He would not play their game. (ToG 161)

Because he is not quite willing to believe Manuel's revelation about the android religion, Krug forces Thor to shunt (a process of electronic personality exchange) with him. Interestingly, Silverberg presents Thor's point of view during the shunt so as to show in the most dramatic way Krug's absolute rejection of the divine role the androids would project upon him. When Thor shares this certain knowledge with the other androids, revolution results. Thor himself feels driven to the symbolic act of destroying the tower-an act that leads to his own death and Krug's decision to go, alone, in the starship to the planetary nebula. This ending is just an ambiguous as the ending of "St. Dionysus," but in a different way. Krug's monomania, his obsession with "contact," continues. In a sense, one is taken back to the fish image at the beginning of the book-the first fish to go out of the water dies, but sets a precedent. Yet one cannot be sure whether Krug's departure is an escape from the chaotic situation on Earth, perhaps even an actual suicide, or another attempt at physical transcendence, merely using a different means in the hope of obtaining purely scientific knowledge. III

If we apply Galbraith's idea that "fantastic literature exemplifies a modern version of gnosis as revelatory saving knowledge of the transcendental" (1987, 5) to these two works, we can see how Krug and Oxenshuer represent similar but contrasting uses of transcendence. Beginning with the idea of salvation, we readily see that Oxenshuer is thoroughly alienated and guilt-ridden. He desires to be saved from his guilt and reunited with humanity. He hopes he can achieve this through the gnostic spiritual knowledge The City offers. Krug, by contrast the potential donor of salvation, refuses to recognize the androids and unite them with humanity. The gnostic knowledge he seeks is physical, coming from Dr. Vargas's arcane field of radio astronomy. Each of these men finds himself in an intolerable position from which he wishes to escape. Oxenshuer attempts to escape from the guilt of his past through a symbolic death leading to a spiritual renewal. Krug attempts to escape from the intolerable responsibility the android worship imposes upon him. He chooses to flee from Earth (in a frozen state). In each case the character has a similar motivation; he desires an escape that involves a sort of transcendence based upon gnostic knowledge. But the key point in both cases is that we, as readers, cannot be certain

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just what has been achieved. At the end one wonders whether Oxenshuer has been reunited and reborn spiritually and whether Krug will simply die or manage alien contact and communication. Silverberg seems fascinated by the idea of transcendence. He sees that it has several different varieties arising from different psychological states. However, ultimately he does not commit himself either to the certainty of its existence or to the possibility of its actual achievement. WORKS CITED Brown, Norman O. Love's Body. New York: Random House, 1966. Clareson, Thomas D. Robert Silverberg. Mercer Island, WA: Starmont House, 1983. Galbraith, Robert. "Fantastic Literature as Gnosis." Paper delivered to the Science Fiction Research Association, June 27, 1987. Gunn, James. "Tower of Glass." In Survey of Science Fiction Literature, ed. Frank N. Magill, vol. 5. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Salem Press, 1979, pp. 2303-2305. Silverberg, Robert. "The Feast of St. Dionysus." In An Exultation of Stars: Transcendental Adventures in Science Fiction, ed. Terry Carr. New York: Pocket, 1974, pp. 13-76. Cited as "Feast." ~~-. Tower of Glass. Reprint. New York: Bantam, 1971. Cited as ToG.

8 On Silverberg's Tom Q'Bedlam C. N. MANLOVE

There is no galactic empire. There never will be any galactic empire. All is chaos. Everything is random-Galactic empires are puerile power-fantasies. Do I truly believe this? If not, why do I say it? Do I enjoy bringing myself down? Silverberg, "The SCience Fiction Hall of Fame" (1973)

Silverberg's Tom Q'Bedlam (1985) is his first relatively "science fictional" novel since Shadrach in the Furnace and his announced refusal to write any more such novels. 1 In fact, however, it is an ambivalent mixture of science fiction and fantasy, set in an irradiated America and investigating the nature of possibly supernatural visions that have come to man. Specifically, it is a reworking of the theme of the novella 'Thomas the Proclaimer," describing the various reactions of humanity to the apparent success of a prophet in harnessing the prayers of his followers to ask for a direct sign by God of His existence. More generally, Tom Q'Bedlam continues the mystic orientation of much of Silverberg's work, butperhaps with the move to the writing of fantasy in the Lord Valentine books (1980-1983)-in a more extreme mode. Yet this heightened fantastic element is accompanied by a considerable increase in realism. The best way of isolating the peculiarly ambiguous character of the novel is by comparison with a work published in the same year that treats a

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similar situation from a far more direct and committed viewpoint-David Brin's Campbell award-winning The Postman. In both Torn 0' Bedlam and The Postman there has been a limited form of nuclear war resulting in the destruction of the American heartland. Life continues on the periphery, in more or less shattered form-in Silverberg'S novel, in California; in Brin's, amid the little townships of central Oregon. Each novel deals with a wandering figure who serves in part to pull together the scattered and hopeless fragments of humanity. Silverberg's Tom O'Bedlam is a visionary who sees the existence of great extraterrestrial and supernatural civilizations; further, he acts as a conduit for the enrapturing images of life on other worlds that these civilizations send out. 2 Tom's mind becomes an enormously potent transmitter of these visions, to the point where all humanity dreams of paradisal planets and transcendental joys. Whether Tom, who also has the role of fool, actually does see the sights is left unclear. Brin's "postman," by contrast, lives a lie and finds it truth. A wanderer leaving the ruin of the central states, Gordon Krantz comes through the Cascade Mountains into Oregon. One night, having been robbed by bandits of his tent and much vital equipment, he takes cover in a longabandoned jeep in which he finds the still-clothed skeleton of a murdered postman from the time just after the war. Lacking a jacket of his own, he decides to wear that of the postman and to take his useful sack, with a few old letters to write his journal on. When he arrives later at the first settlement, Pine View in Oregon, he finds that people surround him in a wondering way. They believe he is a postman and that he represents the first sign of hope for communication in a scattered world. Partly through gratitude for their hospitality, partly out of growing conviction that such communication would be good, and also thanks to his considerable acting ability, Gordon begins to pretend to be a real postman who represents the Restored United States, a power for national unity supposedly located in the East. Despite numerous setbacks, he helps to bring Oregon together and assists in the overthrow of the white barbarians, or Holnists, who wish to destroy it. At the end of the story, he sets out for California, where he has heard of another state struggling back into being. Both books question the nature of reality and truth, but in opposite directions. Brin's asks us whether reality is something not "given" but made by people's minds and wills; Silverberg's asks whether a reality that looks as though it is made by people's minds may not in fact be a "given." Silverberg'S novel, unlike Brin's, deals not so much with the creation of a new society on this Earth as with hope for a new extraterrestrial life beyond death. For much of the novel, it is true, the visions that people experience seem to relate to a glory approaching this world. We

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do not, for a long time, learn of Tom's potential influence on other minds: our attention is instead focused on a messianic religious cult centered in the slums of San Diego, the leader of which, a Mexican ex-taxi driver, Senhor Papamacer, has experienced visions of a great homed God called Chungira-He-Will-Come-visions that are also seen independently by other characters in the novel. 3 Senhor Papamacer comes to believe that this God of the New Coming will arrive on Earth at the North Pole and must be met there by His followers if they would be saved. It is only when the story is far advanced that the way to union with the gods or divine aliens, which by then all humanity desires, is increasingly seen through Tom (who has come to be seen as the fount of all the visions), as lying through death, a death that Tom is able to give to willing individuals by an act of energetic will. This death will involve a journey away from Earth, not a New Coming but a Last Going. The novel ends with Tom walking about conferring death and hoped-for transfer to new worlds for those who see no hope in the human condition. Silverberg's book could be said to be as Californian as its location in its sense of the ultimate "trip" administered by a mystic guru. 4 Brin's, by contrast, with its hearty idealism,s its spirit of a new American Dream forging a recovered state out of the barbaric wilderness, is perhaps more appropriately set in Oregon. 6 Brin's book starts from nothing-indeed, the hero's first experience is to lose most of his treasured belongings and to have to take on a new self (fitting, for him, as an actor), but Silverberg's portrays, so far as humanity is concerned, a steady retreat toward final passivity. Brin's novel is centrifugal in movement, Silverberg's centripetal: the one moves outwards, the other in. Brin's Gordon the Postman travels from town to town of the Willamette Valley, from Pine View to New Oakridge, Curtin, Cottage Grove, Eugene, Harrisburg, Corvallis, Roseburg, and so to the Rogue River and finally off from Oregon to California. As he connects up formerly isolated places, the chapters of the book are headed with their names, until the last name, "Oregon," occurs in the middle of the story. At the same time, Brin's hero dilates: from the frightened, rather self-centered man who begins the book, he becomes more social, responsible, and courageous. All the while he is steadily woven into his own myth until he becomes a new Benjamin Franklin or a George Washington, savior of postwar America and establisher of a new and just political order; parallel to this, his prowess in battle grows, until even the rugged and savage Holnist barbarians he is dedicated to destroying prize him as a potential asset. (Part of this may be sentimentality: there is some loss of grip on detail and realism as the character becomes heroic, but it is also Brin's point to show his hero growing into an identity he could never have imagined. f At the same time, Brin's book moves outwards to its readers: it invites them to con-

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sider how man may be his own destroyer, how a lie, if told for the general good, may legitimately serve political ends, how Americans should prize what they have in the light of what they might not have. The story in Brin's novel is much more integrated with history and the past than that in Silverberg'S, and this may be explained by considering that the one novel is essentially political in orientation, the other religious. In Tom O'Bedlam the action comes inwards, to end at one particular place in California, at a clinic near Mendocino called Nepenthe Center, where, indeed, all who come are brought to forget rather than to learn. 8 (They are sufferers from a psychological disease caused by the war that makes them dangers to society, and their treatment consists of the daily removal of their memories by a scientific process called "mindpick.")9 We begin far east of Sacramento with Tom O'Bedlam meeting a gang of drifters, or "scratchers," then we are moved to San Diego to be introduced to an ex-university teacher of anthropology called Jaspin who is going to a gathering of the worshippers of Chunginl-He-WillCome;lO then we are introduced to the doctors and patients at Nepenthe Center. As the story proceeds, all people converge on Nepenthe. An accidental encounter with an escaping patient makes Tom resolve to go there; he is followed by the scratchers, and the pilgrimage of the "tumbonde" religionists of San Diego comes to an end there, as does the life of their founder. In parallel, the characters do not grow more but less, as the shared visions increasingly flood their minds; all those whom Tom helps to make "the Crossing" at the end die with identical smiles of beatitude on their faces. 11 These processes of movement inwards and of shrinkage are to be seen in much of Silverberg's work: the novels are often a journey to the interior in the sense of mind, as in The Man in the Maze or Downward to the Earth, or to a spiritual center, as in Nightwillgs; shrinkage is seen in the recurrent theme of isolation in the novels or in the sense of a dwindling of powers, as respectively in A Time of Changes or Dying Inside. Also in common with other Silverberg books, the spiritual issues of Tom 0' Bedlam are self-enclosed, relating only to the peculiar world in which they are set. 12 None of us are likely to face the dilemma of whether to continue living on a war-ravaged and devolving Earth or to die into some new and happier reality far above the mire and muck of our own. Silverberg is not even interested in the Dust War that has crippled the United States; he does not ask us to consider what caused it or to reflect more than fleetingly on what it was like before the war. Man is psychologically blighted, hope is offered: what then? The hope offered finally involves cutting the self loose from the Earth altogether, having nothing more to do with it or its concerns. None of this, however, prevents us from feeling the dilemmas of the characters very strongly;

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Silverberg's realism sees to that. But it does move his book away from our world, in a kind of alienating process. Brin's novel seems to come largely from the author's heart and weaves its way back toward our condition; Silverberg is bent always on exploration of increasingly "unfamiliar territory," to use the title of one of his story collections. Silverberg often introduces a small semisupernatural element into his stories, which divides them from our predicament: the mysticism of the nildoror in Downward to the Earth, the strange beings of the future encountered by Clay in Son of Man, the mythic role of Muller in The Man in the Maze, the spiritual transformations at Jorslem in Nightwings. In The Postman, however, Brin is at pains to give a picture of what might conceivably happen in our world as we know it. His whole object is to make links; he is not interested here in the creation of new alternative worlds so much as in the recovery of this one. 13 It is certainly possible for us to allegOrize Silverberg's books, as anything can be allegorized, and it is clear that in Tom O'Bedlam something of the issue of "facing up to life" or else opting out via drugs and dreams is present, but this is under such special and extreme conditions that we are able to do no more than make comparisons, not learn anything about ourselves. What we are dealing with here, of course, is a divide that runs through the science fiction genre itself. Our concern here, however, is with this particular book of Silverberg's and how this "enclosed" tendency of his work generally is particularly in' keeping with this book's drive toward something like entropy, seen in the exhaustions of Earth and its inhabitants and their gradual shrinkage toward stasis and death. Many of Silverberg's novels and stories set out with their characters possessed of sophisticated, highly urbanized minds, and this one is no exception. Brin's novel, however, concerns itself with a self-made hero from the Midwest and with homespun folk whose simplicities are at once their weakness and their strength. Tom 0' Bedlam starts in still frailly civilized California; The Postman begins with its hero coming from the east over the Cascades into relatively primitive territory. During Brin's book there is an increase of civilization, and the ultimate object is to recover the technological society that is lost; nonetheless, the book is concerned with the pioneer struggle required to get there. The hero, Gordon, becomes steadily more intellectually aware of himself and the nature of his responsibility; people lose their incipient savagery as they begin to communicate and to assert themselves against the forces of disorder. Silverberg'S book, however, shows a semipastoral urge in its gravitation toward the forest clinic at Nepenthe, and to the extent that this parallels similar movements in others of his novels-Downward to the Earth, Nightwings, The World Inside, Son of Man, The Book of Skullswe may suppose a measure of assent to it on the author's part. Nevertheless, what Tom O'Bedlam also shows is the erosion of civilization until

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nothing is left, imaged in the final riot of the huge crowd of followers of Chungira-He-Will-Come at Nepenthe and the total destruction of the highly sophisticated medical center. Here, as in others of his works, Silverberg seems antitechnological;14 the academic mind of Jaspin, the anthropologist, is taken over by the power of the visions, and he submits to the uneducated tumbonde people, and the clinical techniques and analytic modes of thought at Nepenthe Center are overwhelmed by the "mad" drifter Tom and his visions. In Brin's novel, the reborn technology of "balloons, airplanes and rocket-ships" which in a dream Gordon sees flying upwards from a blossoming tree, fills the air "with hope" (Brin 1985, 25). Equally, where Brin shows man coming increasingly in control of his environment, Silverberg's novel shows such control steadily diminishing. Nepenthe Center in Tom O'Bedlam is a place where people who have already lost a measure of mastery over themselves, through the postwar disease Gelbard's syndrome, are brought to have their identities taken away from them every day by mindpick. Most patients are cut off from their pasts, born again in a state of total amnesia each morning. Gradually, however, both patients and doctors lose all power over their minds as they are progressively invaded by the visions. Charley, the leader of the scratchers, becomes fascinated by the visions of Tom O'Bedlam, and loses a measure of control over his gang and their direction. The leader of the tumbonde religionists is killed, and his followers run amok. Loss of control is in a sense imaged in the final passivity of death for which many of the characters opt at the end. Tom himself is the only exception; he gains purpose as the novel proceeds, and with it increased power, but it is only power to end things. This theme of loss of control is seen in many of Silverberg's novels. IS Both Tom 0' Bedlam and The Postman are imbued with the sense of different places and with the idea of journeying from one to another, but there is much more sense of purpose and direction in Brin's novel. We know what Gordon, the new-made postman, goes to Curtin for after Oakridge; we know that he goes to Cornwallis to see whether the great machine he has heard of can help his plans. Even when events catch up with him and he is captured by the Holnists, this eventually furthers his plans as nothing else could have done. But in Tom O'Bedlam the proposed pilgrimage of motley hundreds of thousands to the North Pole is absurd from the outset, and soon turns to an ill-directed blundering, with the leader Senhor Papamacer rarely in evidence. 16 The scratchers with whom Tom becomes involved simply drift, first toward North California before they propose going south to Baja California. 17 All motion comes steadily to a halt in Silverberg's novel, symbolized in the enormous traffic jam that piles up at the end of the road at Nepenthe. The novel often deals with conditions of entrapment and enclosure-Jaspin

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bound as literary servant to Senhor Papamacer and forced to marry a woman he does not want, the Senhor and his wife closeted in their decorated bus, the patients prevented from escape from Nepenthe Center by implanted devices, all humanity shut in a ruined world from which the only escape is through death. Fundamentally, where Brin's book is concerned with process, with spiritual development, Silverberg's depicts ultimate stasis, the inability to change the self. Not one of Nepenthe Center's patients shows much sign of improvement even before the coming of the visions. Brin's novel is filled with a sense of beginnings, Silverberg's with one of endings. The Postman has come to Oregon at the approaching endtime of civilization in America, with its last little gleams about to be extinguished by the same barbaric forces that originally overthrew the old order elsewhere. This Gordon wakes people up; he makes them aware once again of what they were, what they have lost, and how they might grow into their true selves once more. Awareness, which has been only local, begins to expand as the communities link up with one another. At the end, it has spread to a whole state, and the hero leaves to help another state into the same fold. In Silverberg's novel, the lights are progressively being put out. Society is in terminal decline, sick at the core with the wasting psychological disease that renders man powerless to better his conditiQn. The visions beckon, and humanity follows them to leave Earth for happier worlds. In Brin's novel, as in much science fiction, survival is of the essence: the hero, humanity, must come through in some form or another. But Silverberg's novel is nearer to a "terminal vision" so far as life on this world is concerned. All of the characters apart from Tom are in the end dead in this sense, and Tom himself is the dispenser of this death. In The Postman, Gordon's continued survival at the hands of the brutish Holnists at the end is not convincing at the level of plot, but it is necessary to the drive of the whole book. No one in Silverberg'S novel would have cared enough about continued existence to have engaged in the agonizing struggle it costs Gordon to escape from being hung upside down by his ankles with a rope tied to a beam (Brin 1985, 288-91). A basic contrast between the two novels is that where Brin has a worldview to offer us, Silverberg gives us only a world. Were we able to extract any definite philosophy from Silverberg'S book, we would find it contradicted by others of his works, some optimistic, some pessimistic. As Silverberg himself said, "1 manage to hold all poses at once .... probably the truth is that I have no consistent positions at all ("Sounding" 8). It is precisely this matter of holding all poses at once that is central to his books. Brin's novel is continually concerned with how things ought to be, Silverberg'S with the complexities of what is. The one is moral in concern: the other ontological.

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We can see the moral emphasis in Brin's hero from the outset. He is radically self-conscious, continually measuring his behavior against a standard. He rebukes himself for trying to reason with some bandits who have robbed him, saying that appeals to reason and to charity are of no use in this world, yet it is by those criteria that he is in large part to live. It is in part charity that makes him let the people of Pine View entertain the myth that he is a postman, sign of a new world of order and communication, and this starts the whole process. When he leaves the townsfolk of Cornwallis to their partly deserved fate at the hands of the approaching Holnists, his sense of responsibility draws him back. Indeed it is the phrase, "Who will take responsibility now?" (emphasis added) that comes to echo through the book (Brin 1985, 166 and onwards). At first Gordon's object is to take proper concern for himself; then this shifts into concern for others; then he must learn to share the responsibility, as he relinquishes his male prejudices and allows a group of dedicated women to take on the Holnists. The failure of these women acts as a beacon to others of their sex, who realize that they can no longer leave the responsibility of warfare to men. This level of moral concern exists in every area of Brin's novel. It matters to his hero, for instance, that the society of the United States before the nuclear war should be seen as almost wholly admirable in its organization and achievements and to have been destroyed only by unfortunate mistakes and accidents. "[Gordon] had to know if the United States had been ruled, in these last years before the Calamity, by men and women of honor" (Brin 1985, 314). Gordon finds in the general of the Holnists a terrible genetically altered fighting machine or "augment" created by the former U.S. government, but in the eventually heroic George Powhatan who overcomes this general, he finds a later and improved "augment," a much more civilized, peaceable and conScience-governed version who looks always to the good of the larger community. This illustrates the preoccupation of Brin's novel with not just what one does but why one does it-with good conduct. In Tom Q'Bedlam the primary concern is with the delineation of people and situations for their own sakes, and more particularly with the precise nature of the visions that have come into people's minds. In other words, the book is concerned more with the nature of a thing than with the mode of its behavior. Those involved with altering human behavior in Silverberg's novel (at Nepenthe Center) are overthrown. One would not find in Brin's book such an episode as the following: Jaspin, the skeptical university teacher turned mystic, has come to his seventh gathering of the tumbonde religionists, the worshippers of Chungini-He-Will-Come, on a dusty hillside outside San Diego, and as usual his skepticism and his supposedly research motive for coming play against a real spiritual hunger that he feels in the vacancy that his life has become. He hears

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a loud voice roaring for the god to take its owner, and realizes that the voice is his own. He feels it is crazy, a "nice Jewish boy from Brentwood, sure, jumping around with the pagan shvartzers on a sizzling hillside in the middle of July"; but then, thinks, "well, why the hell not? Go with it, kid" (TOB 25). He sees the leaders of the procession, he begins to chant with the masked dancers who corne whirling through the crowd, and he goes up the hill until he found himself standing on the lip of a huge ditch. It was full almost to the brim with the most amazing assortment of things: jewelry, coins, dolls, entertainment cubes, family photographs, clothing, toys, electronic gadgets, weapons, tools, packages of food. He knew what to do. This was the Well of Sacrifice: you had to rid yourself of something that was precious to you, by way of recognizing that you would not need such things once the gods came from the star bringing incalculable wealth to all the suffering people of Earth. You must make a gift to the Earth, said Senhor Papamacer, if you wish the Earth to draw gifts from the stars. It didn't matter if what you threw into the ditch wasn't generally considered precious; it had to be precious to you. Jaspin had an offering ready-his wristwatch, probably the last valuable thing except for his books that he had not yet pawned, a sleek IBM job with nine function nodes. It was worth at least a thousand. This is lunacy, he thought. "To Chungini-He-Will-c:ome," he said, and hurled the shining watch far out into the cluttered ditch. (TOB 26-27)

There is no evident moral assessment here; the scene is created for its own sake, without in any way losing contact with the rest of the novel. 18 The great ditch full of precious things is almost symbolic of much that happens in the world itself-the tumbonde religion a thing of broken shacks hiding glory, of illumination rising from the dirt, of the great beatific visions of far stars imposed on the eroded psyches of Earth's inhabitants. The precious things put in the earth are an image of death, but this is a death that will give a more precious life-or will it? The ambiguity and duality in this scene are that of much of the novel. The insistence on giving to the Earth so that the Earth may draw from the stars reminds us of other mentions of the Earth in the novel: the scratchers floating often clear off it with Torn in their air car, all people brought back to Earth in that final muddy confusion at Nepenthe. The ditch itself with that amazing assortment is in a way like the novel with its gallery of sharply seen characters or even the variety of the visions themselves; there is not a scene, not a figure, that Silverberg has not made live for us in all its idiosyncrasy. 19 And of course locally, within the scene itself, we have a very vivid picture of Jaspin, still with one foot very firmly in the world of calculation and cynicism even as he blindly goes against them. This concentration on the sheer "thisness"

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of a scene in all its multiple reality makes Silverberg's approach in this novel much more contemplative than Brin's. Indeed, its focus is on images, whether of the sort above or of the nine different worlds of wonder and beauty portrayed throughout in the visions. The concern with "being" in Tom 0' Bedlam is most evident in the differing theories about the visions offered throughout the novel. As each new piece of information comes in, the characters and the reader are forced to shift back and forth between supernatural and natural, or psychological, explanations. 20 The mood of the novel is continually interrogative; the whole object is to determine the true nature, the ontological status of something. In a sense, the investigative process the novel follows is a species of contemplation in series. At first we have the visions experienced by Senhor Papamacer and the tumbonde people, visions for which there seems no other attitude than the one we normally adopt to any enthusiastic sect. But then, first the patients and later the doctors at Mendocino begin to have dreams of wonderful planets of bliss and of gods; one of the several recurrent·visions they have is identical to the image of Chungira-He-Will-Come. At the same time, we see that the visions of Tom O'Bedlam, which till now have also had no authentication, are identical to those of the patients. For a time, the "supernatural" reading has sway; the gods seem to be speaking to the Earth, and maybe they are coming to it, as Senhor Papamacer says. This level of reading is supported further as reports come in of the same visions being experienced in cities all over the western seaboard of the United States. Meanwhile, however, another idea is growing, namely that the visions are telepathically induced by Tom O'Bedlam. Tom at one point (TOB 248-49) describes how he was once a lodger in the house of Senhor Papamacer in San Diego before the tumbonde religion began. Tom has always had his visions, though not so frequently as he is having them now; his powers are attributed by one of the doctors at Nepenthe Center to his being a telepathic mutant, brought up on the fringes of the radioactive areas of Nevada (TOB 272).21 He has traveled widely; it need not be surprising, then, that his visions have spread. But he is also credited with the power to affect other minds at a &:;tance (TOB 26972). All this Tom is happy to accept, since he regards the visions, even though spread by him, as coming from real sources. For more skeptical minds, however detailed and seemingly realistic the visions are, they are the products of Tom's own invention and long domiciliation with them. But then a "Starprobe" sent decades previously from Earth to the Proxima Centauri system begins, as it nears the second planet of that system, to send back a series of visual transmissions that matches exactly one of the visions, of a green world of gentle crystalline people (TOB 274-76). One scientist still holds out, insisting that if Tom's mind can

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put visions into people, it can do so into the relays that pick up the messages from the Starprobe; his colleagues oppose this view (TaB 29193), but we recall that they have themselves all experienced the power of the visions and that this may affect their judgment. Finally Tom himself comes into his own at the end of the story. He says that the "Time of the Crossing" is at hand and that he must help people to make the journey to whatever vision-seen planet of joy is appropriate for them. For him the gods are not coming to Earth, as they are for Senhor Papamacer; the gods are beckoning man to them, so that he may join their joys: " 'They want us to come to them and live among them and exchange ideas with them, and they know 'it has to be soon because we've been in big trouble here ... and this is the last chance, right now' " (TaB 250). Helped at first by others, but increasingly on his own, Tom begins to "send" all those who wish it to the worlds of their desires. The result of his action may look like death, but it is meant to be more life. It is possible that he has simply killed people by some kind of psychic force, and equally possible that he has been given the power to release people from the restraints of their mortality. Tom O'Bedlam thus essentially leaves us with the question with which it faced us long before: what is the true nature of the visions? Despite receiving much more information, we have achieved no more certainty. Unlike Brin's The Postmal), the novel does not go forward to a new position, but stands still. This static quality can be seen as one expression of its fundamentally contemplative character. But there are ways in which the ontological questions asked by Silverberg's book are especially appropriate to its peculiar world. In P. J. Farmer's To Your Scattered Bodies Go, in which similar questions are continually asked of a strange world where the entirety of the human race has been apparently resurrected, a definite answer is eventually given: the resurrection is an experiment conducted by alien intelligences on a planet near the center of our galaxy. Farmer's heroes are all mental and physical travelers, and that there is a certain answer to their questing is never in doubt. The medium of Silverberg's world is quite different: it is one in which truth is always indefinite and everything is dual. This is a world of uncertainty of being, where man, through the secret influence on his spirit of the Dust War, has lost touch with any self or belief. The skeptical, self-unemployed Jaspin, the sexually shiftless Jill, the grasping taxi-driver-made-good, Senhor Papamacer, the whole religious pilgrimage to the North Pole are in themselves symbols of that displacement, as too are the drifting scratchers, and the patients at Nepenthe Center, who every day have to lose all knowledge of the selves they knew the previous day. Duality enters everything in Tom O'Bedlam. One day while he is traveling with the scratchers, Tom sings two songs to them; one is a song of Feste, the clown in Shakespeare's Twelfth Night,

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"0 Mistress mine, where are you roaming?" The song is full of the sense of love's value amid fleeting time. Then to his own tune Tom sings Arnold's "Dover Beach," which begins with a note of fulfilled love but ends with a sense of the loss of meaning in a world "where ignorant armies dash by night" (TOB 98-100). Together the two songs put the doubleness of the vision of life in the novel. Tom himself is a double figure-is he to be seen as a reincarnation of Shakespeare's Mad Tom, or as someone simply acting up to the name from a knowledge of King Lear? Both positions are possible. Then there is Jaspin: for a time we consider his cynicism about sex and his skepticism as products of his own shiftless character, but later he reveals that he is suffering from the same disease that the patients in Nepenthe Center have, Gelbard's syndrome, and that this has made him "confused, bewildered, totally mixed up" (TOB 63). This clinical explanation does not fully displace the earlier more individual view of the case, but exists side by side with it. Dr. Elszabet Lewis of Nepenthe Center is also first seen in what could be a poor light.22 She is trying to persuade one of her patients, a Father Christie, to give himself over to the mind pick that erases all memories each day; he, having just had what is to him a supreme religious experience involving one of the visions, is resisting that vision's removal. She does not believe in his God and imposes her truth system on him; she tells him that the mind pick will heal him, ignoring the fact that for him his God could do that healing and far better than any medicine could. Ironically, she is later to be brought to believe in gods herself. She tells Father Christie that he cannot withdraw from treatment and cynically uses his God as part of her argument, saying that if He has manifested Himself once He will do so again-a considerable assumption concerning any god. But he is forced to accept, and she tells him, "Trust me .... Trust God, Father" (TOB 19); the "God" thrown in there is cynical, not least after putting the trust in herself first. It is a typically well-observed scene, and it is one that, taken on its own, might have provoked a moral reading. Yet this same Elszabet, who can be seen as quite harsh here, is elsewhere seen as supremely kind and gentle (if at times fastidious and aloof)-this mainly by Tom. Here again, both views coexist. Then too there are the pictures of the gods, or divine-seeming aliens. A picture such as this may excite suspicion of them; it occurs in one of Elszebefs early visions of the green world: All about her moved the delicate crystalline people, bowing smiling, stroking her. Telling her their names. The prince of this, the countess of that. A crystalline cat sauntered among them .... Elszabet, Elszabet. There is the duke of something. Beside him are the duchess and the duke-other of something and the marquis of something else .... Do you like it here,

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Elszabet? Do you like us? We have a poem for you. Where is the poem? Where is the poet? Ah: here. Here. Make way for the poem. Make way for the poet. (TOB 147)

Here the immortals seem a rather "precious" collection, in a too-sweet assemblage of cliches as indefinite as a wish-fulfillment dream (though other characters in the visions are not so). And that is the way we may see the immortals. And we may ask in the midst of all this benignity, Why are they being so generous to man, and why only now, if they truly exist? Later, however, Elszabet's vision of them is different in character; she knows who all the figures she sees are and enters more fully into their lives, and to that extent they become more real. Even then we would at times like to believe that there is something too facile, even superficial, in the way they behave: Visitors had come from all over the galaxy to see the Double Equinox. Some wore the bodies of their native worlds; others, not as compatible with local conditions, had donned crystalline. The room buzzed with the chatter of fifty empires. Three Blades of the Imperium and a Magister, someone was saying. Can you imagine? All in the same room. And someone else said, They were Ninth Zygerone, I'm sure of it. Have you ever seen Ninth before? And a soft whisper: She is of the twelfth Polyarchy, under the great star Ellullimiilu. Years since one of them has been here. Well of course it is the Double Equinox but even so- (TOB 237-38)

They still seem a rather chattery and hierarchical crowd, and the whole scene a sort of divine cocktail party. But then we know that of all the visions she has experienced, Elszabet prefers that of the green world; she has chosen it, and to some extent the character of her mind could be said to mold the way in which she sees it. In other words, the vision she has can be both real, or objective, and an expression of her. We are not allowed to rest in any view of the visions themselves as superficial in the light of those who are having them, but equally we are allowed to entertain the possibility. When Silverberg chose as epigraph for the book a quotation from Metrodorus, the Epicurean of circa, 300 B.C., "To consider the Earth the only populated world in infinite space is as absurd as to assert that in an entire field sown with millet only one grain will grow," he invited us to see that there is no statement of fact, only an indictment of opinion. There are other forms of duality, amounting almost to paradox, in the book. The mystic moments are deeply tied into the physical, even to the sexual. 23 After his vision of Chungira-He-Will-Come, Jaspin makes love with Jill. The total vision of the book is the coming together of the transcendentally pure, beautiful, desirable, and simple with the confused, complicated, grimy world of earth.24 The heavy physicality of

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Senhor Papamacer's wife, instinct with some secret knowledge of life's core, lives through the imagery of celestial transport. It is all faintly reminiscent of the confusion of mud and miracle that ends E. M. Forster's A Passage to Illdia, the Hindu conflation of the grand and the apparently banal in one great mass. It is the poor and the outcast-the Papamacers, the tumbonde people from the San Diego slums, the sacked teacher Jaspin, the psychic wrecks in Nepenthe Center, and most of all the mutant Tom O'Bedlam-that the visions come to first, as to their home. The imagery seems in one way incarnational, if we take the images as truth. And there are other forms of paradox. The hard-bitten and cynical Ed Ferguson, last patient to see the visions, is the first to make the journey to them. Tom the madman, half-literary figure, may be the vessel of a reality and a truth far beyond any the world has known. The book plays the controlled states of mind and emotion that Nepenthe Center seeks to create in its patients against the visions that represent breakdown of that control and against the chaotic loss of reason that occurs at the end. Nepenthe Center seeks to divide people from themselves; at the end, however, they are all brought together, not only through shared dreams but physically in terms of their absorption in the one crowd; even in death they all have the same beatific smiles. The irony is that in a sense the work of those at Nepenthe Center prepared the way for the visions; by cutting people off from their pasts and their identities (as, in a wider sense, the Dust War began to do), the work made them much more open to images of a new and future identity. How does this book compare with Silverberg'S earlier fiction? We have already touched on some of the features it has in common with it, such as the antitechnological drift, the motif of loss of control, the stripping away of phenomena to reach spiritual insight, the journey inwards, the themes of self-enclosure. To this we could add the contemplative bias of the book, its concern with understanding the nature of reality, which is the motive force behind much of Silverberg's fiction-whether it be the extremity of man's guilt in Nightwings or Downward to the Earth, his isolation in The Man in the Maze, Dying Inside, or A Time of Changes, or his identity in Lord Valentine's Castle. The interest is in "being" rather than becoming, in examination rather than action. Nevertheless, there are some real changes here. There is frequently a spareness in Silverberg's earlier descriptive technique that is in contrast to the very detailed and luxuriant imagery used in Tom Q'Bedlam. 25 If one put the portrayal of ruined Roum in Nightwings beside the scene at the Well of Sacrifice in Tom Q'Bedlam, the rather perfunctory mode of description in the earlier novel would be evident. It could be said that in Nightwings Silverberg does not intend us simply to see so much as to see conceptually, but in the later book the image comes first. This may perhaps be attributed to the intervening influence of Lord Valentine's

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Castle and Valentine Pontifex, with their luxuriance of description, typical of fantasy. The second main difference is that where the earlier fiction is often moral in orientation, Tom Q'Bedlam resists evaluations for or against characters. As we have seen, no sooner are we given a potentially negative view of, say, Jaspin or Elszabet than a quite opposite approach is presented. In Nightwings we know that humanity is being justly punished through invasion for its previous arrogant treatment of aliens and that the journey of Tomis the Watcher to Jorslem is in part an expiation for his and all men's guilt. Another form of human arrogance to aliens and subsequent repentance is portrayed in Downward to the Earth. The pride of Krug is brought low in Tower of Glass; the sterility of human supercivilization is indicted in The World Inside; the miserable human fear of love and its consequences is portrayed in A Time of Changes; the indifference of absolute power is exposed in Shadrach in the Furnace. Of course there are novels where moral issues do not surface so muchSon of Man or The Stochastic Man, for example-but in Tom Q'Bedlam they seem at once invited by the material and refused. And this brings us to a third difference from the earlier fiction, and that is the presence of ambiguity and duality in this novel. Earlier works tend to be identifiably optimistic or pessimistic in their eventual conclusions. Humanity at the ~nd of Nightwings is on the way to a spiritual restoration that will transcend and eventually transform the oppressive presence of the aliens. Edmund Gundersen in Downward to the Earth finally makes contact with the aliens, and man is forgiven and accepted. The way to an overthrow of tyranny and the curing of men sick of the terrible organ-rot disease is clear at the end of Shadrach in the Furnace. On the other hand, Muller in The Man in the Maze turns away from man; Dying Inside portrays the painful waning of a man's former telepathic powers; Mattern in The World Inside, despite all the new understanding of real life outside the urbmons, is executed when he returns to them; and in A Time of Changes, Kinnall Darival is in the end tried for his life for daring to love and to say "I." But as we have seen, there is no way to determine whether Tom Q'Bedlam is optimistic or pessimistic. Humanity ends in diseases or death, but in many cases that death may be a way to new life. Everywhere there is ambiguity; indeed that is almost the medium of the novel. Are the visions true or not? We are led continually to ask, and continually we receive no certain answer. There is some anticipation of this procedure in The Book of Skulls, but in Tom Q'Bedlam it can be said to make a development in Silverberg's art toward a greater and more subtle realism. And that is a paradoxical thing to have to say of a book that deals so much with the potentially supernatural. Most of all, thi~ is almost the first novel of Silverberg's to admit the

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possibility for humanity of a mystical experience of the genuinely transcendent, a contact with alien minds and worlds that are here equated with the supernatural and the divine. 21> Silverberg had frequently dealt in his previous fiction with the theme of life after death, but always with that new life as a secular one, continuing on our planet and engineered by semiscientific methods-thus Recalled to Life, To Open the Sky, To Live Again and "Born with the Dead." He had also explored the theme of messianism in To Open the Sky, The Masks of Time, Tower of Glass, and "Thomas the Proclaimer," and the theme of telepathic communication in Son of Man, A Time of Changes, Dyin~ Inside, Lord Valentine's Castle and Valentine Pontifex. And he had frequently touched on the topic of mystic oneness between different and even alien souls. This is portrayed in the drug-induced raptures of Kinnall and Halum in A Time of Changes, in the ecstatic unions experienced by Clay with the people of the future in Son of Man, in the fusion of Gundersen with the nildoror and sulidoror in Downward to the Earth, and at the end of Nightwings, when Tomis the Watcher is transformed at Jorslem: "I became the Surgeon and the Flier and the Renewer and the Changeling and the Servitor and the rest. And they became me. And so long as my hands gripped the starstones we were one soul and one mind" (NW 188). But in Tom O'Bedlam-again perhaps because of his recent writing of fantasy in the Valentine booksSilverberg describes what, if real, is wholly supernaturaL godlike. In earlier novels, as Robert Hunt has put it, "there is religious feeling without a true religion. Heaven, revelation, transfiguration are all to occur in this life" (Hunt 1980, 76). But here, as Tom O'Bedlam helps people to make the Crossing to the incorruptible new lives they are promised among the stars, "it seemed to him that even the awesome ancient godlike Theluvara themselves were warming his soul from their eyrie at the farthest reaches of space" (TaB 334); and as Elszabet herself leaves this life, "the greeness (of the green world) rose up about her like a fountain of joyous light, and she felt herself setting forth, beginning the wondrous voyage outward" (TaB 366). It seems strange yet somehow appropriate that a year before Tom 0' Bedla III , Silverberg had written, in Gilgamesh the King, a novel quite opposite to this one, in which the gods seemed far off and death was feared as final; a novel, paradoxically in this light, from the beginning of man's history, not the putative end. Nevertheless, for Silverberg, here as throughout his work, the demands of complex realism go side by side with the urge toward mysticism. It "seems" to Tom, it is "felt" by Elszabet. The raptures may still all be illusion. There is scope, too, for explaining them away as mere projections from one mind. At the moment of maximum joy of selfsurrender, the universe may be empty, the bliss a mere mockery. Silverberg leaves us with the ambiguities of life, which at once allure and beckon, and yet can also alienate us. One could even apply the same

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duality to the author himself in relation to his book. Through all the changes, ironies, ambiguities and paradoxes, the figure of Silverberg somewhere sits, at once involved and removed, an image of the texture of his own work. If we try to identify him with anyone view in the book we will fail; we will also miss him if we see him as wholly detached from it. And in that as in much else lies the tantalizing force of Tom O'Bedlam. NOTES 1. Silverberg said in an interview in 1979, "I had been getting more and more away from the notion of science fiction as story telling," and "I wrote myself into silence" Geffrey Elliot, "Robert Silverberg Returns," Future Life 2 [August 1979): 25-27; summarized in Thomas B. Clareson, Robert Silverberg: A Primary and Secondary Bibliography [Boston: G. K. Hall, 1983), p. 270). However, in another interview in 1979, Silverberg felt that following Lord Valentine's Castle he would "return to fairly serious and intense fiction after a couple of years, and just ignore the consequences" (Charles Platt, "Robert Silverberg," in Platt's Dream Makers: The Uncommon People who Write Science Fiction [New York: Berkley, 1980], pp. 261-67; summarized in Clareson, Robert Silverberg, pp. 135-36). This seems to envisage the writing of a novel such as Tom Q'Bedlam. 2. So too in "Thomas the Proclaimer." Thomas sees himself as only a "vehicle ... a voice. A spokesman. f\ tool through which His will was made manifest" (Silverberg, "Thomas the Proclaimer," in Silverberg's Born with the Dead [London: Hodder and Stoughton, Coronet, 1977], p. 110). 3. For a possible source for the portrait of this religion, see Silverberg, "Trips" (1974), repro in Silverberg, The Feast of st. Dionysus (London: Hodder and Stoughton, Coronet 1980), pp. 108-9. 4. Compare "Trips": "Go wherever you like. Define your world as you would like it to be, and go there .... It's all trips, this universe. What else is there?" (p. 114). 5. Brin has described himself as "an incorrigible idealist" (phone conversation with author, November 14, 1986), and this seems borne out in all his fiction. 6. It is ironic to find a Californian character of Silverberg's in another story dealing with a postholocaust United States of little, scattered semicivilizations, mocking the people of Oregon for their rustic ignorance and superstition and for a giant pilgrimage that many of the "quarter of a million neopagans in the Willamette Valley" have already begun to San Francisco ("The Palace at Midnight" [1981] repr. in Silverberg, The Conglomeroid Cocktail Party [New York: Bantam, 1985), pp. 90-91). 7. It is possible that Brin is unconsciously drawing on the vision of the valley of dry bones brought to life in Ezekiel, chap. 37 (d. verse 3, "Can these bones live?"). 8. "Nepenthe" means "forgetfulness, oblivion," from Homer, Odyssey 4. pp.301-24. . 9. A similar technique is used on criminals in The Second Trip (1972). The

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word "mindpick" is used in To Live Again (1969), chaps. 13, 14, in reference to discovering the contents of people's minds. 10. This ]aspin and his initial skepticism are modeled on the professor of physics, Gifford, and his attitude to the supposed revelation of God in "Thomas the Proclaimer"; see, e.g., pp. 102-3, 108-9. 11. This probably derives from the "Crystalman grin" that settles on the features of the dead in David Lindsay's A Voyage to Arcturus (1920), which Silverberg knew well. 12. See C. N. Manlove, Sciellce Fiction: Ten Explorations (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1986), p. 120. 13. Though, it should be said, he is quite ready to explore alien or alternate worlds elsewhere in his fiction-the worlds of Kithrup or Garth in Startide Rising (1982) or The Uplift War (1987), or the alternative Earth of The Practice Effect (1984). 14. See also Manlove,.§cimce/iction, pp. 116-17, 233, n. 14. 15. Most notably in the subjugation of Earth in Nightwings, the collapse of Krug's megalomaniac schemes in Tower of Glass, the repression of self in A Time of Changes, the hopelessness of opposition to the totalitarian society in The World Inside, the waning of David Selig's telepathic powers in Dying Inside. 16. This chaotic pilgrimage has its origins in two described in "Thomas the Prodaimer," pp. 107, 132, 139-43, 148-52. 17. These scratchers may derive from the motley group of travelers on the airwagon in Silverberg's "This Is the Road" (1973), repr. in The Feast of SI. Dionysus, esp. pp. 181-85. 18. The source of this picture is probably the pit of religious offerings in "Thomas the Prodaimer" (pp. 150-51). 19. Silverberg has stressed the value he puts on characterization in his science fiction; see Silverberg, "Characterization in Science Fiction," Fmltastic 18 (April 1969): 4-5, 103 (summarized in Clareson, pp. 87-88). 20. For a similar portrayal of diverse theories regarding a potentially supernatural event, see "Thomas the Prodaimer" (pp. 116, 123-24, 128-29, 134-35, 145, 145-47); the last citation is parallel to the posited interference by Tom with the messages sent back by the Starprobe sent out to Proxima Centauri (291-93). 21. The central figure of "Thomas the Prodaimer" is also a visionary from Nevada (p. 106). 22. The source of the name Elszabet may be the female protagonist Ilsabet of the time-traveling story "The Far Side of the Bell-Shaped Curve" (1982), repr. in The Conglomeroid Cocktail Party. 23. Similar fusions of mysticism and sexuality are found throughout Silverberg's work. Perhaps the most striking portrayal is that in the relation between the drug-inspired Kinnall Darival and his "bondsister" Halum in A Time of Changes (1971). More recent examples are seen in "The Feast of SI. Dionysus" (1971) and in Gilgamesh the Killg (London: Pan, 1986), where the relation of Gilgamesh and the incarnate "goddess" Inanna is both physical and supernatural; Gilgamesh feels that "the act of engendering is the way to all that is holy . . . . The joining of flesh and spirit in that act is the thing that brings us dose to the gods," p. 35. 24. It is possible to see the whole story, as often with Silverberg'S fiction, as a mythic or literary reworking-in this case, of Yeats's "Byzantium" poem, with

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the desperate desire to reach the Emperor's palace across "That dolphin-torn, that gong-tormented sea." 25. See Manlove Science Fiction, on Silverberg's spareness in technique, pp.l04-7. 26. There are preludes to this theme in such stories as "Ship-Sister, StarSister" (1973), repr. in Silverberg, Capricorn Games (1976) and in "Schwartz between the Galaxies" (1974), repro in The Feast of St. Dionysus (esp. pp. 103-4). Schwartz's vision is, however, indentifiably a compensatory fantasy.

WORKS CITED Brin, David. The Postman. New York: Bantam, 1985. C1areson, Thomas D. Robert Silverberg: A Primary and Secondary Bibliography. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1983. Elliot, Jeffrey. "Robert Silverberg Returns." Future Life 2 (August 1979): 25-27. Farmer, Philip Jose. To Your Scattered Bodies Go. New York: Putnam, 1971. London: Panther, 1974. Hunt, Robert. "Visionary States and the Search for Transcendence in Science Fiction." In Bridges to Science Fiction: Essays Prepared for the First Eaton Conference on Science Fiction and Fantasy, ed. George E. Slusser, George R. Guffey, and Mark Rose. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1980, pp. 64-77. Manlove, C. N. Science Fiction: Ten Explorations. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1986. Platt, Charles. Dream Makers: The Uncommon People who Write Science Fiction. New York: Berkley, 1980. Silverberg, Robert. Gilgamesh the King. London: Pan, 1986. - - - . Nightwings. London: Sphere, 1978. Cited as NW. - - - . "The Palace at Midnight." In Silverberg, The Conglomeroid Cocktail Party. New York: Bantam, 1985, pp. 84-101. - - . 'The Science Fiction Hall of Fame." In Infinity 5, ed. Robert Hoskins. New York: Lancer, 1973, pp. 9-27. - - - . "Sounding Brass, Tinkling Cymbal." In Hell's Cartographers: Some Personal Histories of Science Fiction Writers, ed. Brian Aldiss and Harry Harrison. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1975, pp. 7-45. Cited as "Sounding." - - - . "Thomas the Proclaimer." In Born with the Dead. London: Hodder and Stoughton, Coronet, 1977, pp. 89-157. - - . Tom O'Bedlam. New York: Donald I. Fine, 1985. Rpt. New York: Warner, 1986. 1986 rpt. cited as TaB.

Bibliography

This is a selective bibliography which lists only Robert Silverberg's major science fiction novels, collections and sources for the short stories cited in the chapters. (Not every edition or reprint is cited; generally, only those which are actually mentioned or quoted in the chapters are listed in the bibliography.) Only secondary sources specifically on Silverberg are cited; reviews are omitted. Primary sources are listed by year of publication then alphabetically; secondary sources are listed alphabetically. The most definitive bibliography of Silverberg is Thomas D. C1areson's Robert Silverberg: A Primary and Secondary Bibliography, 1983.

NOVELS Revolt on Alpha C. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1955. Reprint. New York: Scholastic Book Service, 1962. Special Anniversary Edition. New York: Warner, 1989. Master of Life and Death. New York: Ace Double D 237, 1957. The Shrouded Planet [Robert Randall, pseud.]. Hicksville, NY: Gnome Press, 1957. The 13th Immortal. New York: Ace Double D 223, 1957. Aliens from Space [David Osborne, pseud.). New York: Avalon, 1958. Invaders from Earth. New York: Ace Double D 286, 1958. Invisible Barriers [David Osborne, pseud.]. New York: Avalon, 1958. Lest We Forget Thee, Earth (Calvin M. Knox, pseud.]. New York: Ace Double A291, 1958. J Starhaven [Ivor Jorgenson, pseud.]. New York: Avalon, 1958.

142

Bibliography

Stepsons of Terra. New York: Ace Double D-311, 1958. The Uawning Light (Robert Randall, pseud-I- Hicksville, NY: Gnome Press, 1959. The Planet Killers. New York: Ace Double D-407, 1959. The Plot Against the farth [Calvin M. Knox, pseud.]. New York: Ace Double D358, 1959. Starman's Quest. Hicksville, NY: Gnome Press, 1959. Lost Race of Mars. Philadelphia: Winston, 1960. Collision Course. New York: Avalon, 1961. Recalled to Life. New York: Lancer, 1962. The Seed of Earth. New York: Ace Double F-145, 1962. The Silent Invaders [Calvin M. Knox, pseud.]. New York: Ace Double F-195, 1963. One of Our Asteroids Is Missing (Calvin M_ Knox, pseud.]. New York: Ace Double F-253, 1964. Regan's Planet. New York: Pyramid, 1964. Time of the Great Freeze. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1964. Conquerors from the Darkness. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1965. A Pair from Space. New York: Belmont, 1965. The Gate of Worlds. New York: Holt, Rinehart a'nd Winston, 1967. Planet of Death. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1967. The Time-Hoppers. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1967. Thorns. New York: Ballantine, 1967. Those Who Watch. New York: New American Library, 1967. Hawksbill Station. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1%8. The Masks of Time. New York: Ballantine, 1968. Across a Billion Years. New York: Dial, 1%9. The Anvil of Time [British title Hawksbill Station). London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1969. The Man in the Maze. New York: Avon, 1969. Nightwings. New York: Avon, 1969. Reprint. London: Sphere, 1978. Three Survived. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1969. To Live Again. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1969. Reprint. New York: Warner, 1969. Downward to the Earth. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1970. Reprint. New York: Signet/New American Library, 1971. Reprint. London: Victor Gollancz, 1977. Reprint. London: Pan, 1978. Reprint. New York: Berkley, 1978. A Robert Silverberg Omnibus. London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1970 (includes: Master of Life and Death [19701, Invaders from Earth [1958), The Time-Hoppers [1967]). Vornan-19 [British title The Masks of Time). London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1970. Tower of Glass. New York: Scribner's, 1970. Reprint. New York: Bantam, 1971. Reprint. London: Panther, 1976. Son of Man. New York: Ballantine, 1971. A Time of Changes. Garden City, NY: Nelson Doubleday, 1971. The Book of Skulls. New York: Scribner's, 1972. Dying Inside. New York: Scribner's 1972. Reprint. New York: Ballantine, 1973. Reprint. London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1975. The Second Trip. New York: Nelson Doubleday, 1972. Reprint. New York: Signetl

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New American Library, 1973. Reprint. London: Victor Gollancz, 1979. Reprint. New York: Avon, 1981. The Stochastic Man. New York: Harper and Row, 1975. Reprint. London: Victor Gollancz, 1976. Reprint. New York: Fawcett, 1978. Reprint. London: Coronet, 1978. Shadrach in the Furnace. Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1976. Lord Valentine's Castle. New York: Harper and Row, 1980. Reprint. London: Victor Gollancz, 1981. Reprint. Bantam, 1981. The Desert of Stolen Dreams. San Francisco, CA, and Columbia, PA: UnderwoodMiller, 1981. A Robert Silverberg Omnibus. New York: Harper and Row, 1981 (includes: The Man in the Maze [1969], Nightwings [1969], Downward to the Earth [1970) ). Majipoor Chronicles. New York: Arbor House, 1982. Lord of Darkness. New York: Arbor House, 1983. Valentine Pontifex. New York: Arbor House, 1983. Gilgamesh the King. New York: Arbor House, 1984. Reprint. Toronto and New York: Bantam, 1985. Reprint. London: Pan, 1986. Sailing to Byzantium. San Francisco, CA, and Columbia, PA: Underwood-Miller, 1985. Tom O'Bedlam. New York: Donald I. Fine, 1985. Reprint. New York: Warner, 1986. Star of Gypsies. New York: Donald I. Fine, 1986. At Winter's End. New York: Warner, 1988. The Secret Sharer. Los Angeles: Underwood-Miller, 1988. The New Springtime. New York: Warner, 1990. Letters from Atlantis. New York: Warner, 1990. To the Land of the Living. New York: Warner, 1990. Thebes of the Hundred Gates. Eugene, OR: Pulphouse, 1992. New York: Bantam, 1992.

SHORT STORIES AND SHORT STORY COLLECTIONS "Gorgon Planet." Nebula Science Fiction (British) 2 (February 1954): 50-58. "The Songs of Summer." Original Science Fiction Stories 7 (September 1956): 318. "Collecting Team." Authentic Science Fiction #81 Gune 1957): 66-79. ''Warm Man." Fantasy and Science Fiction 12 (May 1957): 46-55. ''The Winds of SiTOS." Venture Science Fiction 1 (September 1957): 52-74. "Road to Nightfall." Fantastic Universe Science Fiction 10 Guly 1958): 92-112. Next Stop the Stars. New York: Ace Double F-145, 1962 (includes: "Slaves of the Star Giants" [1957], ''The Songs of Summer" [1956], "Hopper" [1956], "Blaze of Glory" [1957], ''Warm Man" [1957]. "The Pain Peddlers." Galaxy 21 (August 1963): 88-98. "To See the Invisible Man." Worlds of Tomorrow 1 (April 1963): 153-62. Godling, Go Home. New York: Belmont, 1964 (includes: "Godling Go Home" [1957], "Why?'; [1957], "Silent Colony" [1954], "Force of Mortality" [1957), "There's No Place Like Space" [1959], "Neutral Planet" [1957), "The

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Lonely One" [1956), "Solitary" [1957], 'The Man with Talent" [1956], "The Dessicator" [1956], "The World He Left Behind" [1959]). To Worlds Beyond: Stories of Science Fiction by Robert Silverberg. Philadelphia: Chilton, 1965 (includes: "The Old Man" [1957), "New Men for Mars" [1957], "Collecting Team" [1957), "Double Dare" (1956), "The Overlord's Thumb" [1958), "Ozymandias" [1958), "Certainty" [1959], "Mind for Business" [1956], "Misfit" [1957] ). [Editor.] Earthmen and Strangers: Nine Stories of Science Fiction. New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1966. Needle in a Timestack. New York: Ballantine, 1966 (includes: 'The Pain Peddlers" [1963], "Passport to Sirus" (1958), "Birds of a Feather" (1958), "There Was an Old Woman-" [1958), "The Shadow of Wings" [1963], "Absolutely Inflexible" [1956], "His Brother's Weeper" [1959], "The Sixth Palace" [1965), "To See the Invisible Man" [1963], "The Iron Chancellor" [1958] ). "Flies." In Dangerous Visions, ed. Harlan Ellison. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1967, pp. 9-20. To Open the Sky. New York: Ballantine, 1967. Reprint. Boston: Gregg Press, 1977 (includes "The Warriors of Light" [1965], "Where the Changed Ones Go" [1966], "Lazarus Forth" [1966], "Open the Sky" [1966] ). "Passengers." In Orbit 4, ed. Damon Knight. New York: Putnam, 1968, pp. 163-

77. The Calibrated Alligator and Other Science Fiction Stories. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1969 (includes: "The Calibrated AlIigator" [1960], "Blaze of Glory" [1957], "The Artifact Business" [1957], "Precedent" [1957], "Mugwump Four" [1959], "Why?" [1957), "His Head in the Clouds" [1957), "Point of Focus" [1958], "Delivery Guaranteed" [1959]. Dimension Thirteen. New York: Ballantine, 1969 (includes: "Eve and the Twentvfour Adams" [1958], "Warm Man" [1957J, "By the Seawall" [1967), "Da~k Companion" [1961], "The Four" [1958), "Bride Ninety-One" [1967], "World of a Thousand Colors" [1957), "En Route to Earth" (1957], "The King of the Golden River" [1967], "Prime Commandment" [1958], "Halfway House"[1966], "Journey's End" [1958), '''Solitary'' [1957] ). Nightwings. New York: Avon, 1969 (includes revisions of: "Nightwings" [1968], "Perris Way" [1968], ''To Jorslem" [1969] ). "Sundance." Fantasy and Science Fiction 36 (June 1969): 4-17. The Cube Root of Uncertainty. New York: Macmillan, 1970 (includes: "Passengers" [1968), "Double Dare" [1956J, "The Sixth Palace" [1965], "Translation Error" (1959), "The Shadow of Wings" [1963), "Absolutely Inflexible" [1956], "The Iron Chancellor" [1958], "Mugwump Four" [1959], "To the Dark Star" [19(8), "Neighbor" [1964], "Halfway House" [1966), "Sundance" [1964) ). [Editor.] The Mirror of Infillity: A Critic's Anthology of Science Fictioll. New York: Harper and Row, 1970. Parsecs and Parables. New York: Doubleday, 1970 (includes: "The Man Who Never Forgot" [1958], "Ishmael in Love" [1970), "One Way Journey" [1957), "Sunrise on Mercury" [1957], "The Outbreeders" [1959), "Road to Night-

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fall" [1958], "Going Down Smooth" [1968], "Flies" [1967], "The Fangs of the Trees" [1968], "Counterpart" [1959] ). [Editor.] The Science Fiction Hall of Fame. Vol. 1. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1970. London: Victor Gollancz, 1971. New York: Avon, 1971 [paper]. London: Sphere Books, 1972 [paper; published in two volumes: Part I and Part II]. "Going." In Four Futures; Four Original Novellas of Science Fiction. New York: Hawthorn, 1971, pp. 131-95. "Good News from the Vatican." In Universe I, ed. Terry Carr. New York: Ace, 1971.

"In Entropy's Jaws." In Infinity 2, ed. Robert Hoskins. New York: Lancer, 1971, pp. 181-227. Moonferns & Starsongs. New York: Ballantine, 1971 (includes: "A Happy Day in 2381" [1970], "After the Myths Went Home" [1969], "Passengers" (1968], "To Be Continued" [1956], "Nightwings" (1968], "We Know Who We Are" [1970], "The Pleasure of Their Company" [1970], "The Songs of Summer" [1956], "A Man of Talent" [1956], "Collecting Team" [1957), "Going Down Smooth" [1968] ). [Editor.] New Dimensions I. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1971. The World Inside. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1971 (includes adaptations of "The Throwbacks" [1970], "The World Outside" [1970], "We Are Well Organized" [1970], "A Happy Day in 2381" [1970], "All the Way Up, All the Way Down" (1971] ). "CaJiban." In Infinity 3, ed. Robert Hoskins. New York: Lancer, 1972, pp 9-25. "Push No More." In Strange Bedfellows. ed. Thomas Scortia. New York: Random House, 1972, pp. 3-25. The Reality Trip. New York: Ballantine, 1972 (includes: "In Entropy's Jaws" [1971], "The Reality Trip" [1970], "Black Is Beautiful" [1970], "Ozymandias" [1958], "Caliban" [1972], "The Shrines of Earth" [1957], "Ringing the Changes" [1970], "Hawksbill Station" [1967] ). "When We Went to See the End of the World." In Universe 2, ed. Terry Carr. New York: Ace, 1972, pp. 41-51. "Breckenridge and the Continuum." In Showcase, ed. Roger Elwood. New York: Harper and Row, 1973, pp. 1-35. Earth's Other Shadow. New York: New American Library, 1973 (includes: "Something Wild Is Loose" (1971], "To See the Invisible Man" [1963], "Ishmael in Love" [1970], "How It Was When the Past Went Away" (1969), "To the Dark Star" [1968], "The Fangs of the Trees" (1968], "Hidden Talent" [1957], "The Song the Zombie Sang" [1970], "Flies" [1967] ). "This Is the Road." In No Mind of Man, ed. Robert Silverberg. New York: Hawthorn, 1973, pp. 120-82. Unfamiliar Territory. New York: Scribner's, 1973 (includes: "Caught in the Organ Draft" [1973], "(Now + n) (Now - n)" [1973], "Some Notes on the Predynastic Epoch" [1973], "In the Group" [1973], "Cali ban" (1972), "Many Mansions" (1973), "Good News from the Vatican" [1971], "Push No More" (1972), "When We Went to See the End of the World" [1972), "What We Le,~rned from This Morning's Newspaper" (1972), "In Entropy's Jaws" [1971], "The Wind and the Rain" (1973) ).

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Val/clI Beyond Time. New York: Dell, 1973 (includes: "Valley Beyond Time" [1957], . 'The Flame and the Hammer" [1957], "The Wages of Death" (1958), "Spacerogue" [1958] ). "Born with the Dead." Fantasy and Science Fietioll 46 (April 1974): 4-66. Born with the Dt'ad. New York: Random House, 1974. Reprint. New York: Vintage, 1975. Reprint. New York: Berkley, 1976. Reprint. London: Hodder and Stoughton, Coronet, 1977 (includes: "Born with the Dead" [1974], "Thomas the Proclaimer" [1973], "Going" [1971]). "The Feast of St. Dionysus." In An Exultation of Stars, ed. Terry Carr. New York: Pocket, 1974, pp. 13-76. "Schwartz between the Galaxies." In Steller 1, ed. Judy Lynn del Rey. New York: Ballantine, 1974, pp. 103-24. Sundance and Otiler Science Fictiol1 Stories. Nashville, TN: Nelson, 1974 (includes: "Sundance" [1969,1, "Nl'!ighbor" [1964], "Passport to Sirus" [1958), "Caught in the Organ Draft" (1973], "Neutral Planet" [1957J, "The Pain Peddlers" [1963), "The Overlord's Thumb" [1958J, "The Outbreeders" [1959], "Something Wild Is Loose" [1971] ). "Trips." In Final Stage, ed. Edward L. Ferman and Barry N. Malzberg. New York: Charterhouse, 1974, pp. 204-40. The Feast of St. DiollYsus. New York: Scribner's, 1975. Reprint. London: Victor Goilancz, 1976. Reprint. London: Hodder and Soughton, Coronet, 1980 (includes: "The Feast of st. Dionysus" [1973], "Schwartz between the Galaxies" [1974], "Trips" (1974J, "In the House of Double Minds" [1974], "This Is the Road" [1973] ). Sunrise on Mercury and Other Science Fiction Stories. Nashville, TN: Nelson, 1975 (includes: "Sunrise on Mercury" [1957), "Hi Diddle Diddle" [1959], "Birds of a Feather" [1958], "There Was an Old Woman-" [1958], "Alaree" [1958], "The Macauley Circuit" [1956], "Company Store" [1959], "After the Myths Went Home" [1969] ). The Best of Robert Silverberg. Vol. 1. New York: Pocket, 1976. Reprint. London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1977. Reprint. Boston: Gregg Press, 1978 (includes: "Road to Nightfall" (1958), "Warm Man" (1957), "To See the Invisible Man" [1963), "The Sixth Palace" (1965), "Flies" (1967), "Hawksbill Station" [1967), "Passengers" [1968], "Nightwings" [1968], "Sundance" [1969], "Good News from the Vatican" [1971] ). Capricorn Games. New York: Random House, 1976 (includes: "Capricorn Games" [1974], "The Science Fiction Hall of Fame" [1973), "Ms Found in an Abandoned Time Machine" [1973], "Breckenridge and the Continuum" [1973), "Ship-Sister, Star-Sister" [1973), "A Sea of Faces" [1974J, "The Dybbuk of Mazel Tov IV" [1974], "Getting Across" [1973] ). The Best of Robert Silverberg. Vol. 2. Boston: Gregg Press, 1978 (includes: "A Happy Day in 2381" (1970), "In Entropy's Jaws" [1971), "Caliban" (1972], "When We Went to See the End of the World" (1972), "The Dybbuk of Mazel Tov IV" (1974), "Breckenridge and the Continuum" (1973), "Capricorn Games" [1974), "Trips" (1974], "Born with the Dead" (1974), "Schwartz between the Galaxies" (1974) ). The SOllgs of SUlllmer and Other Stories. London: Victor Gollancz, 1979 (includes: "The Songs of Summer" (1956), "To Be Continued" (1956), "Double Dare"

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(1956], "A Man of Talent" [1956], "Dark Companion" (1961], "Halfway House" [1966], "By the Seawall" [1967], "The King of the Golden River" (1967], "Bride 91" [1967], "We Know Who We Are" [1970], 'The Pleasure of Their Company" [1970] ). The Conglomeroid Cocktail Party. New York: Arbor House, 1984. Reprint. New York: Bantam, 1985 (includes: "The Far Side of the Bell-Shaped Curve," "The Pope of the Chimps," "The Changeling," "The Man Who Floated in Time," "The Palace at Midnight," "A Thousand Paces Along the Via Dolorosa," "At the Conglomeroid Cocktail Party," "Our Lady of the Sauropods," "Gianni," "The Trouble with Sempoanga," "How They Pass the Time in Pelpe!," "Waiting for the Earthquake," "Not Our Brother," "The Regulars," "jennifer's Lover," "Needle in a Timestack"). "Gilgamesh in the Outback." In Rebels in Hell, ed. Janet Morris. New York: Baen, 1986, pp. 73-137. Beyolld the Safe Zone: Collected Short Fictioll of Robert Silverberg. New York: Donald I. Fine, 1986.

MISCELLANEOUS FICTION The Mask of Akhnaten. New York: Macmillan, 1965.

NONFICTION "Characterization in Science Fiction." Fantastic 18 (April): 4-5, 103. "Fanmag." Science Fiction Adventures 2 (December 1953): 88-95. Treasures Beneath the Sea. Racine, WI: Whitman Publishing Co., 1960. First American into Space. Derby, CT.: Monarch Books, 1961. Lost Cities and Vanished Civilizations. Philadelphia: Chilton, 1962. The Golden Dream: Seekers of El Dorado [Walker Chapman, pseud.). Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1967. Mound Bilders of Ancient America: The Archaeology of a Myth. Greenwich, CT.: NY Graphic Society, 1968. The Realm of Prester John. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1972. "Sounding Brass, Tinkling Cymbal." In Hell's Cartographers: Some Personal Histories of Science Fiction Writers, ed. Brian W. Aldiss and Harry Harrison. London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, pp. 7-45. New York: Harper and Row, 1975, pp. 7-45. Reprint. Foundation 7 and B (March 1975): 6-37. Reprint. Algol 25 (Winter 1976): 6-18. Reprint. London: Futura, 1976.

EDITED COLLECTIONS The Mirror of Infinity: A Critics' Anthology of Science Fiction. New York: Harper and Row, 1970. Reprint. London: Victor Gollancz, 1971. Reprint. New York: Avon Books, 1971. Reprint. London: Sphere Books, 1972. 2 vols. Robert Silverberg's Wqrlds of Wonder: Exploring the Craft of Science Fiction. New York: Warner, 1987.

Bibliography

148 SECONDARY STUDIES

Abrash, Merritt. "Robert Silverberg's The World Inside." In No Place Else: Explorations in Utopian and Dystopian Fiction, ed. Eric S. Rabkin, Martin Greenberg, and Joseph Olander. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1983, pp. 225-43. Alderson, John. "The Better Way: Has Silverberg Found It?" Science Fiction Commentary #53 (April 1978): 26, 54. Aldiss, Brian, and Bob Shaw. "Comment on Two of Silverberg's Worlds of Wonder." Foundation 38 (Winter 1986-1987): 21-23. Aldiss, Brian, and Harry Harrison, eds. Hell's Cartographers: Some Personal Histories of Science Fiction Writers. London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, pp. 745. New York: Harper and Row, 1975, pp. 7-45. Reprint. Foundation 7 and 8 (March 1975): 6-37. Reprint. Algol2S (Winter 1976): 6-18. Reprint. London: Futura. 1976. ' Altemman, Peter S. "Four Voices in Robert Silverberg's Dying Inside." In Critical. Encounters II: Writers and Themes in Science Fiction, ed. Tom Staicar. New York: Ungar, 1982, pp. 90-103. Clareson, Thomas D. "Downward to the Earth." In Survey of Science Fiction Literature, Vol. 2, ed. Frank N. Magill. Englewood Giffs, NJ: Salem Press, 1979, pp. 591-94. - - . "The Fictions of Robert Silverberg." In Voices for the Future, Vol. 2, ed. Thomas D. Clareson. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1979, pp. 1-33. - - . "Introduction to Silverberg'S The Best of Robert Silverberg." Vol. 2. Boston: Gregg Press, 1978, pp. vii-xxi. - - . Robert Silverberg. Starmont Reader's Guide, No. 18. Mercer Island, WA: Starmont House, 1983. - - . Robert Silverberg: A Primary and Secondary Bibliography. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1983. - - . "Robert Silverberg: The Complete Writer." Falltasy and Science Fiction 46 (April 1974): 73-80. - - . "Whose Castle? Speculations as to the Parameters of Science Fiction." Essays in Arts and Sciences 9 (1980): 139-43. Currey, L. W. "Robert Silverberg." Science Fiction and Fantasy Authors: A Bibliography of First Printings of Their Fiction. Boston: C. K. Hall, 1979, pp. 436-

38. 0' Ammassa, Don, and Bruce Gillespie. "The Dying Inside Debate." Science Fiction

Commentary No. 51 (March 1977): 12-15. Dilley, Frank, and Nicholas Smith. "Multiple Selves and Survival of Brain Death." In Philosophers Look at Science Fiction, ed. Nicholas D. Smith. Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1983, pp. 105-16. Dunn, Thomas P., and Richard D. Erlich. "The Mechanical Hive: Urbmon 116 as the Villain-Hero of Silverberg'S The World Inside." Extrapolation 21 (Winter 1980): 338-47. Edwards, Malcolm. "Robert Silverberg." In Science Fiction Writers, ed. E. F. Bleiler. New York: Scribner'S, 1982, pp. 505-11.

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Emery, Michael J. "The Invasion Motif in the Science Fiction of Robert Silverberg." W. Ohio JoumallO, no. 1 (Spring 1989): 138-43. Gillespie, Bruce. "Robert Silverberg at His Best: The Stochastic Man." Science Fiction Commentary No. 51 (March 1977): 16-18. Gordon, Andrew. "Silverberg's Time Machine." Extrapolation 23 (1982): 345-61. Gunn, James. "Tower of Glass." In Survey of Science Fiction Literature, ed. Frank N. Magill. Vol. 5. pp. 2303-2305. Kam, Rose Sallberg. "Silverberg and Conrad: Explorers of Inner Darkness." Extrapolation 17 (December 1975): 18-28. Kelley, George. "Robert Silverberg." In Twentieth-Century Science Fiction Writers, ed. Curtis C. Smith, 2nd ed. Chicago and London: St. James Press, 1986, pp.661-66. Letson, Russell. " 'Falling through Many Trapdoors': Robert Silverberg." Extrapolation 20 (Summer 1979): 109-17. - - . "Introduction" to Silverberg's To Open the Sky. Reprint. Boston, MA: Gregg Press, 1977. Magill, Frank N. Survey of Science Fiction Literature. 5 Vols. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Salem Press, 1979. Malzberg, Barry. "Robert Silverberg." Fantasy and Science Fiction 46 (April 1974): 67-72. Manlove, C. N. "Robert Silverberg, Nightwings (1969)." In Science Fiction: Ten Explorations by C. N. Manlove. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1986, pp. 100-120. McNelly, Willis. "Dying Inside." In Survey of Science Fiction Literature, ed. Frank N. Magill, Vol. 2, pp. 671-75. Nedelkovich, Alexander. "The Steller Parallels: Robert Silverberg, Larry Niven, and Arthur C. Oarke." Extrapolation 21 (1980): 348-60. Reginald, Robert. "Robert Silverberg." In Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature, ed. R. Reginald. 2 vols. Detroit, MI: Gale Research, 1979, Vol. 1, pp. 47678; Vol. 2, pp. 1074-1075. Sanders, Joe. "Silverberg: Transformations and Death." Science Fiction (September 1983): 90-95. Shiflet, Ray C. "The Stochastic Man." In Survey of Science Fiction Literature, ed. Frank N. Magill, Vol. 5, pp. 2179-2183. Silverberg. Robert. "Sounding Brass, Tinkling CymbaL" In Hell's Cartographers: Some Personal Histories of Science Fiction Writers, ed. Brian Aldiss and Harry Harrison. London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, pp. 7-45. New York: Harper and Row, 1975, pp. 7-45. Reprint. Foundation 7 and 8 (March 1975): 6-37. Reprint. Algol 25 (Winter 1976): 6-18. Stableford, Brian M. "The Compleat Silverberg." Speculation No. 31 (Autumn 1972): 20-26. - - - . "The Metamorphosis of Robert Silverberg." Science Fiction Monthly 3 (March 1976): 9-11. - - . "Nightwings." In Survey of Science Fiction Literature, ed. Frank N. Magill, Vol. 3, pp. 1526-1530. - - - . "Postscript tt? the Compleat Silverberg." Speculation No. 32 (Spring 1973): 9-12. .

ISO

Bibliography

- - . "Robert Silverberg." In Science Fictioll Encyclopedia, ed. Peter Nicholls. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1979, pp. 545-46. - - . "A Time of ChanKes." In Survey of Science Fiction Literature, ed. Frank N. Magill, Vol. 5, pp. 2293-2297. Swank, Paul. "Robert Silverberg." In Twentieth-Century Science Fiction Writers, ed. Curtis C. Smith. New York: St. Martin's, 1981, pp. 492-94. Tuma, George. "Biblical Myth and Legend in Tower of Glass: Man's Search for Authenticity." Extrapolation 15 (May 1974): 174-91. - - . "Robert Silverberg." In Twentieth-Century American Science Fiction Writers, ed. David Cowart and Thomas L. Wymer. Vol. 8 of Dictionary of Literary Biography. Detroit, MI: Gale Research, 1981, pp. 106-19. Turner, George. "Robert Silverberg: The Phenomenon." Science Fiction Commentary No. 51 (March 1977): 3-7.

Index

Aldiss, Brian, 1, 16, 59, 63 Anthony, Piers, 34 Arnold, Matthew, 132; "Dover Beach," 132 Asimov, Isaac, 41; Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, 36 Ballard, J. G., 4, 16 Barrett, William, 17; Irrational Man, 17 Beckett, Samuel, 15 Bellamy, Edward, 100; Looking Backward, 100, 102 Bellow, Saul, 40, 47; Seize the Day, 48; Herzog, 48 Bester, Alfred, 41, 60; The Demolished Man, 45-46 Bierce, Ambrose, 60 Borges, Jorge Luis, 4; "The Babylon Lottery," 17, 66 Bradbury, Ray, 99; Fahrenheit 451, 99, 101, 102 Brin, David, 12; The Postman, 12, 12228 Brown, Fredric, 60 ..

Brown, Norman 0., 108; Love's Body, 108 Brunner, John, 99; The Shockwave Rider, 99 Bryant, Dorothy, 100; The Kin of Ata Are Waiting for You, 100 Bulwer-Lytton, Edward, 102; The Coming Race, 102 Bunyan, John, 24; Pilgrim's Progress, 24 Burnett, W. R., 4 Burroughs, Edgar Rice, 2, 40 Callenbach, Ernest, 100; Ecotopia, 100, 102 Campbell, John W., 39 Carr, Terry, 11 Clareson, Thomas, 16, 60 Clarke, Arthur c., 36 Conklin, Groff, 2 Conrad, Joseph, 6, 12, 15, 36; Heart of Darkness, 7, 22 Cosmos, 8

152

Index

Delany, Samuel, 16; Triton, 104 de Maupassant, Guy, 60 Derleth, August, 63; Worlds of Tomorrow, 63 Dick, Philip K., 16 Disch, Tom, 4 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 15

Joyce, James, 12, 15, 39, 40, 41, 60

Eliot, T. S., IS, 40, 41 Elliott, Don, and Dan Eliot (pseudonyms of Robert Silverberg), 3-4 Ellison, Harlan, 4, 16, 41; Dangerous Visions, 6 .' Ellison, Ralph, 52

Le Guin, Ursula, 8; The Dispossessed, 104 Lewis, C. S., 24, 25 Lewis, David, 77 Lindsay, David, A Voyage to Arcturus, 24,25

Fairman, Paul, 63 Fantasy Amateur Press Association, 1 Farmer, Philip Jose, 1, 35, 41; The Lovers, 18; To Your Scattered Bodies Go, 131 Forster, E. M., 134; A Passage to India, 134 Foundation, 35 Galbraith, Robert, 107, 118 Galaxy, 4, 5 Galileo, 8 Garrett, Randall, 1 Gold, Horace, 4 Graves, Robert, 35 Haggard, Rider, 41 Harrison, Harry, 1,59 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 51; "The Birthmark," 50 Healy, Raymond J., and Francis McComas, 2 Heinlein, Robert A., 17, 31, 41; "If This Goes On ... ," 18 Hell's Cartographers, 1, 59 Henry, 0., 60 Herbert, Frank, 8, 36 Hugo Award, 1, 5 Huntington, John, 97 Huxley, Aldous, 96; Ape and Essence, 101; Brave New World, 98, 103

Kafka, Franz, 15, 39, 40, 41, 42-43, 60; The Castle, 42; "The Metamorphosis," 42 Kipling, Rudyard, 41 Knight, Damon, 2, 60

Malamud, Bernard, 40, 47 Malzberg, Barry, 16, 59 Milfotd Award, 8 Milford Science Fiction Writers' Workshop, 2 Miller, Arthur, Death of a Salesman, 49 Moorcock, Michael, 16 Morris, Janet, 10; Rebels in Hell, 10, 35 Morson, Gary Saul, 97 Nebula Award,S, 8, 9 Nebula Science Fiction, 1 "New Wave," 4, 15 Nietzche, Friedrich, 43 Nightstand Books, 4

Odyssey, 8 Orwell, George, 95, 96; Nineteen Eighty-Four, 99, 100, 102, 104 Panshin, Alexei and Cory, 24 Poe, Edgar Allan, 41, 60, 63; Marqinalia, 63; "The American Drama," 63 Pohl, Frederik, 4, 41; The Space Merchants, 102 Proust, Marcel, 60 Rabkin, Eric, 39 Rand, Ayn, %; Anthem, 102 Rorty, Amelie 0., 75, 83 Roth, Philip, 40, 47

Index Russ, Joanna, 104; The Female Man, 104 Ryman, Geoff, 35 Science Fiction Writers' Association (SFWA),2 Shakespeare, William, 131; King Lear, 132; Twelfth Night, 131 Silverberg, Robert: and American Jewish novel, 47-49; and anxiety and uncertainty, 15; association with Frederik Pohl, 4; beginning of second phase of career, 4; collaboration with Randall Garrett, I, 2; disappointment with SF audience,S; and Doppelganger characters, 61; and dystopian novel, 95-105; early years, 2, 62; early publishing, 3-6; and existentialism, 6, 39, 61; first Hugo, 2; and free will and determinism, 8; his "mysterious" illness of 1966, 6; home ravaged by fire, 6, 62; and ironic endings, 59-72; marriage (Barbara H. Brown), 2; arid modernism, 15, 17, 40, 43; and myth of the superman, 39-57; and personal identity, 73-94; President of SFWA, 2; and "psychic cannibalism," 6, 61; quitting science fiction, 7; and redemption and transcendence, 6, 20, 107-19, 121-39; and science fiction, 15, 60; third phase of career, 8; undergraduate in comparative literature at Columbia University, 1, 2; wins fifth Nebula, 9; writes column for GaWeo and Amazing Stories, 8; writing erotica, 3-4 Silverberg, Robert: Works by: "Amanda and the Alien," 61, 6970; The Book of Skulls, 48, 125, 135; "Born with the Dead," 5, 8, 17, 36, 61, 136; Born with the Dead, 60, 6S69; "Breckenridge and the Continuum," 28, 30-31; "Caliban," 61, 65, 67-68, 69; "Collecting Team," 60, 61, 63~64; The

153

Conglomeroid Cocktail Party, 10, 35; "The Desert of Stolen Dreams," 9; Downward to the Earth, 7, 12, 17, 20, 22-24, 25, 27, 32, 33, 36, 73, 74, 76, 77-81, 83, 124, 125, 134, 135, 136; Dying Inside, 6, 7, 9, 12, 15, 39-57, 62, 70, 124, 134, 135, 136; Earthmen and Strangers, 4; "In Entropy's Jaws," 61, 62; The Feast of St. Dionysis, 12, 107-19; First American in Space, 4; "Flies," 6, 64; "Gilgamesh in the Outback," 10, 35; Gilgamesh the King, 10, 35, 36, 136; "Going," 32; Going, 60; The Golden Dream, 4; "Good News from the Vatican," 5; "Gorgon Planet," 1, 60; "Hawksbill Station," 5; Invaders from Earth, 3; To Live Again, 12, 27, 73, 76, 77-78, 82, 85, 86, 90, 91, 136; Lord of Darkness, 9, 36; Lord Valentine's Castle, 8, 9, 34, 35, 36, 59, 7l, 73, 76, 82-85, 134, 135, 136; Lost Cities and Vanished Civilizations, 4; Lost Race of Mars, 3; Majipoor Chronicles, 8, 34, 35, 76, 85-87; The Man in the Maze, 6, 17, 20-22, 24,25-27,32, 124, 125, 134, 135; The Mask of Akhnaten, 4; The Masks of Time, 17, 27, 32, 136; The Mirror of Infinity, 63; Mound Builders of Ancient America, 4; Needle in a Times tack, 5; New Dimensions (edited anthology), 4; The New Springtime, 11; Next Stop the Stars, 3; "Nightwings," 5; Nightwings, 6, 17, 20, 23, 24, 27, 32, 36, 124, 125, 134, 135, 136; "The Old Man," 60; One of Our Asteroids Is Missing,S; To Open the Sky,S, 17, 1S-20, 24, 27, 32, 136; "The Pain Peddlers," 4; "Passengers," 5, 6, 27, 61, 64, 65, 66--67, 69; Planet of Death, 5; Project Pendulum, 11; "Push No More," 61, 62; The Realm of Prester John, 4, 7, 36; Recalled to Life, 136; Revolt on Alpha C, 1; "Road to Nightfall," 3, 16; Robert Silverberg's Worlds of Wonder, 62-63; Sailing to Byzantium,

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Index

9, 36; "Schwartz Between the Galaxies," 29-30; "The Science Fiction Hall of Fame," 28-29, 31, 33, 65, 121; The Second Trip, 61, 7576; The Secret Sharer, 11, 36; "To See the Invisible Man," 4, 6, 17, 61, 64-65; The Seed of Earth,S; Shadrach in the Furnace, 8, 34, 121, 135; Son of Man, 20, 22, 24-27, 36, 50, 125, 136; "The Songs of Summer," 2; "Sounding Brass, Tinkling Cymbal," I, 7, 59, 61, 65; Star of Gypsies, 10, 35; Stepsons of Terra, 3; The Stochastic Man, 8, 17, 32-33; "Sundance," 6,' 27, 34,61; "This is the Road," 17, 32; "Thomas the Proclaimer," 121, 136;. Thorns,S, 6, 32; A Time of Changes, 5, 16, 17, 20, 23, 27, 32, 50, 51, 124, 134, 135, 136; Tom O'Bedlam, 10, 121-37; Tower of Glass, 7, 9, 12, 16, 27, 107-19, 136; Treasures under the Ice, 4; "Trips," 32; Universe I (edited anthology, with Karen Haber), 11; Valentine Pontifex, 9, 35, 36, 76, 86-89, 90, 91, 135, 136; "Warm Man," 2, 6, 16; "When We Went to See the End of the World," 61, 66; ''The Winds of Siros," 5; At Winter's End, 11; The World Inside, 12, 16, 27, 76, 86, 95lOS, 125, 135

Simak, Clifford D., 6 Science Fiction Adventures, 1 Shaw, George Bernard, 43 Skinner, B. F., 100; Walden Two, 100 Smith, Cordwainer, 4 Smith, E. E., 44 Spaceship, 1 Stableford, Brian, 44 Stapledon, Olaf, Last and First Men, 24; Odd John, 44; Star Maker, 24 Sturgeon, Theodore, 45; More Than Human, 45 Transcendental Meditation, 91-92 Uzzell, Thomas, 62 Vanc~ Jack, 36 Van V6gt, A. E., 40; Sian, 44-45 Vonnegut, Kurt, 42

Watson, Ian, 35 Weinbaum, Stanley, 40; The New Adam, 44 Wells, H. G., 41, 66 Wollheim, Donald A., 2 Worlds of If, 4 Yeats, William Butler, 12, 15, 36 Zamiatin, Evgenii, 95; We, 99, 104

About the Contributors

EDGAR L. CHAPMAN teaches in the Department of English and Foreign Languages at Bradley University, Illinois. He has written a number of articles on science fiction and is completing a book-length manuscript on Robert Silverberg. THOMAS D. CLARE SON teaches English at the College of Wooster, Ohio. One of the foremost scholars of science fiction, Clareson has written extensively on Robert Silverberg, including the definitive Robert Silverberg: A Primary and Secondary Bibliography (1983). FRANK DIETZ teaches English at Austin Community College, Texas. He edited, with M. Kunath, a study of utopias, Die Kinder Utopias (1984). CHARLES ELKINS is Professor of English at Florida International University. Former Co-editor of Science-Fiction Studies, he has written extensively on the social functions of science fiction. JOHN H. FLODSTROM teaches in the Philosophy Department at the University of Louisville, Kentucky. He has presented several papers on science fiction and has translated Henry Ey's Consciousness: A Phenomenological Study of Being Conscious and Becoming Conscious (1978). JOSEPH FRANCAVILLA teaches American literature and film at Columbus College, Georgia. He has published fiction and essays on Harlan

156

About the Contributors

Ellison, Roger Zelazny, Thomas Disch, Stanislaw Lem, and Ray Bradbury. He is currently working on a historical survey of science fiction and a book on Edgar Allan Poe and Franz Kafka. MARTIN H. GREENBERG teaches at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay and has edited over five hundred books on science fiction. RUSSELL LETSON taught English at St. Cloud College, Minnesota, and is now a computer systems consultant. He has published essays on Jack Vance, Robert Heinlein, and Robert Silverberg. Currently, he is completing a manuscript on the science fiction writer Jack Vance. C. N. MANLOVE teaches in the Department of English Literature at

the University of Edinburgh. He is the author of several books, including Modern Fantasy (1975), Literature and Reality 1600-1800 (1978), The Gap in Shakespeare (1981), The Impulse of Fantasy Literature (1983), Science Fiction (1986), c. S. Lewis: His Literary Achievement (1987), Critical Thinking: A Guide to Interpreting Literary Texts (1989). ROBERT REILLY is a Professor of English at Rider College, New Jersey, and is author of several articles on Arthurian literature and science fiction. He has edited The Transcendent Adventure: Studies of Reli8ioll in Science Fiction and Fantasy (Greenwood, 1985).