Collected Stories of Robert Silverberg

Volume One: To Be Continued

First in a projected eight volumes collecting all of the short stories and novellas SF Grandmaster Silverberg wants to take their place on the permanent shelf. Each volume will be roughly 150,000-200,000 words, with classics and lesser known gems alike. Mr. Silverberg has also graced Subterranean Press with a lengthy introduction and extensive story notes for each tale.

The Subterranean Collected Silverberg will vary greatly from the UK trade paperback series published in the 1990s. Due to the publisher's desire to limit the series to six volumes, many stories and, especially, novellas, could not be included. The Subterranean Collected Silverberg will be the definitive set.

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• Gorgon Planet
• The Road to Nightfall
• The Silent Colony
• Absolutely Inflexible
• The MacAuley Circuit
• The Songs of Summer
• To Be Continued
• Alaree
• The Artifact Business
• Collecting Team
• A Man of Talent
• One-Way Journey
• Sunrise on Mercury
• World of a Thousand Colors
• Warm Man
• Blaze of Glory
• Why?
• The Outbreeders
• The Man Who Never Forgot
• There Was an Old Woman
• The Iron Chancellor
• Ozymandias
• Counterpart
• Delivery Guaranteed

Trade: fully cloth bound edition and sold out at the publisher
Limited to 125 signed numbered hardcover copies, bound in leather and cloth and sold out pre-publication

Volume Two: To the Dark Star

Length: 392 pages

This story, "To See the Invisible Man," written in June of 1962, marks the beginning of my real career as a science-fiction writer, I think. The 1953-58 stories collected in To Be Continued, the first of this series of volumes, are respectable professional work, some better than others but all of them at least minimally acceptable--but most of them could have been written by just about anyone. Aside from a few particularly ambitious items, they were designed to slip unobtrusively into the magazines of their time, efficiently providing me with regular paychecks. But now, by freeing me from the need to calculate my way around the risk of rejection, Fred Pohl allowed--indeed, required--me to reach as deep into my literary resources as I was capable of doing. I knew that unless I gave him my very best, the wonderful guaranteed-sale deal I had with him would vanish as quickly as it had appeared. Therefore I would reach deeper and deeper, in the years ahead, until I had moved so far away from my youthful career as a hack writer that latecomers would find it hard to believe that I had been emotionally capable of writing all that junk, let alone willing to do it. In "To See the Invisible Man" the distinctive Silverberg fictional voice is on display for just about the first time.

--Robert Silverberg

Table of Contents:

• Introduction
• To See The Invisible Man
• The Pain Peddlers
• Neighbor
• The Sixth Palace
• Flies
• Halfway House
• To The Dark Star
• Hawksbill Station
• Passengers
• Bride 91
• Going Down Smooth
• Fangs of the TREES
• Ishmael in Love
• Ringing the Changes
• Sundance
• How It Was When the Past Went Away
• A Happy Day in 2381
• (Now + n, Now - n )
• After the Myths Went Home
• The Pleasure of Their Company
• We Know Who We Are

Limited to 125 signed numbered hardcover copies, bound in leather and cloth and sold out at the pubiisher

Volume Three: Something Wild is Loose

"The world that these stories sprang from was the troubled, bewildering, dangerous, and very exciting world of those weird years when the barriers were down and the future was rushing into the present with the force of a river unleashed. But of course I think these stories speak to our times, too, and that most of them will remain valid as we go staggering onward through the brave new world of the twenty-first century. I am not one of those who believes that all is lost and the end is nigh. Like William Faulkner, I do think we will somehow endure and prevail against increasingly stiff odds.

"A great many strange and dizzying things happen to the characters in these sixteen stories, and in the fourteen stories of the 1972-73 volume that will follow. The reader who makes the journey from beginning to end of all thirty stories will be taken on many a curious trip, that I promise -- as was their author during the years when they were being written."

--Robert Silverberg, from the Introduction

Table of Contents:

• Introduction
• Something Wild is Loose
• In Entropy's Jaws
• The Reality Trip
• Going Caliban
• Good News from the Vatican
• Thomas the Proclaimer
• When We Went to See the End of the World
• Push No More
• The Wind and the Rain
• Some Notes on the Pre-Dynastic Epoch
• The Feast of St. Dionysus
• What We Learned from This Morning's Newspaper
• The Mutant Season
• Caught in the Organ Draft
• Many Mansions

Trade: fully cloth bound hardcover and sold out at the publisher
Limited to 125 signed and numbered copies, bound in leather and cloth and sold out at the publisher

Volume Four: Trips

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

--Robert Silverberg, from his introduction

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• In the Group
• Getting Across
• Ms. Found in an Abandoned Time Machine
• The Science Fiction Hall of Fame
• A Sea of Faces
• The Dybbuk of Mazel Tov IV
• Breckenridge and the Continuum
• Capricorn Games
• Ship-Sister, Star-Sister
• This is the Road
• Trips
• Born with the Dead
• D.V. Perrot: Teach Yourself Swahili
• Schwartz Between the Galaxies
• In the House of Double Minds

Trade: Fully cloth-bound hardcover edition and sold out at the publisher
Limited to 150 signed numberd copies, bound in leather and cloth copies and sold out at the publisher

Volume Five: The Palace at Midnight

Somehow, for all my outward pretence of cold-eyed professionalism, all my insistence that writing is simply a job like any other, I’ve discovered to my surprise and chagrin that there’s more than that going on around here, that I write as much out of karmic necessity and some inescapable inner need to rededicate my own skills constantly to my—what? My craft? My art? My profession? I wrote these stories because the only way of earning a living I have ever had has been by writing, but mainly, I have to admit, I wrote these stories because I couldn’t not write them. Well, so be it. They involved me in a lot of hard work, but for me, at least, the results justify the toil. I’m glad I wrote them. Writing them, it turns out, was important for me, and even pleasurable, in a curiously complex after-the-fact kind of way. May they give you pleasure now too.

—Robert Silverberg, from his Introduction

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• Our Lady of the Sauropods
• Waiting for the Earthquake
• The Regulars
• The Far Side of the Bell-Shaped Curve
• A Thousand Paces Along the Via Dolorosa
• How They Pass the Time in Pelpel
• The Palace at Midnight
• The Man Who Floated in Time
• Gianni
• The Pope of the Chimps
• Thesme and the Ghayrog
• At the Conglomeroid Cocktail Party
• The Trouble with Sempoanga
• Jennifer’s Lover
• Not Our Brother
• Gate of Horn, Gate of Ivory
• Dancers in the Time-Flux
• Needle in a Timestack
• Amanda and the Alien
• Snake and Ocean, Ocean and Snake
• The Changeling
• Basileus
• Homefaring

Trade: Fully cloth bound hardcover edition and sold out at the pubisher
Limited to 150 signed numberd copies, bound in leather and cloth copies and sold out at the publisher

Volume Six: Multiples

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

—Robert Silverberg, from his Introduction

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• Tourist Trade
• Multiples
• Against Babylon
• Symbiont
• Sailing to Byzantium
• Sunrise on Pluto
• Hardware
• Hannibal’s Elephants
• Blindsight
• Gilgamesh in the Outback
• The Pardoner’s Tale
• The Iron Star
• The Secret Sharer
• House of Bones

Trade: Fully cloth bound hardcover copy
Limited to 150 signed numbered copies, bound in leather and cloth

Volume Seven: We Are for the Dark

The stories collected here, written between August of 1987 and May of 1990, demonstrate that I still believe in the classical unities. Of course, what seems to us a unity now might not have appeared that way when H.G. Wells was writing his wonderful stories in the nineteenth century. Wells might have argued that my “To the Promised Land” is built around two speculative fantastic assumptions, one that the Biblical Exodus from Egypt never happened, the other that it is possible to send rocketships to other worlds. But in fact we’ve sent plenty of rocketships to other worlds by now, so only my story’s alternative-world speculation remains fantasy today. Technically speaking the space-travel element of the plot has become part of the given; it’s the other big assumption that forms the central matter of the story.

—Robert Silverberg, from his Introduction

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• The Dead Man’s Eyes
• Enter A Soldier. Later: Enter Another
• To The Promised Land
• Chip Runner
• A Sleep And A Forgetting
• In Another Country
• The Asenion Solution
• We Are For The Dark
• Lion Time In Timbuctoo
• A Tip On A Turtle

Trade: Fully cloth bound hardcover edition
Limited: 150 signed numbered copies, bound in leather and cloth

Volume Eight: Hot Times in Magma City

The stories in this volume were written between July of 1990 and March of 1995—the second half of the fifth decade of my career as a science-fiction writer. I don’t think I could have imagined, when I began that career in the early 1950s, that science-fiction publishing would evolve the way it did over the next forty years.

Here, then, is the cream of the Silverberg output, 1990-95. I suppose I wrote more short stories in the first six months of 1957 than in that entire six-year period; but so be it. It’s a different world today. I look back nostalgically on the small-town atmosphere of the era in which I began my career, and there are times when I’d be glad to “call back yesterday, bid time return.” As Shakespeare pointed out, though, that can’t be done. The one recourse is the one I have chosen, which is to soldier staunchly onward through the years, come what may, writing a story or two here and a book there, while the world changes out of all recognition around me. And so—to leap neatly from the Bard of Avon to F. Scott Fitzgerald—“so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

—Robert Silverberg, from his Introduction

Table of Contents:

• Introduction
• In the Clone Zone
• Hunters in the Forest
• A Long Night’s Vigil at the Temple
• Thebes of the Hundred Gates
• It Comes and Goes
• Looking for the Fountain
• The Way to Spook City
• The Red Blaze is the Morning
• Death Do Us Part
• The Martian Invasion Diaries of Henry James
• Crossing into the Empire
• The Second Shield
• Hot Times in Magma City

Trade: Fully cloth bound hardcover copies
Limited: 150 signed numberd copies, bound in leather and cloth and sold out at the publisher

Volume Nine: The Millennium Express

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

—Robert Silverberg, from his Introduction

Table of Contents:

• Introduction
• Diana of the Hundred Breasts
• Beauty in the Night
• Call Me Titan
• The Tree That Grew From the Sky
• The Church at Monte Saturno
• Hanosz Prime Goes to Old Earth
• The Millennium Express
• Travelers
• The Colonel Returns to the Stars
• The Eater of Dreams
• A Piece of the Great World
• Against the Current
• The True Vintage of Erzuine Thale
• Defenders of the Frontier
• The Prisoner
• Smithers and the Ghost of the Thar

Trade: Fully cloth bound hardcover edition
Limited: 150 signed numbered hardcover copies, bound in leather and cloth
 

Available:

• Matched numbered set of Volume 1 - 9 includes the following titles with the same number in signed limited editions from Subterranean Press.
  
  Please note that Volume 9 does have three small spots of discoloration on the page edges as pictured.  These books are new from the publisher.
   
  • The Book of Silverberg
  • Early Days More Tales From the Pulp Era
  • Tales of Majipoor
  • Times Three
    • Hawksbill Station
    • Up the Line
    • Project Pendulum
  • The Emperor and the Maula