Robert Silverberg Interview

SFFWorld is very pleased to speak to legendary SF and Fantasy writer Robert Silverberg. We talked about the re-release of old work, the process of writing, the importance of digital media in the 21st century and retirement.

Hello, Robert: many thanks for giving us some time here. Welcome to SFFWorld.

We’re writing these questions as Open Road Media are releasing more of your older work in the USA as e-books. Of the current list now being released (Tom O’Bedlam, Hunt the Space-Witch!, The Chalice of Death, The Man in the Maze, The Planet Killers and To the Land of the Living) have you got any particular personal favourites in that list?

I like TOM O’BEDLAM for its fierce depiction of a post apocalyptic world, and THE MAN IN THE MAZE for the use it makes of my background in classical Greek drama. But I don’t like picking favorites among my books. It’s a little like picking favorites among one’s children.

It’s an eclectic list that covers a wide range in your lengthy career. During the last few years you’ve had much of your older repertoire released as e-books. How comfortable are you generally with seeing the re-appearance of older work?

I’m delighted. This is the 21st century and book publishing is not what it was when I began writing sixty years ago. If I want to hold my place with today’s readers, I have to put my books where they will want to read them, and that means electronic publishing. And I have no problem with releasing my older work. Anyone interested in watching my development as a writer over all those years will want to study the whole span of my work.

Of course, you also write shorter fiction, and much of that has been appearing in your Collected Volumes of stories. How different do you find writing short stories and shorter fiction rather than novels? Do you have a preference?

Not really. A novel is something of an endurance test, requiring a great deal of stamina from the writer as the project goes on for weeks or even months. A short story is finished, at least in the first draft, in a matter of a few days. But short-story writing is a tense and difficult business, because every word has to matter, everything has to be precisely in the right place. A novel can have a whole chapter not quite right and it won’t seriously affect the impact of the entire work. So both forms are challenging, each in its own way — the novel asks the writer to maintain the creative impulse from week to week, the short story demands fierce on-the-spot concentration.

One about the process: Generally, do you tend to work from one key idea that you then refine, or do you spend a long time maturing ideas and mixing them together until you find something that works?

The basic idea, or sometimes just the title, is the first thing that generally arrives. Then my mind goes to work developing and elaborating that basic bit of information, and I just stand back and watch.

Thinking back over your professional career, how did you start writing? Was there a particular book or moment in your life that spurred you on?

When I was about twelve, one of my teachers said to me, “You’re going to be a writer, aren’t you?” That had never occurred to me. I assumed I would do something in the sciences when I grew up. But once the words had been spoken, I realized that they were on the mark — that I had a gift for language, that writing came easily to me, that I was already doing quite a bit of writing as it was. And so I simply followed the path that I discovered I had been on all along.

Over the last sixty years you have written a stunningly impressive range of material. In all that time, has your writing process changed much?

Not really. I write quickly; I revise; eventually I stop revising. That’s about it.

What do you know now that you wish you knew when you were a young writer?

That I really was going to achieve all the things that I did achieve.

Would you care to pass on any advice to writers starting out? What was the best advice you were ever given when starting out?

At the beginning I was writing a lot of quick, simple material for an easy sale to undemanding markets. An older and wiser writer pointed out that although I was getting a lot of money fast, all of that stuff would be forgotten almost immediately, whereas if I worked with my full skills my work would be reprinted over and over again in years to come. I took his advice to heart,

Undoubtedly, the science fiction field is a genre that has grown in style, maturity and complexity over the years. As a Grand Master, do you find yourself still reading for entertainment much? Or do you tend to read away from the genre?

I don’t read much science fiction any more. I’ve read millions of words of it (and written millions of words of it!) and I’m tired of it. What I’m reading now, with great admiration, is Solzhenitsyn’s IN THE FIRST CIRCLE. The book before that, for the third time in the past sixty years, was THE HISTORIES OF HERODOTUS.

And with that in mind, do you need to know of current SF writing (and writers!) to be a success in the 21st century?

You need to keep up with what your colleagues are doing. There’s always been a conversation among published work in science fiction — ideas are tossed back and forth, picked up and amplified, transmuted into new ideas.

How are you finding the e-book revolution? Personally, are you happy with an e-reader these days, or do you still prefer ‘tree-books’?

I don’t read any e-books myself. I don’t like staring into screens for any great length of time and I’m quite content with old-fashioned books after having been reading them for close to 75 years. But I’m delighted that the e-book revolution has happened and I’ve made very sure that all my work is available to today’s readers through the various electronic media.

I guess at this point it would be appropriate to ask the age-old question: after sixty-plus years of writing and editing, is there anything that still keeps you writing, today? Have you now got to the point where you can happily walk away, feeling that ‘the job is done’?

Oh, nothing keeps me writing today. I’m 80 years old and I DID happily walk away, feeling the job is done. I haven’t written any new fiction in four or five years and I have no plans for writing any more. I certainly don’t feel that I didn’t write enough during my career.

Was this why you returned to writing in the 1980’s after ‘retiring’ in 1975? The job wasn’t done, as it were?

I was only 40 when I “retired” the first time. I was tired, my life was getting too complicated, the readers didn’t seem to understand my recent work, and the whole science-fiction market was changing very rapidly. But what I really needed was just a long rest. After four or five years I unretired and wrote quite a lot over the next twenty-five years or so, virtually an entire second career. This retirement today is a different matter. At my age I feel no need to work any more.

And, with that in mind, what are your aspirations in 2015?

To live long and prosper, as the man said. My only writing ambition is to keep my work of yesterday visible for the readers of today and tomorrow. But I am beyond the age when one has aspirations.

Let’s finish on a big question. Science Fiction and Fantasy, for all their minor squabbles and issues, seems to be more of a global phenomenon than ever. Without polishing the crystal ball too much, how do you see the future of SF & Fantasy?

Oh, you ask the wrong person. I’m not really part of science fiction’s present, and I hardly have a view of its future. I’m happy to have done what I did when I did it, and now I step aside and leave the world of science fiction to people who occupy the kind of position I did forty years ago. The world belongs to them now.

In our opinion, it is through your illustrious work that future SF & Fantasy has a secure foundation to build on.

Once again, thank you very much for your time, Robert.

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Interview by Mark Yon & Dag Rambraut – SFFWorld.com © 2015

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