Robert Silverberg’s Reflections: November 2014

 

‘Where Silverberg goes today, the rest of science fiction will follow tomorrow’

Isaac Asimov

 

 

Reflections is a regular column by multi-award-winning SFWA Grandmaster Robert Silverberg, in which he will offer his thoughts on science fiction, literature and the world at large.

This month: Re-reading S. Fowler Wright

The novel of the remote future has been my special favorite among science fiction genres since I first discovered H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine when I was ten or eleven years old, just after the Second World War. Wells’ vision of the vast vistas of time to come led me to seek out other books of the same type – Olaf Stapledon’s Last and First Men, Arthur C. Clarke’s Against the Fall of Night, Jack Vance’s The Dying Earth, and, when I was about fourteen, S. Fowler Wright’s The World Below. They all made profound impressions on me, the Wright not the least. And so after many years I have given The World Below a second look. It proved to be both more and less than the book I remembered.

 

You can read the rest of the column here, and find Robert Silverberg’s eBooks here – including Reflections and Refractions, a collection of his non-fiction columns. Please note: each column will remain on the site for one month only.