by IGMS
SILVERBERG: I do. What a lot of us tend to forget from time to time is that SF in the United States is a branch of popular entertainment, not a kind of avant-garde literature. There's a certain core of readers looking for sophisticated visionary experiences, sure, but most of the audience is just interested in finding an hour's light entertainment. When that substantial portion of the audience runs up against fiction that is difficult to read (Aldiss's Barefoot in the Head, for example) or difficult to understand (a lot of the modern high-tech stuff) or heavily downbeat (Ballard, let's say) it goes off in search of something more to its taste. I guess it's paradoxical that so many readers of a kind of fiction that deals in infinite horizons of time and space want the same old thing every time, but that's the way it is, and so be it.
SCHWEITZER: If so, then what makes it worthwhile for a writer to struggle against what he knows the readers actually want?
SILVERBERG: We don't always realize that we're doing that. Even as sharp-eyed an observer of trends and tastes as, ah, Robert Silverberg failed to notice that he was swimming upstream all through 1969 and 1970 and 1971. Then, too, some of us write just for the pleasure of it, and don't give a damn about commercial requirements. To a certain degree that's what I was doing during my big creative period in the late sixties. And some of us are very obstinate.
SCHWEITZER: Do you read enough contemporary SF to have any sense of the state of the field today?
SILVERBERG: No. I read hardly any, these days.
SCHWEITZER: Do you have any sense that anybody is standing on your shoulders?
SILVERBERG: I'd like to think so. When Elizabeth Bear complained that the older writers don't read the newer ones, I made a point of reading some stories by three of the writers she cited and saw distinct signs of my influence on all three. It may have been at second or third remove, but I do believe the fiction I wrote in the 1967-73 period, and some of the later work, had a lasting impact.
SCHWEITZER: As for what the readers allegedly did not like in your work in the early '70s, I can't help but notice that books like Dying Inside and The Book of Skulls have shown real staying power. Particularly Dying Inside is now regarded as a classic. So, what happened? Might it not be that the conventional book will be easily replaced by another conventional book, but that the unique one, even if it sells fewer copies at first, can't be and therefore stays in print?
SILVERBERG: They don't stay in print. They have to be brought back, again and again. Each time they find a new (small) audience, and eventually they slip out of sight again, and then some adventurous new publisher takes a chance on them, with the same result. I've been assiduous in finding new publishers for my books, but, then, I'm alive to do it. Sturgeon and Blish and Kornbluth aren't, and but for the work of some dedicated small presses they'd be forgotten today.
SCHWEITZER: Isn't it some cause for optimism that publishers keep trying? After all, in today's market very little stays continuously in print. I can cite an example. I found a letter in a 1972 fanzine in which James Blish is bemoaning the fact that one of his short story collections published in mass-market paperback by Ballantine (he doesn't give the title but is probably talking about So Close to Home, 1961) has "died the death" and gone out of print after eleven years. You know better than I do how that just does not compute in modern publishing terms. Story collection by a midlist writer? In mass-market paperback? In print for eleven years? Who could imagine it today?
SILVERBERG: Publishing has changed quite a bit since then. Books like the Blish collection, and Son of Man and a lot of other off-beat things, were published by Ballantine before it morphed into Del Rey. Betty Ballantine loved her authors and coddled them, and was willing to publish things that could be seen a priori not to have big commercial futures; she would stand behind those books for years. She ran the company as an expression of her personal tastes and counted on big sellers like her Clarke books to carry the rest along. Eventually the Ballantines had to sell their company. There may be a connection there.
SCHWEITZER: I'd like to posit something to you about Dying Inside. Is this the last major psi novel? Of course you were working in the field when psi was everywhere and John Campbell seemed to think it was an "essential science" on which science fiction had to be based, just like physics or astronomy. But while there have been novels since which have had psi as one component among many, I cannot think of a later one (within the SF category, not counting something like Stephen King's Firestarter) in which psi is the primary subject. So, were you in any sense consciously bidding farewell to this old and tired SF trope? I can well imagine that John W. Campbell would not have approved.
SILVERBERG: I wouldn't know. Probably there have been psi novels since mine, but I haven't been aware of them. Campbell, of course, would not have cared much for Dying Inside, because of its near-contemporary setting, the sex, the mainstream tone. There was some irony in the book's getting a special award from the Campbell Award people (not the worldcon award, the other Campbell award.) And the same year Barry Malzberg won that Campbell award for as unCampbellian a book as could be imagined this side of Samuel Beckett.
SCHWEITZER: While I've brought his name up, could you describe your working relationship with John Campbell? Is it true that you and Randall Garrett used to race each other to see who could sell Campbell a story based on one of his editorials? Or is this just fannish legend?
SILVERBERG: No, not true. John wanted his writers to pay attention to his editorials, but he didn't want them simply to feed his own ideas back to him, and he rejected stories that were of that sort. What he wanted was to establish a sort of Socratic dialog, the writers working with the concepts in the editorials but adding their own spin. Poul Anderson was better at this than anyone, though Garrett did it well. There was a distinct Campbell "slant" and we all knew what it was -- he disliked stories in which aliens get the upper hand over humans, for example -- but selling stories to him was not the simple button-pushing business fans think it was.
I did try to push buttons, now and then. Garrett and I used a Scottish protagonist, Duncan MacLeod, for an early story, and sold it to John. John was always partial to Scots. I wrote some stories for Horace Gold in which people were confined in close quarters, as Horace was, and he bought them. But when Garrett and I concocted a story for Tony Boucher, who was Catholic, a notorious opera-lover and cat-lover, and an expert on detective stories, about an opera-loving priest whose cat solved a murder mystery, Tony rejected it with a grin of appreciation for the stunt -- but rejected it all the same. (Bob Lowndes, who was an Anglican but otherwise shared Tony's interests, bought it.)
SCHWEITZER: Surely the trick is to not let the editor know his buttons are being pushed. Besides, that kind of stunt writing is something you do when you're younger, isn't it? Do you find as you get older that you're less interested in writing stories which are contrivances aimed at a market?
SILVERBERG: I certainly don't aim at markets, these days. Everything I write is sold before I write it, so why twist myself out of shape to meet someone else's slant? But stunt writing -- well, yes, I still enjoy doing that, writing a story in the voice Jack Vance used in The Dying Earth, or doing a novella interwoven with "Vintage Season" to tell the other side of the story, or playing around with themes out of Conrad.
SCHWEITZER: So, what are you writing these days?
SILVERBERG: Not much. I did two Majipoor stories this winter to round out a collection I'm assembling, and a Time Patrol story for a Poul Anderson memorial anthology. But I've got nothing on my schedule now except a lot of introductions to reissues of old work of mine. For the time being I want to take a break from writing fiction, and I don't know how long that break is going to last -- six months, a year, forever, maybe. I can't say. And won't. Lord knows I've written quite a few stories for one human being in one lifetime, and I don't feel enormous inner pressure to add to the list.
SCHWEITZER: Thanks, Bob.
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