Theme Page
In his multitudinous writings, Silverberg often returns to a number of themes, looking at them from different viewpoints, coming to different conclusions about them. He has admitted to an obsession with time travel, and a preoccupation with death appears again and again, whether as the main theme of a story or as a secondary motif. Most of his stories are complex enough to touch upon more than one theme at a time, so we see these threads woven and rewoven into new cloth throughout the works.
Time
Death
Aliens
Space and space travel
Isolation
Telepathy
Sex
Religion
Society
Alternate worldsSilverberg's time theme is manifested in many ways: directly in stories of time travel, and indirectly in stories like "In Entropy's Jaws", where it is the perception of time which is questioned. He has touched on many of the famous paradoxes of time travel, such as the what-if-you-kill-your-grandfather question (in "Many Mansions") and the what-if-you-meet-yourself question ("The Far Side of the Bell-Shaped Curve" and Up the Line). There are also different technical twists on time travel, like travel only one way ("Hawksbill Station", "Absolutely Inflexible"), travel as disembodied observer ("The Man Who Floated in Time", Letters from Atlantis), and even "travel" by reconstruction ("Enter a Soldier. Later: Enter Another").
Silverberg is not alone in focussing on death in his writing. Virtually every storyteller from the dawn of human consciousness has told stories about the human desire to thwart death or at least come to terms with mortality. It only takes a quick skim through the titles of books and stories to see that a lot of them deal with the subject: "Born with the Dead", To Live Again, Recalled to Life, To the Land of the Living. "Going" is notable for its spiritual acceptance of death.
Silverberg often concerns himself with encounters between humans and others, be they creatures from other planets or outsiders in human society. For example, though it's framed in a good adventure/quest story, Lord Valentine's Castle deals a great deal with the relations between the races inhabiting Majipoor.
Silverberg is not generally a hard science fiction writer, so he never gives nitty-gritty high-tech details like CJ Cherryh or someone else might (No problem there--SF can work both ways if the story is good). Silverberg generally evokes a more-or-less familar concept of space travel (such as hyperspace) and lets it go at that, throwing occasional twists for spice.
Silverberg returns again and again to situations of isolation, feelings of being alone in a cold universe, the difficulty of connecting with other people (human and otherwise). Some of this may be rooted in his childhood, but hey, I'm not here to psychoanalyze him. And nothing's that simple anyway. In many cases, the isolation theme is closely tied to the alien theme, as isolation and alienation often go together. Even something like telepathy, which might normally be seen as bringing people together ("Ship-sister, Star-sister") can be made into a source of isolation (Dying Inside) when the differences between people seem to outweight the similarities.
Silverberg has written a lot of stories that deal at least peripherally with mental communication. This relates in a way to the isolation theme, as telepathy is a very direct connection between people. Sometimes this is portayed as a good thing ("Ship-sister, Star-sister"), sometimes it's a nightmare (Dying Inside), sometimes it's both in the same story (The Mutant Season).
I'm trying to think of an icon for this!
There is an undercurrent of spirituality running through much of Silverberg's fiction, spirituality of a non-Christian (even non-religious) variety. The characters are often seeking some sort of peace with the universe and themselves. Sometimes they find it, sometimes they don't.
Back in the sixties, sex started creeping into fiction all over the place, no longer marginalized to specialty publishers. SF was no exception, and Silverberg gained a bit of a reputation for being more explicit than most. Personally, I find Silverberg's sex scenes to be tasteful and interesting, for even though the characters' motivations may be other than love, they are never mean-spirited (now wait, I'll come across a psycho-nasty in a story one of these days!). Various combinations abound: hetero, homo, alien-human, alien-alien, groups, whatever.
Silverberg has made no secret of the fact that he's an atheist, but he frequently concerns himself with what might be called spiritual matters, and has no difficulty portaying religious characters both favorably and otherwise. His Jewish heritage has occasionally presented itself in his fiction. Some of the most prominent stories with this theme are "Good News from the Vatican", "The Pope of the Chimps", and "The Dybbuk of Mazel Tov IV". There are also a number of invented religions in his stories, including the Brotherhood of Immanent Radiance (or Vorsters) and the splinter Harmonists in To Open the Sky, several religions in the Majipoor books, and the Apocaliptists in The Masks of Time.
There is a set of stories I think of as Silverberg's Cocktail Party stories. They usually concern a social elite who spend most of their time with entertainment and participating in the latest fashions. Some examples are "Caliban", "Capricorn Games", and "When We Went to See the End of the World". Sometimes I will also include a social-commentary like "After the Myths Went Home".
The alternate world story seems to be increasingly popular these days in science fiction, though that may just be because there's such an accumulation of them over the decades since the sub-genre was invented. It's hard to deny the appeal of the infinity of what-ifs our history presents to us. From radically changed worlds (like Harry Harrison's Eden series where the dinosaurs never died out), to fairly subtle ones (such as Len Deighton's SSGB where Hitler conquered Britain), all it takes is a little imagination and a bit of historical knowledge, and you're off on a journey of discovery where the map may look like our planet, but everything else is up for grabs. Probably the most detailed of Silverberg's alternate world stories is The Gate of Worlds, where the Black Death wiped out three-fourths of all Europeans, leaving them easy targets for Turkish domination, which in turn left the New World open to full flowering of Aztec and Inca cultures. At the other extreme, there is "Trips", which presents, in quick succession, a dazzling variety of possible Californias.
One continuing alternate history Silverberg has going is generally refered to as the "Roma" or "Roma Eterna" series. In this scenario, Moses never led the Hebrews out of Egypt. "Since the Jews never reached Palestine, Christianity never developed and Rome remained pagan, renewing itself constantly during the period we call the Dark Ages, fending off the invasions of the barbarians and sustaining itself as a thriving worldwide empire for thousands of years." (From Silverberg's introduction to "Waiting for the End" in Asimov's) Silverberg uses the Roman dating system, starting with the traditional founding of Rome in 753 BCE. The stories (with their dates where I know them) in this series are:
We can hope there will be more installments to this fascinating saga. With the addition of "A Hero of the Empire" it seems there are enough to fill a good size book. Hint, hint, to any publishers out there...
Last updated by Jon Davis on October 21, 2002.