Black Gate

To Open the Sky by Robert Silverberg (Sphere, 1977). Cover by Peter Elson

I’m on something of a Robert Silverberg kick. It started when Mark Kelly reviewed Silverberg’s early novel Collision Course for us back in April, one of the first SF novels I ever read, and in a haze of nostalgia I ended up taking an extended look at all six Silverberg novels packaged up by Ace in that magical year of 1977. More recently I’ve been collecting some of his earlier books, and finding all kinds of interesting artifacts, like the 1969 anthology Dark Stars, and the 1967 fix-up novel To Open the Sky, assembled from five novelettes originally published in Galaxy magazine.

To Open the Sky is the saga of two religions that emerge in the 21st Century, both of which worship technology and atomic power. Over nearly a century the mysterious origins of both religions, and the secret ambitions of their founders, are gradually revealed. It’s the kind of epoch-spanning, tech-focused SF that isn’t written any more. Here’s an excerpt from my favorite review, a short but insightful piece by Thomas M. Wagner at sff180.

A fine example of pre-1970s Bob Silverberg, To Open the Sky is the absorbing story of an overpopulated and economically depressed world clinging to the outcome of a religious schism for its salvation. But is the schism itself a pure public relations ploy, a staged affair whose intricacies are known only to its elusive and enigmatic founder?…

Silverberg effectively constructs a narrative on an epic scale — nearly a century of time between 2077 and 2164 — within a taut 200 or so pages, demonstrating once again that the present-day tendency towards bloat in SF and fantasy publishing is not necessarily the only way to convey big ideas set against a big canvas. Noel Vorst is the founder of a new religious movement rooted squarely in science. Though there is plenty of spiritualist window dressing to appeal to the emotional needs of the disaffected, the promises of the Vorsters are materialist to a fault. There is the promise of potential immortality, as well as the ultimate colonization of the stars, both unfulfilled so far due to limitations of technology.

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Land of Dreams (Ace, 1988). Cover by James Warhola

In 1986 James Blaylock’s novelette “Paper Dragons,” originally published in Robin McKinley’s anthology Imaginary Lands, was nominated for a Nebula award, and received a World Fantasy Award. A year later Blaylock returned to the same setting with Land of Dreams, a contemporary fantasy that Science Fiction Chronicle called “Blaylock’s best novel to date, one that will undoubtedly catapult him into prominence,” and which caused Gardner Dozois to proclaim, “James P. Blaylock is one of the most lyrical and inventive of all new writers.”

Land of Dreams was Blayock’s hardcover debut, originally published by Arbor House with a colorful but rather middlin’ cover by Viido Polikarpus. It was reprinted in paperback by Ace a year later, with a spectacular wraparound cover by James Warhola that definitely got my attention. So did the rave review from Kirkus.

Striking, beautifully turned surreal fantasy, Blaylock’s remarkable hardcover debut. In the alternate-world northern California coastal village of Rio Dell, strange events mark the approach to the eerie, highly magical 12-year Solstice. Hungry young Skeezix and his friend Helen live at the orphanage run by the stern, repellent Miss Flees (she feeds them nothing but cabbage soup) and her horrid sidekick, Peebles. Along with their friend Jack, Skeezix and Helen discover a gigantic shoe washed up on the beach, and haul it to Dr. Jensen, who’s already puzzling over a collection of similarly enormous artifacts. The beach is invaded by hermit crabs, small at first; but, as Solstice approaches, the crabs grow larger — the last is the size of a house. A darkly ominous Carnival arrives, travelling magically along train tracks that have decayed into uselessness… Skeezix and Jack unravel the multiple mysteries in a stunning and satisfying conclusion. Weird, complex, wise, original, delightful: pounce!

As Fletcher Vredenburgh has recounted here at Black Gate, he discovered Blaylock with the delightful trilogy that began with The Elfin Ship (1982), but Land of Dreams was the book that really put Blaylock on the map for me. The Ace edition was handed around and excitedly discussed among my circle of friends in Ottawa in 1988.

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Time and Again (Ace, 1976), Way Station (Manor Books, 1975), and A Choice of Gods (Berkley Medallion, 1977).
Covers by Michael Whelan, unknown, and the great Paul Lehr

116 years ago this week, one of the finest science fiction authors or the 20th century was born. He died 32 years ago, in 1988. And currently he is almost forgotten, which is a great shame and also a great pity, since his humanism, his respect for all living creatures and his tolerance for the alien, the divergent, the different viewpoints, backgrounds and expectations are qualities no less needed now than when he was alive.

I’m talking about Clifford D. Simak, author of seminal works of sf like Time and Again (1951), City (1952), Time Is the Simplest Thing (1961), Way Station (1963), All Flesh Is Grass (1965), A Choice of Gods (1972), as well as of dozens of unforgettable short stories. The author who said, in an interview,

When I talk of the purpose of life, I am thinking not only of human life, but of all life on Earth and of the life which must exist upon other planets throughout the universe. It is only of life on Earth, however, that one can speak with any certainty. It seems to me that all life on Earth, the sum total of life upon the Earth, has purpose. If the means were available, we could trace our ancestry – yours and mine – back to the first blob of life-like material that came into being on the planet. The same thing could be done for the spider that spun his web in the grass, and of the grass in which the web was spun, the bird sitting in the tree and the tree in which he sits, the toad waiting for the fly beneath the bush, and for the fly and bush. We are all genetic brothers. The chain of life, tracing back to that primordial day of life’s beginning, is unbroken…

Clifford Simak was a newspaper man and an author. He wrote of love for all living things, of respect for life and of acceptance both of the supreme importance of life and of the inevitable differences between living things. Reading him as a child, I learned from him the importance of tolerance and inclusiveness. His was one of the important voices in science fiction. He still should be.

Digits and Dastards by Frederik Pohl (Ballantine Books, 1966). Artist uncredited.

Frederik Pohl was something of a science fiction renaissance man. He was a fan, agent, publisher, editor (of both Galaxy and If magazines, from 1969-79), and multiple Hugo Award-winning writer. His career spanned over 75 years, from his first publication (a poem in 1937) to his last novel, All the Lives He Led (2011). He received the SFWA Grand Master Award in 1993. He died in 2013, at the age of 93.

Along with Asimov, Heinlein, Campbell and Wollheim, he was such an integral part of 20th Century SF that you can honestly say that without him, the field would have been dramatically different. Like Campbell and Wollheim, he was a taste-maker, a keen-eyed editor who loved discovering talent, and he won three Hugo Awards in a row as best editor. Like Asimov, he wrote extensively about science fiction, pointing many young readers (including me) towards the folks they should be reading, and enriching the history of the field with numerous non-fiction articles.

And like Heinlein and Asimov, he was hugely respected as a writer, winning numerous awards for his fiction, including a Hugo and Nebula Award for Gateway (1977), the John W. Campbell Award for the novella collection Years of the City (1984), and the coveted National Book Award for Jem (1979). In 2010 he won the Hugo Award for Best Fan Writer for his long-running blog, one of the earliest (and still one of the best) SF blogs, The Way the Future Blogs. He was a pioneer in the field to the very end.

I’m very fond of Fred Pohl. Like Asimov, he wrote about science fiction not as some higher and more enlightened branch of literature, but as a quirky business practiced by a small community of highly likeable individuals who shared common roots, and a common love of and fascination with science. It was that characterization, as much of my love of the stories itself, that filled me at a young age with an enduring desire to become an SF writer.

And, very much unlike Asimov, Pohl was a high-school dropout in a genre that celebrated hard science, and that gave him– critically, I think — a refreshingly different viewpoint on what science fiction could (and should) mean to the average reader. He was also a local SF writer, a fixture at the major Chicago SF conventions, and was just as delightful in person as he was on the page. He was an entertaining and self-deprecating writer, as you can see from the following excerpt from the introduction to his 9th collection, Digits and Dastards (1966).

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