Tag Archives: Robert Silverberg

Steal This Book

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Famous radical Abbie Hoffman had a bestseller in 1971 named Steal This Book. It was a bestseller in spite of its title, doubtless because obeying the command at the time meant concealing a physical book and walking out of a store past watchful clerks. But today? Well, isn’t the purpose of technology to make everything easier?

Publishers Weekly assures us technology is making book theft much easier. According to a recent report:

Publishers could be losing out on as much as $3 billion to online book piracy, a new report released today by Attributor estimates. Attributor, whose FairShare Guardian service monitors the Web for illegally posted content, tracked 913 books in 14 subjects in the final quarter of 2009 and estimated that more than 9 million copies of books were illegally downloaded from the 25 sites it tracked.

The Four Horsemen of digital downloading — 4shared.com, scribd.com, wattpad.com, and docstoc.com — account for an estimated one-third of all book piracy.

Nonfiction professional and academic works are the most common targets, but the survey also counted plenty of pirated fiction, like Angels and Demons (7,951 illegal downloads) and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (1,604 downloads).

It seems online theft parallels print popularity to an extent. I wonder if some science fiction authors will feel both relieved and a little disappointed to find they register a smaller blip on the e-crime stat sheet than Dan Brown. After all, I once heard Robert Silverberg wistfully remark about the lack of pirated print editions of his work in an Iron Curtain country, saying: “The East Germans were too German to steal.”

The Attributor survey shows that what everybody suspects is true. “None of this is really surprising,” comments Francis Hamit. “One of the virtues of print publication is that you can only sell one copy at a time.”

Or steal.

[Thanks to Francis Hamit for the story.]

Octavia Butler’s Papers Come to Huntington

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Octavia Butler

Octavia Butler

Octavia Butler’s papers have arrived at the Huntington Library where they will join those of Robert Silverberg and any number of other well-known writers like Jack London, Christopher Isherwood and Charles Bukowski.  

Butler, the most prominent African American woman in the field of science fiction, died in 2006. Butler lived for decades in the city where she was born, Pasadena, CA before moving to Washington state in 1999, and the city treasures her memory — Pasadena Public Library’s annual “One City – One Story” program selected her novel Kindred for 2006. It is fortunate for the community that Butler’s manuscripts, correspondence, notebooks, photos and other materials were acquired by a prestigious library so close by – in San Marino, the next town over.

The librarian responsible for Butler making the donation, Sue Hodson, the Huntington’s curator of literary manuscripts, is finding it a bittersweet experience:

“In a sense I wish I hadn’t had the opportunity” to go through the papers, Hodson said, referring to Butler’s untimely death in 2006. “I thought it would be someone who came after me. It’s a great joy, but I’m sorry, in a way, it’s me unpacking the boxes.”

Diana and I think the world of the Huntington. Diana spent a couple of summers using their facilities to work on her Inklings book. 

[Thanks to Andrew Porter for the story.]

Silverberg Coverage in LA Times

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The Los Angeles Times has published an article about Robert Silverberg, marking the reissue of his novel Dying Inside by Tor:  

Right about then, the Age of Aquarius seemed to be reaching an apocalyptic conclusion: Amid campus riots, a contentious war and political assassinations, it was hard not to feel fatalistic.

And Robert Silverberg, a New York writer who’d recently watched his home burn to the ground and now felt his marriage turning to ash as well, sat down to write one of the darkest books in American literature, as well as one of the most unjustly overlooked.

The reasons “Dying Inside,” published in 1972, is not as well known as “Portnoy’s Complaint” or “Rabbit, Run” are complex. But it didn’t help that this novel — set in a recognizable, crumbling 1970s New York — concerned a gifted, neurotic guy who is also a telepath.

This article, written by Scott Timberg, concludes with the notice that Timberg will moderate a “Science Fiction: The Grand Masters” panel with Silverberg, Harry Harrison and Joe Haldeman on Saturday at 12:30 p.m. in Ackerman Grand Ballroom at UCLA as part of the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books.

[Thanks to Andrew Porter and my mother (!) for the story.]

Longest and Shortest Hugo Award Ceremonies

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Hugo Award ballots must be received by Midnight, Pacific Daylight Time, on July 7. Denvention 3 members are eligible – do your online voting soon and beat the rush. The imminent deadline also means that about a month from now another audience of nominees will be sweating out the results. Diana and I will be there.

I said in “Silverberg and Resnick: That’s Entertainment!” in File 770 #153 that I’m no fan of the Hugo-Ceremony-as-100-Yard-Dash. The ceremony’s purpose is to honor the best in our field, and to me the clock is not the tool to measure how well that’s done. But I’d agree that some of the shortest ones have been great fun.

When the fans who love speedy Hugo Ceremonies start honoring people on a Mount Rushmore for toastmasters, Marta Randall will be right up there in Washington‘s place. She always did an admirable job of making haste as entertainingly as possible. And no wonder people were moving. The funniest moment of the fast-moving 1982 Hugos came when she goosed presenter Bob Tucker as he left the stage. Marta’s 90-minute 1982 Hugo Ceremony set a record unequalled for 23 years.

Chicago brought her back for 1991 and the Hugos sped by in 100 minutes, a brisk pace if not a record. Tucker presented again and when he started to leave the stage covered his butt with both hands. But Marta came over, gave him a big hug, and winked to the audience, “Now I know why he was kicked out of the Garden of Eden.”

Only in 2005 did Paul McCauley and Kim Newman turn in the second 90-minute performance with Interaction’s Hugo Ceremony.

All people who yelp like they’re being tortured when the Hugos last two hours should pay silent tribute when in the presence of anyone who endured the 1968 Worldcon banquet. It was Toastmaster Bob Silverberg’s baptism of fire — a baptism of live steam for everyone else. Fans endured dinner and speeches in 95-degree heat, in an unventilated ballroom without air conditioning, for five hours and fifteen minutes before the first Hugo was presented. As Mike Resnick recalled in File 770:100:

[At 8:00 p.m.] Phil Farmer got up to give his speech…. [When] he paused for a drink of water more than 2 hours into it, we all gave him a standing ovation in hope it would convince him he was through. It didn’t. He finished after 10:30. Time for the Hugos, right? Wrong. Randy Garrett gets up, takes the microphone away from Toastmaster Bob Silverberg, and sings about 50 verses of ‘Three Brave Hearts and Three Bold Lions.’ Finally, approaching 11:15, Silverberg gets up to hand out the Hugos.

New Issue of File 770, the Fanzine

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Cover of File 770 #153 by Taral Wayne

The new issue of File 770 is posted at eFanzines as a PDF file. (Paper copies were mailed on June 30.)

James Bacon and I do some last minute fanzine Hugo handicapping. My tribute to Worldcon toastmasters “Silverberg and Resnick – That’s Entertainment!” is in the issue. John Hertz reports several valuable news stories. Mystery writers Mary Reed and Eric Mayer answer my questions about writing historical fiction. I write up my Corflu Silver experiences. James Bacon tells about a day of his honeymoon visit to South Africa. There’s a great cover by Taral Wayne, and new illos by Alan White, Brad Foster and Alexis Gilliland.

Yesterday’s Future: Insufficiently PC

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Carlos Mondragon is not enamored of Robert Silverberg’s vintage Hugo nominee, “Schwartz Between the Galaxies”:

Overall, I found the story itself to be quite dull (as well as anachronistic, misogynistic, and slightly racist) at times. No news here; one has to take Old School SciFi for what it was – even though that doesn’t really excuse its writer, given that 1972 is not that far removed from us. In this respect, the fact that it was ever nominated for a Hugo just goes to prove that said award has never been a guarantor of quality.

Silverberg having been one of the least conservative sf writers of the Seventies did not immunize his work against the reproaches of contemporary readers, of course. But if that’s all the mercy he’s going to receive, heaven help the other favorites of that era.

The more commonly accepted idea of Silverberg’s place in sf history, which takes context into account, is the one expressed by Kim Stanley Robinson in this recently-published article:

“[In the 1960s and 1970s], that’s when [Silverberg] came into his own,” [Kim Stanley] Robinson noted. “When he saw that science fiction could be written in the styles of the great literary modernists, it struck sparks in him. He became one of the new wave. He’s so prolific that he popped off a half-dozen classics in rapid order – The Book of Skulls, Dying Inside, Nightwing. Those are among the books that marked that era as being the high point in American science fiction. Silverberg was a big part of it.”

Clipping Service

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A cherished – and perfectly true! – anecdote about the Golden Age of science fiction is that Cleve Cartmill’s description of an A-bomb in his 1944 story “Deadline” prompted a visit to editor John W. Campbell from a U.S. Army intelligence officer worried about leaks in the Manhattan Project.

Robert Silverberg sifted through the government’s file on the investigation and wrote a highly amusing two-part article that appeared last fall in Asimov’s.

If you’re as far behind in your web reading as I am, this still may be news to you… Here are the links:

Part I
Part II