ANTHOLOGIES Yesterday’S Mail Brought Me a Fine, Fat Make It Into the Anthologies
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REFLECTIONS Robert Silverberg ANTHOLOGIES Yesterday’s mail brought me a fine, fat make it into the anthologies. And so I am (574 pages) science fiction anthology grateful to editor John Joseph Adams called Lightspeed: Year One, edited by and his publisher, Prime Books, for al- John Joseph Adams. It’s a collection of lowing me to add that very solid and tan- forty-eight stories published, as its name gible volume, Lightspeed: Year One, to indicates, during the first year of exis- my collection of anthologies that contain tence of Lightspeed, a weekly online SF my work. There are hundreds of books in magazine that you can find at that collection now, as thorough a valida- <www.lightspeedmagazine.com>. Twen- tion as my ambitious adolescent self ty-six of the stories were original to could ever have asked for. Lightspeed; the rest were reprints. I began to develop my thing for an- I was glad to see it, not only because it thologies in 1948, when I was in the looks like a terrific anthology—among eighth grade and my hope of becoming a the contributors are such estimable writ- science fiction writer was merely a wild ers as Ursula K. Le Guin, Nancy Kress, boyish dream. I had already discovered a Stephen King, James Patrick Kelly, few science fiction novels by then—H.G. Robert Reed, and George R.R. Martin— Wells’ The Time Machine, Jules Verne’s but because it rescues a story of mine, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, and one “Travelers,” from existence in cyberspace. or two others—and then I had stumbled I have never really made a good accom- upon some of the pulp magazines of the modation to online publication, a fact era, Amazing Stories, Weird Tales, and that marks me as a hopelessly twentieth- Astounding Science Fiction. I knew that I century sort of guy. Oh, I don’t mind hav- liked the stuff and I was hungry for more ing my stories and novels distributed in of it. And one day in the book section of electronic versions—far from it. I make Macy’s department store, which I haunt- deals practically every day for e-reprints ed because they sold books at huge dis- of Silverberg work. But such electronic counts from retail price, I came upon a publications have no reality for me, be- big book in a blue jacket, Groff Conklin’s yond the nice checks that they bring in. I A Treasury of Science Fiction, the cover of like to receive a printed version of what which told me that it contained “30 MAR- I’ve written, and stick it up there on the VELLOUS STORIES of superscience shelf amidst the yards and yards and and the future, Atomic Power, Interstel- yards of published material I’ve spawned lar Space, Time, Travel and Adventures since I began writing nearly sixty years in Dimension. .” ago. Yes, there was that comma between In particular I like to see the shelf of “Time” and “Travel.” And that wasn’t anthologies that contain my work grow- how I had been taught to spell “mar- ing ever more crowded, because antholo- velous,” either. I didn’t care. The book cost gies have a special place in my affection. something like $1.72, discounted from Since boyhood I have thought of the ap- the list price of $3, and that was a huge pearance of a story in an anthology as amount back then for a boy barely into the real validation of that story’s quality. his teens, but I bought it on the spot, and It’s good to get them published in maga- I’m afraid my eighth-grade homework zines, of course—but only the very best of suffered that night. the magazine stories, I have always felt, The names of the authors of those 30 7 September 2012 MARVELLOUS STORIES meant very Vogt’s “The Weapons Shop”—one unfor- little to me at first, but the stories them- gettable experience after another. I was selves were marvelous indeed. There was hooked, and hooked for life. one haunting item called “With Folded Donald A. Wollheim’s “The Pocket Book Hands,” in which humanoid robots from of Science Fiction” was next, twenty-five another solar system quietly conquer the cents, the first paperback SF anthology: earth, and one called “Vintage Season” in another Heinlein here, another Don A. which time-traveling tourists from the Stuart, and some more new names, future come for a visit, and one called Theodore Sturgeon and Stanley G. Wein- “Tomorrow’s Children,” portraying nu- baum. Sturgeon, Heinlein, Stuart, Pad- clear devastation a couple of decades gett, and Asimov turned up again in my ahead. I could go on and on: “Child’s next purchase (we are into 1949 now), Play,” “Loophole,” “The Ethical Equa- Conklin’s The Best of Science Fiction, tions,” “Rescue Party,” stories that even which had come out before the Treasury: now, more than sixty years later, many Heinlein again, Padgett, Sturgeon, van readers will remember fondly. Vogt, Stuart, Asimov.You get the picture. When I finished the book I read it The anthologies, I saw, preserved the again, and again. The second and third best material from those gaudy pulp time around some of the authors’ names magazines, and the writers whose work began to stick: Arthur C. Clarke, L. showed up most frequently in them were Sprague de Camp, Lewis Padgett, C.L. plainly the cream of the crop, the aristo- Moore, A.E. van Vogt, Robert A. Heinlein. crats of science fiction. And a careful study of the copyright cred- I have never lost that belief. I learned, its revealed that most of the stories were before long, that there was even more reprinted from Astounding Science Fic- Heinlein in those books than I realized, tion. I began to conclude that the writers because he was also included under the whose work had been chosen for this name of “Anson MacDonald,” and that book—I had not yet heard the word “an- “Don A. Stuart” was really John W. thology”—must be the best SF writers Campbell, Jr., the editor of Astounding, there were, and that Astounding was the and that “Lewis Padgett” and “Lawrence magazine that published most of the best O’Donnell,” whose stories were every- science fiction. I resolved to buy Astound- where, were pseudonyms for C.L. Moore ing every month, another big investment, and her husband, Henry Kuttner. So and to keep an eye out for stories by the there were fewer aristocrats than I had top writers, meaning the ones I had en- thought: a tiny band of writers, turning countered in Conklin’s Treasury. out astounding science fiction with won- And then I ran back to Macy’s and drous skill. They were the true masters; found a second of these big books, and their presence in those anthologies was this one was even better than the first: the emblem of their superiority. Adventures in Time and Space, edited by In time I began my own career—only Raymond J. Healy and J. Francis McCo- six years went by between my eighth- mas. Practically everything in this thou- grade discovery of those pioneering an- sand-page whopper (twice the size of thologies and my first story sales, in Conklin’s Treasury) came from Astound- 1954, though to me those six years were ing, and here were the newly familiar an eternity. I did not, naturally, expect to names of Heinlein, van Vogt, de Camp, find my early published stories jostling and Padgett, and some new ones, Alfred those of Asimov and Heinlein and Stur- Bester, Don A. Stuart, Isaac Asimov. geon off the contents pages of new an- What a strange name “Asimov” was, and thologies, since I was just a beginner, a how I loved his story, “Nightfall”! And novice, glad enough to be getting pub- Heinlein’s mind-blowing “By His Boot- lished without having delusions of being straps,” Stuart’s “Who Goes There?”, van the equal of the real writers, the ones 8 Robert Silverberg Asimov’s whose stories got into the anthologies. books so excited me when I was young.) (And for a while there were no more jum- But, let the shelves overflow as they bo anthologies of the Conklin and Healy- may, I will never be able to think of my- McComas kind, either.) But then came self as the equal of the writers whose the wondrous day when a story of my names I came to know as I read and own was picked for anthology reprint. reread those great anthologies of the The first one seems to have been “Road to 1940s. For me they will always be the Nightfall,” a story I wrote when I was real writers, and the presence of their eighteen, which was chosen for The Fan- work in those books marks those stories tastic Universe Omnibus in 1960. Then as the real stories. Hardly a month goes came “Double Dare,” reprinted in The by without some story of mine being cho- Fifth Galaxy Reader, 1961. Donald Woll- sen for a new anthology, which means heim, he of the legendary Pocket Book of that readers of those anthologies who no- Science Fiction, put my “Sunrise on Mer- tice authors’ names must surely think of cury” into 1963’s More Adventures on me the same way I thought of the writers Other Planets. whose repeated appearances in the an- And so it went, a story or so reprinted thologies of my boyhood signalled that every year, more or less, and then two or they were writers to remember.