A short life of the author
Robert Silverberg (born 1935) is one of the most prolific and protean figures in American science fiction. His career falls into distinct phases: a youthful period of astonishing productivity (publishing dozens of novels and hundreds of stories in the 1950s), a transformative period in the late 1960s and early 1970s when he reinvented himself as a literary science fiction writer of genuine ambition, a retreat from writing in the mid-1970s, and a commercially successful return in the 1980s. At his best — Dying Inside, The Book of Skulls, Downward to the Earth — he produced science fiction as psychologically penetrating as anything in the genre.
Life and Career
Silverberg was born in Brooklyn, New York, and displayed precocious talent: he was publishing professionally by age eighteen and won his first Hugo Award (Most Promising New Author) in 1956 while still at Columbia University. Through the late 1950s and early 1960s he wrote at industrial speed — sometimes producing a million words a year — across science fiction, mystery, nonfiction, and pseudonymous erotica. This journeyman phase produced competent but unremarkable genre work.
The transformation came around 1966–1967, influenced by the New Wave movement and by Silverberg’s own dissatisfaction with formula writing. Thorns (1967) signaled the change: a psychologically intense novel about exploitation, empathy, and pain. The extraordinary run that followed — The Masks of Time (1968), Nightwings (1969), Downward to the Earth (1970), Tower of Glass (1970), The World Inside (1971), A Time of Changes (1971, Nebula Award), Dying Inside (1972), The Book of Skulls (1972), The Stochastic Man (1975) — represents one of the most sustained bursts of quality in science fiction history.
Dying Inside is his masterpiece: a novel about a telepath in New York City whose psychic ability is fading as he ages — a metaphor for creative decline, for the loss of intimacy, for middle-aged diminishment. Written in a confessional first-person mode influenced by Bellow and Roth, it is one of the few science fiction novels that could have been published as literary fiction without changing a word.
After burning out in the mid-1970s, Silverberg returned with the Majipoor series — beginning with Lord Valentine’s Castle (1980) — a commercially successful planetary romance set on a vast world. The 1980s and 1990s brought further novels (Gilgamesh the King, Star of Gypsies, The Face of the Waters) and continued story production.
Key Works
- Dying Inside (1972)
- The Book of Skulls (1972)
- Downward to the Earth (1970)
- Lord Valentine’s Castle (1980)
Collecting Silverberg
The sheer volume of Silverberg’s output makes completist collecting impractical, but the 1967–1975 literary period is the target. Dying Inside first edition (Scribner’s, 1972) brings $100–$400. Early paperback originals from the 1950s are scarce but inexpensive. Silverberg signs at conventions and has been accessible to collectors throughout his career. Signed copies of the Majipoor novels bring $40–$100. The Subterranean Press limited editions of his key works are collected. His nonfiction (archaeology, history) is a separate collecting niche.