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Interview: Robert Silverberg
Interview with JUD MEYERS and ROBERT SILVERBERG
Jud: Our community loves to discuss the beginnings of their romance with comic books and science fiction literature. Our childhood obsessions are sort of the base of the pyramid for all of us. Were you a fan of comic books as a boy?
Robert: Of course. My comic-book era covers ages six through ten or so, which is roughly equivalent to the years of World War II. But I was also reading prose books from a very early age. Eventually they came to have more to offer me than the adventures of Superman or Batman. The paperback boom was just beginning when the war ended in 1945, Pocket Books and the American version of Penguin Books as the pioneers, and when it did I shifted quickly from comic books to the very tempting 25-cent paperback books. (My Aunt Mary was very good about slipping me quarters to buy paperbacks.) But between 1941 and 1945 or so I read all the big comic books, the ones that now sell for millions of dollars, and, no, I didn’t keep my copies and retire on the proceeds of their sale years later.
Jud: Can you recall the first comic book you ever read that stayed with you?
Robert: The one that had the biggest impact on me was PLANET COMICS, around 1942, which set me on the path to science fiction. I had already discovered s-f through the Buck Rogers comic strip that ran in one of the Sunday newspapers, but it was PLANET COMICS that really got me hooked.
Jud: Strange question, but where did you find it? Sometimes, the place where we unearthed the initial treasure says a lot about who we were and who we developed into.
Robert: Sorry, no. More than 75 years ago and I just don’t remember. I do remember buying my first science-fiction magazine, in 1948, on a newsstand near my school in Brooklyn.
Jud: What about the first Speculative Fiction novel that made you stare off into the distance for hours?
Robert: H.G. Wells, THE TIME MACHINE. I was ten or eleven.
Jud: Were you the isolated kid that devoured stacks of books or did you have a "tribe" that you spent time with, developing a taste for what you did and didn't like?
Robert: I was an only child, as was the norm during the Great Depression, and I was pretty much of a loner as a small boy. I had playmates, of course, but only children aren’t very big on sharing, and when it came to reading, which, of course, is a solitary pastime, I withdrew to my own room and made no effort to discuss what I was reading with others my age. Later, when I was twelve or thirteen and had discovered science fiction, I became much more sociable: I found others who shared my tastes, and we loaned each other magazines, talked about what we were reading, etc. And from there it was an easy move into the worldwide community that is science-fiction fandom in my teens.
Jud: Sometimes, the mechanics of your work are as fascinating as the work itself. Neil Gaiman writes everything in beat up notebooks and then just transcribes it all into a computer when it's completed. Harlan Ellison still bashes away with two fingers at an old manual typewriter, carbon copies and white-out spilling everywhere. It's hard to imagine you writing by hand considering the mountainous amount of work you produced from the pulps to the paperbacks to the fully realized novels. What was your system and did it change drastically based on the advancement of technology?
Robert: I would make a brief outline on the back of an old envelope and start typing away. Generally I would do just one draft, a sheet of white paper, a sheet of carbon paper, a sheet of yellow second paper, and read it through and make corrections, if necessary, by hand. For more demanding markets I would do a first draft on scrap sheets and then type out a second draft, which again I would correct by hand before turning it in. I was a touch typist, and a good one, but it was still a lot of hammering away, and in 1982, after undergoing the interminable ordeal of typing several drafts of a 900-page manuscript (LORD OF DARKNESS) I happily converted to working on a computer. My old typewriter still sits on a desk in my office but it’s there simply as an artifact.
Jud: Speaking of technology, I'm interested in your take on something in particular. My daughter has been making her way through the classics we all devoured so long ago. It's a pleasure to watch her discover the source material for all of the television and film she and her friends bombard themselves with every day. Recently, she set down an old H.G Wells book she was reading, stormed into the kitchen and announced, "Scientists didn't create the escalator, H.G Wells did!" We then debated the idea of whether writers could take credit as co-creators if their idea inspired scientists to bring those idea into reality. So many of the concepts you came up with in your books turned into practical things we use in our everyday lives that were fantastical ideas when you wrote them.
Robert: I’m a storyteller, not an inventor. I’m always amused when something I’ve written about in a story turns up as a real-world device or concept — my 1964 story “The Pain Peddlers” may have invented the reality TV show, which is not exactly something I ought to be proud of, and a lot of my stories back then offhandedly mention gadgets that we actually use today. But I have no illusions about the distinction between making something up and really inventing it. It’s one thing to say, casually, “Beam me up, Scotty” and another thing entirely to do the heavy lifting involved in building the device that makes the beaming-up possible.

Jud: What are your thoughts on this? Is "Speculative Fiction" and "Science Fiction" one and the same or does one inform the other?
Robert: They are the same thing. I think “Speculative Fiction” sounds a bit uppity, and I always refer to the field in which I wrote as “Science Fiction,” but I think “speculative fiction” is actually a more appropriate term, since there isn’t much science in a lot of science-fiction but the best stuff always deals in thoughtful “what-if” conceptualization, even if it’s not very gadgety.
Jud: Have you marveled over the years when something you dreamed up on the page actually appeared in your living room?
Robert: Many times. But when it goes out of whack I generally have to call a technician to fix it for me.
Jud: You're known to be a sort of scholar among your contemporaries. Many of the greatest science fiction/fantasy writers of your generation had very limited education or training. They just fell into a time when there was a hunger for short stories and a fascination with the future by a culture trying to define itself. The idea that there were paperback vending machines in gas and train stations is almost impossible for the average young reader to imagine.
Robert: Most of my contemporary colleagues were older than I was, because I got such an early start as a writer, and so their lives were affected by the Depression and then World War II in a way that mine wasn’t. My adolescence was spent in prosperous peacetime and so I had a chance to go to college, a very good one, and I was much the better off for it as a writer. But very few of the other s-f writers of my era had that chance. Isaac Asimov had a college education, of course, but he had to fight very hard to get into the school I went to because of the anti-Semitic quotas of his day, fifteen years ahead of mine. Fred Pohl didn’t even finish high school, not that that kept him from being one of the greatest of s-f writers. Heinlein was educated to be a naval officer. A lot of others got an involuntary military education when they were pulled into the armed services for World War II without an opportunity for college. I’m happy to have had the education I had, and I’ve put it to good use in my work, but a really determined writer can manage to pick up whatever knowledge he needs on his own, if he has to.
Jud: Do you think we've lost something to the computer screen or has it opened up new worlds for young readers?
Robert: The computer is a miracle. Google alone is the key to all knowledge, if you know where to look. And word-processing is an invaluable time-saving tool for writers.
Jud: Has the science that writers like you dreamed into existence done some kind of harm to the practicality of studying words on a piece of paper held in two hands?
Robert: I don’t think so. Just the other day I saw a report that sales of e-books have leveled off because today’s readers still seem to like old-fashioned printed books. Gadgets like the Kindle are marvelous conveniences for people who load six or seven fat books on their machine before they go off on a trip, but I don’t think printed words are going to disappear in my lifetime.
Jud: Recently, I had the pleasure of reading Octavia Butler's notebooks that were on display at the Huntington Library. In the margins of one of the pages was a note to herself. It read, "I am not a black, female Science Fiction writer. I am not a black, female writer. I am not a black writer. I am a writer."
I know that Ellison, Bradbury, Bester and so many other science fiction/fantasy writers struggled with being defined by their genre, not by their ability to craft a story. Even "Dying Inside" was a struggle for many critics and readers to admit was a novel of great importance, not a great science fiction novel. It seems only writers like Vonnegut were able to win over the literary circles that mostly dismissed the speculative fiction arena.
You own the mantle of Grand Master of Science Fiction. You've won four Hugo Awards. Six Nebulas. You've written hundreds of science fiction stories. Literally millions of words on the page. Clearly, you're among a handful of the greatest science fiction/fantasy writers in history.
Robert: Octavia Butler had special problems because she belonged to a bunch of minorities that were clamoring for special attention, and so people kept labeling her with her special identities. No doubt she was black and female and wrote science fiction, but the main point about her was that she wrote, and wrote well. I happen to be Jewish, but that’s no big deal in science fiction, which has produced Isaac Asimov, Alfred Bester, Robert Sheckley, Harlan Ellison, Avram Davidson, Stanley G. Weinbaum, and a slew of others. Otherwise I am white and male, so I don’t have to deal with identity politics. When someone asks me my professional background, I say “science-fiction writer.” If pressed, I let it be known that I wrote a lot of other things besides science fiction, but a science-fiction writer is what I set out to become when I was sixteen or so, and that is what I did become, and (unlike Vonnegut, who was a mainstream writer who wrote some pretty good science fiction, and unlike Olivia Butler, who really was a science-fiction writer but didn’t like being pushed into categories), I have no problem with identifying myself as a science-fiction writer.
Jud: Is there a quiet part of you that wonders about an alternate universe where Robert Silverberg had the same success in a strictly fiction genre, void of spaceships and alien races and brain transference? Just grounded stories about humans and their relationships here on earth? Would there even be a difference between the two men?
Robert: I don’t think so. A lot of my best science fiction crosses over into mainstream fiction (DYING INSIDE, for example, or BOOK OF SKULLS), but there is always a science-fiction element lurking somewhere in it (telepathy in one, immortality in the other). DOWNWARD TO THE EARTH, all about aliens and group minds and extraterrestrial life, is certainly science fiction, but Joseph Conrad used much of that book’s other themes a century and a quarter ago in “Heart of Darkness,” and nobody thinks of it as s-f. I don’t know whether I would have had the same success if I had set out to be a straight mainstream writer. It never occurred to me to try.
Jud: I've interviewed many genre writers who surprise me with their fiction recommendations for their readership. Crime Noir masters recommending Charles Dickens and masters of the horror genre recommending Peter Pan. Much has been discussed about Downward to the Earth being an homage in some way to Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Was his work inspirational to you?
Robert: It certainly was inspirational to me, as I make clear by borrowing one of that story’s most important characters to be a prominent figure in my own. In 1968 I visited Kenya, where I learned about colonialism (and elephants), and “Heart of Darkness” had had a powerful impact on me ever since I discovered it when I was about sixteen. And the following year it was an obvious next move to translate the Conrad novella into a science-fiction novel by setting my colonialized region on another planet and making the elephants into considerably different but still elephantine creatures.

Robert: Every young writer should know the work of Conrad, one of the most important writers of the early twentieth century. He should know Joseph Campbell, too — I drew on his thinking as I was constructing LORD VALENTINE’S CASTLE — but neither one of them was a science-fiction author, of course.
Jud: Even more importantly, if you could choose a reading direction for young, budding science fiction writers to find inspiration, where would you send them?
Robert: Everywhere. They should read everything they could — a lot of science fiction, of course, but also all of the classics of world literature, and as much scientific material as they can absorb. It all will be of use eventually,
Jud: With this graphic novel adaptation, Philippe Thirault (writer) and Laura Zucchini (art) had to distill 250 pages of your novel into a 108 page sequential art format. John Irving talked about adapting his novel "Cider House Rules" for film and how he had to distill the emotion and breadth of his book into essentially a one chapter story for the screen. But he also said that it stood on its own apart from the book (and won the Academy Award for best screenplay). I'd like to think people reading this adaptation would be inspired to run out and read the novel. The one without pictures!
Maybe that's what adaptation into other forms might be useful for? Not so much replacement as inspiration to go back to the source material?
Robert: I think they did a brilliant job. They used the underlying concepts of my novel to create something that is powerful in its own right. I don’t think that the purpose of graphic novels is to send people back to the source material, but I certainly hope that it happens.
Jud: Surprisingly, there have been very few adaptations of your work into television, film and comic book form. Is this by choice? Are you protective of your work and how it's presented to the public?
Robert: Not at all. I give the adapters free rein — my book is my book, their graphic novel or film is their graphic novel or film, and they are independent entities, I don’t interfere in the adaptations. That there have been so few movie or TV adaptations of my work is an artifact of the weird way those industries work, and I have no control over that. There has not been a time in the past fifty years when some novel or story of mine has not been under option for a film or TV show — six of them are under option right now, including DOWNWARD TO THE EARTH — but though several of them have come right up to the brink of production, only a couple of them have actually made it to the screen. It’s frustrating, but there’s nothing I can do about it. I cash the option checks and hope that something will eventually happen with the project, but usually there is some upheaval among the studio executives, everything in the works gets canceled, and that is that.
Jud: I know you've mostly stopped writing on a regular basis and you're enjoying a well-earned retirement with your wife and your garden.
But...are there moments when you're watering the flowers or strolling in your neighborhood or just sitting and re-reading a favorite classic that you daydream about a story left untold? Maybe the seed of an idea that might still be planted? I find it hard to believe that a man who has spent almost every moment of his adult life bringing fantastical ideas to the page just stops having stories to tell.
Robert: I’m 83 years old and have written enough to fill whole bookcases with my work. Writing is hard work and at my age I don’t want to go on with it. As you say, I’d rather be watering the garden, or strolling around in my neighborhood (or in London, or Paris, or Rome), or sitting on the porch re-reading some beloved book. I do still get story ideas, of course, and now and then I even make a note of them, but it ends there. I doubt that I will ever write more fiction. Very few writers my age have stayed with it into their eighties, and very few of those have produced anything worthwhile at an advanced age. (Very few have even lived that long.) The mental machinery still works, but the will to put it into action is no longer there. I have no regrets whatever about that, since most of my work is still in print and people still read it (and adapt it into other forms!) If I were altogether forgotten, I might be motivated to get some new material out there before the public, but that’s not the case. I’m enjoying my retirement.
Downward to the Earth transcends on February 14, 2018 with an MSRP of $29.95 / £22.99
Spotlight: Dragonseed
Dragonseed
Story by Kurt McClung and Art by Jimenez & Mateo Guerrero
For centuries the men and creatures of Krath have prepared for a conflict that many hoped would never happen. A half-blood, Adam Serre Shadow, now has just two moons to find the thief of the teardrop stone, stolen from his fire-breathing father, before the Council of Elders trigger all-out war. The son of a Dragon will stop at nothing to find the magical relic and preserve the fragile peace that still exists between the two species.
Quick Facts about Dragonseed:
• From the lead writer of the Might & Magic video games
• From the artists of Warlands (Image)
• For fans of fantasy, dragons, Game of Thrones, and Dungeons & Dragons
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Dragonseed arrives in stores January 31, 2018 with an MSRP of $29.95/£22.99
Spotlight: Gregory & The Gargoyles Book 2
Gregory & The Gargoyles Book 2
Story by Denis-Pierre Filippi and Art by Silvio Camboni
Young Gregory grows unhappy and restless when his father moves the entire family into an old family home in a new neighborhood. While awake in his bed, a glimmer from the floor attracts Gregory’s attention. He discovers a medallion on which there is a drawing of the great church that sits opposite his new residence. Bullied for being new, and ignored at home, Gregory decides to explore the church and the giant stone statue that rests atop of it. During his visit, the medallion begins to shine intensely and, with a flash, Gregory is hurled back to the 17th century, where gargoyles, sorcerers and magical beings live in harmony and magic.
Quick Facts about Gregory & The Gargoyles Book 2:
• An action adventure for all ages!
• More than 120K copies sold in Europe
• Perfect for fans of the Harry Potter series!
• Silvio Caboni is known in Europe for his work on Disney comic magazines including Mickey Mouse (Topolino)
• Series of 3 books
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Gregory & The Gargoyles Book 2 arrives in stores January 31, 2018 with an MSRP of $14.95/£11.99
Thoughts from a Humanoid: Adrift
Growing up with the childhood narcissism of most kids, I couldn’t fathom the idea that my parents – and by extension my grandparents – had ever had lives, identities, that had nothing to do with me. That they had existed long before I ever did was hard to imagine. As I grew older, I come to terms with this and was even intrigued by the people my parents and grandparents were long ago when they were young themselves, something that Gregory Mardon taps into with sensitive, bittersweet precision in his portrait of his grandfather’s life as a seafaring youth, charting how he fell in love and made a home for his family in Adrift.
It made me think of my own grandparents and who they were before I met them, especially my maternal grandmother Rose Marie, or “Omi” as my sisters and I called her, a contraction of the Germanic “Oma”. During my childhood, Omi was the ultimate embodiment of home, comfort, warmth, unconditional love and classic femininity – she went to the hairdresser every week to have her silver curls set, she always wore lipstick on the rare occasions her homebody-self ventured out, and she always smelled of Chanel No. 5 perfume, even while she stood for hours at the stove cooking up elaborate breakfast spreads or her signature rich, deliciously Gruyere-laden dishes. But behind her demure ladylike demeanor, her shy, soft-spoken-ness, lay a spine forged of steel.
I knew there was a tragic darkness to her past – she was born in 1930 in a tiny Swiss village, her childhood shrouded in scandal when her mother abandoned her father and disappeared without a trace, unheard of at that time and place. She was left her to raise her younger brother until her father remarried. I remember asking her if she had a wicked stepmother, because I was only able to filter real life through literary and cinematic terms. In my romantic child-mind, Omi’s past self was a combination of Heidi frolicking through the Alps, Cinderella slaving away at the hearth, and Maria Von Trapp taming an unruly horde of wealthy children.
But perhaps the life of her own scandalous mother hinted that Rose Marie would not be content to live and die in the same town where she was born like the other village girls. Instead, as a young woman she became the governess to a British family, leaving her painful past and native tongue of Swiss German behind her – more than daring for a woman of her day and age.
Like Mardon’s grandfather “Dodo”, she sailed across the sea to escape, only her destination wasn’t Morocco but New York, an immigrant to America after WWII like so many others. She attended the Institute of Technology in upstate New York, a surprising choice of study given I knew her only as a consummate goddess of domesticity. There she met her husband Walter, my grandfather, a tall German doctor with a mischievous sense of humor. She and Walter were married in 1956 in St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York but only narrowly averted a Titanic-style tragedy when the ocean liner they were due to sail to Europe on for their honeymoon, the Andrea Doria, sunk the day before their departure, drowning dozens. Had they been superstitious, they could have seen it as a bad omen, but they sailed unscathed on another ship.
They settled in Oklahoma City, where my grandfather was a professor of medicine. There they weathered the turbulent American ‘60s and ‘70s, with Rose Marie busy raising her family, rarely mentioning her long-lost birth mother – although she disliked her middle name, Agnes, as it was her mother’s first.
It was only in the early 2000s when my grandparents had retired to the coastal Californian town of Carmel-by-the-sea that Walter, obsessed with tracing genealogy lines on both sides of the family, finally tracked Agnes down. My grandfather insisted the estranged mother and daughter meet after a lifetime apart. The reunion with the mother who abandoned her was a reluctant one on Rose Marie’s part, but proved to be enlightening as well as emotional -- Agnes had remarried and had another family, and had never told her new daughter Rita about the existence of her previous one. My grandmother handled the late in life news of an unknown half-sister with grace, as she always did.
In the end, she lived to be the antithesis of her own mother – a woman whose utter selflessness put the needs and comfort of everyone else before her own, and who always seemed happy and fulfilled doing so. She was, without a doubt, the one who made so many of my childhood memories golden.
The stories of our parents and grandparents are powerful portals into the past, as Mardon so skillfully illustrates in Adrift. It’s a reminder that we can never really grasp the full scope of someone else’s life, no matter how close in bond and blood. But when we listen to their memories of places and people from long ago, we discover something of ourselves as well, apart from personal oral history – we find the strength to carve out our own paths into the future.
Adrift is washes ashore on Wednesday with an MSRP of $14.95 / £12.99
Spotlight: Milan K. Softcover
MIlan K. - Softcover
Story by Sam Timel and Art by Corentin
He would become one of the world's wealthiest men, dedicated to fighting for the oppressed, the ones lacking voice or power. But his tactics would prove far different from that of the charities and other humanitarian organizations of his time. He was to wage a ruthless war, fraught with great victories and just as great defeats.
Quick Facts about Milan K.:
• Complete Series: the 3 volumes at once
• Now in affordable trade paperback edition!
• From the talented Sam Timel (Redhand: Twilight of the Gods)
• Official Selection at the 2010 the Angouleme International Comics Festival
• Appeals to fans of the Bourne and Alex Rider series
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Milan K. Softcover arrives in stores October 25, 2017 with an MSRP of $19.95/£14.99
Thoughts from a Humanoid: Halloween
Ah, Halloween. That hallowed time of the year when the leaves begin to turn (at least outside of Los Angeles), pumpkins are carved, apples are dunked, cornfields are mazed, and TV features endless horror movie marathons. As Humanoids’ first Halloween-themed offering, what makes Halloween Tales so unique is that each of the three stories use Halloween as a jumping off point, with less a focus on the commercialized holiday itself than using it as a metaphor for coming of age and change in the lives of its young characters.
It holds personal appeal for me as Halloween was my favorite holiday growing up, even more so than Christmas, which as a kid is a pretty big deal. But then as a little girl I was always more of a Wednesday Addams than a Shirley Temple. Something about having a special night each year exclusively allotted to the wicked and scary and transgressive was so delicious – and not just because of the annual tradition of stuffing yourself silly with sweets, candy corn, caramel apples and assorted teeth-rotting goodies.
My health nut of an overprotective father insisted I never eat anything without an unopened manufactured wrapper, lest a razor blade be lurking inside some homemade treat. He also insisted that I trade my hard-earned candy haul from hours of trick ‘r treating for sugar-free gum, which of course only meant I either stuffed my face with candy on the car ride home or hid half my stash away for future late-night snacking, despite my poor dad’s best efforts. But it wasn’t my sugar addiction that swayed me from Christmas favoritism.
No, it was the opportunity to be anybody else for an entire night of delightfully spooky shenanigans. Or at least to dress up as someone else for a few hours, the appeal of which is well-known by children and cosplayers the world over. Whoever you wanted to be, be it a famous real person or fictional character, a clown, a witch, a vampire, a samurai, a pumpkin… or every single Disney princess in existence for twelve years running (or maybe that was just me). Not only is it fun for any kid to pick out and sleeplessly plan their costume down to the last detail of hot-glue-gunned pompoms and sticky glitter face paint, but there is truly a magic about a holiday devoted to play-acting, dress-up and all things that go bump in the night.
I grew up in a community of strictly Catholic homeschooled kids, some of the parents of whom thought Halloween was a sinful, Satanic holiday celebrating witchcraft and diabolical doings under the guise of innocent fun, so they weren’t allowed to dress up and go trick ‘r treating like the rest. Instead, they attended “All Saints’ Day” parties at the local parish church, dressed up not as ghosts or zombies but saints and martyrs, girls dressed as nuns and boys as monks or priests. Few were creative enough to depict the gruesome ways in which most martyrs met their end, in the jaws of lions or with their eyes plucked out. It was a pretty yawn-inducing event, with not much to gorge ourselves on but a divine Tres Leches cake made by a parish mother from Panama.
As it was for me and so many other children throughout the generations, Halloween Tales reflects not just an annual tradition of make-believe and masquerade, a carnivalesque one-night escape from everyday life, but the opportunity to face our fears and explore the dark side in a rite of passage ushering us through the shadows of childhood and adolescence.
Halloween Tales is available now with an MSRP of $24.95/£20.99
Spotlight: The Metabarons Volume 4
The Metabarons: Volume 4 - Aghora & The Last Metabaron
Story by Alejandro Jodorowsky and Art by Juan Gimenez
A must-read cult spin-off of The Incal, by Mœbius and Jodorowsky, centering around the fascinating lineage of the ultimate warrior. This collection introduces the Metabaron's bloodline and reveals the origins of their deep-seated principles. Find out the source of the family's vast wealth, learn why every Metabaron has cybernetic implants, and why the only way to become the next Metabaron is for him to defeat his own father in a mortal combat. Follow each successive generation as it struggles to overcome the forces amassed against it in a galaxy corrupted by greed, power, and terror.
Quick Facts about The Metabarons: Volume 4 - Aghora & The Last Metabaron:
• Now in affordable trade paperback editions!
• The final volume in the series that makes up The Metabarons.
• Featured in the acclaimed documentary Jodorowsky's Dune, one of Entertainment Weekly's top ten films of 2014.
• Like The Incal, The Metabarons is also set in the same space opera fictional universe known as the Jodoverse, in which most of Alejandro Jodorowsky-created science fiction comics take place.
Available below is the desktop wallpaper of The Metabarons: Volume 4 - Aghora & The Last Metabaron. Click the picture to choose your resolution
The Metabarons: Volume 4 - Aghora & The Last Metabaron arrives in stores October 25, 2017 with an MSRP of $14.95/£11.99