Just over a year ago I devoted this column to a celebration of this magazine’s thirtieth anniversary. And the other day I discovered that I have a different thirtieth anniversary to celebrate this year—that of this very column.
No, “Reflections” hasn’t been running in Asimov’s all that time. The opinions and reflections of a very distinguished predecessor occupied this space from the magazine’s first issue, which was dated Spring 1977, until its 189th, date August, 1992—none other than Isaac Asimov himself. Isaac died in April of 1992, and in the issue dated September 1992, editor Gardner Dozois wrote a brief editorial piece to announce the sad news.
But Gardner, swamped with manuscripts to read for a monthly magazine, preferred not to have to write a monthly editorial column as well. And so for the next couple of years no such columns appeared here, except for the very occasional guest editorial, until I took over Isaac’s old slot as columnist with the July 1994 issue, the 218th. And here I have been, issue after issue, ever since. (Minus one, around a dozen years ago: at the time I was struggling to finish a novel that was running greatly overdue, and my wife Karen stepped in and wrote one month’s essay on my behalf. Not as a ghost-writer, mind you. She got her own byline.) Except for that one I’ve done them all, month in and month out, for the past fourteen years, well over 150 columns by now. Some demon bibliographer will probably be able to supply the exact number. I can’t.
Though I’ve been an Asimov’s columnist for the past fourteen years, the column itself had already been in existence for sixteen years when I transferred it to this magazine, and so this year marks its thirtieth anniversary. I provided this account of its history in my initial Asimov’s column:
“It was just about sixteen years ago—the spring of 1978—that I took upon myself the task of writing a regular column of commentary on the science fiction scene. The magazine that invited me to sound off was called Galileo, which was pretty much a shoestring operation, published out of Boston by a bunch of people whose main excuse for publishing it was that they loved SF, and edited by the ambitious and determined Charles C. Ryan.
I suppose you would have to call Galileo a semi-pro operation, considering its irregular publishing schedule, its not-quite-ready-for-prime-time format, and its basically subscriptions-only distribution scheme. But so far as its editorial content went it was as professional as any SF magazine of its era—including Asimov’s, which was all of one year old at the time, and just beginning to hit its stride. Looking through my file of Galileo, I see its contents page studded with names such as Connie Willis, Joan D. Vinge, John Kessel, Alan Dean Foster, and Lewis Shiner, all of them in the early years of careers that soon would shine with high accomplishment. Veterans like Brian Aldiss, Harlan Ellison, Marion Zimmer Bradley, and Jack Williamson had stories in it too; and there were non-fiction pieces by the likes of Carl Sagan, Arthur C. Clarke, Hal Cle-ment, and Frederik Pohl. All in all, it seemed to me a fine place for me to set up shop in as a pontificator.
I very much wanted to do some pontificating, too. After a quarter of a century as a professional science fiction writer, I had wandered into a time of personal and creative crisis that had led me, late in 1974, to retire from writing “forever.” A great deal of my motivation for walking away from my career had to do with the changing nature of science-fiction publishing in the United States in the mid-1970s. The exciting revolution of concepts and literary technique that had acquired the label of “The New Wave” had failed in a big way; the ambitious work of the writers who were considered to be part of the New Wave was swiftly going out of print, and what was coming in was the first surge of Star Trek novelizations, Tolkien imitations, juvenile space adventure books, and other highly commercial stuff that I had no interest in writing or reading. I felt crowded out by all the junk; and, having also hit a period of mental burnout after years of high-level productivity, I was too tired to fight back against the overwhelming trend toward more juvenile SF. So I simply picked up my marbles and walked away, intending my disappearance from the field to be permanent.
When Charlie Ryan approached me about doing a regular column three and a half years later, I was still deep in my irrevocable and permanent retirement, but I had begun to feel as though I were living a weirdly posthumous existence. It was apparent to my friends, if not yet to me, that I was growing increasingly troubled and confused by my extended period of self-imposed silence. Although I had had plenty of offers to write my kind of science fiction on quite generous terms, I wasn’t yet ready to get back into the business of writing fiction again; but I wanted to write something, if only to re-establish my connection with the field of fiction that had been the center of my imaginative experience since my boyhood. The truth was that I missed science fiction and my role in shaping it. I could no longer bear to be invisible, after so many years at the center of things. So I accepted Galileo’s invitation to do a regular commentary piece gladly and eagerly, and with some relief.
I wrote six columns for Galileo before it vanished with its sixteenth issue, dated January 1980. By then my retirement from fiction had ended—I was working on a long novel called Lord Valentine’s Castle when Galileo went under—and I was definitely back in harness with the bit between my teeth. Scarcely had Galileo been laid to rest but I had an offer from Elinor Mavor, then the editor of the venerable Amazing Stories, to move my column to her magazine. Which indeed I did, beginning with the May 1981 Amazing; and there it remained for thirteen years, through a change of publisher, three changes of editor, one change in the column’s name (from “Opinion” to “Reflections”), and a total transformation of the magazine’s format. Issue after issue, Silverberg spouting off on this topic or that for something like a hundred columns.
Then Amazing too went under, and, caught without a podium for my orations and accustomed after sixteen years to holding forth, I quickly accepted Gardner Dozois’ invitation in the spring of 1994 to transfer the site of my column to Asimov’s, and here I still am, hoping that both the magazine and I enjoy enough longevity to allow me to equal Isaac’s record for long-term column production.
And what sort of things was I writing about, thirty years ago in those old Galileo columns?
In the first one of all I noted that science fiction writers, long a notably underpaid crew, were suddenly getting huge advances from book publishers and many were now able, for the first time, to make their livings as full-time writers, something that only a handful of us had been able to manage when I broke in in the 1950s. “I am not, repeat not, in any way objecting to the sudden prosperity that has engulfed nearly all science fiction writers,” I said. “But I do feel some qualms about the ease with which young writers can make themselves self-supporting these days. I know that beyond doubt that I was injured as a writer by having things too easy in my twenties . . . Maybe the best science fiction really is written by part-time writers.” Well, time has taken care of that problem. Most new SF writers now get very modest sums indeed for their work, and very few are able to set up shop as full-time pros. Even a lot of veterans are returning to their day jobs. We no longer have to worry, most of us, about the agony of excessive prosperity.
I had more to say on the same subject in the second column. In the third, I talked about the packaging and marketing of SF books as it applied to my own Lord Valentine’s Castle, which was about to appear. “Of course we’re not going to market the book as science fiction,” my editor had told me. “We’ll handle it as a straight mainstream novel.” It was a noble attempt to break me out of the science fiction ghetto, which had been so constricting for us all. But I did point out to him that the novel takes place on a planet umpteen light-years from now and some fifteen thousand years in the future, which made mainstream handling a bit questionable, and in the end they marketed it as science fiction and did reasonably well that way. Today SF remains what they call “category fiction”—that is, ghetto stuff—and the advent of computerized bookselling makes it most improbable that that will ever change.
In the fourth column I noted the death of the New Wave, that school of highly experimental, even avant-garde SF, that had its little era between 1966 and 1972 or thereabouts. I expressed no regrets for the excesses of the New Wave, but suggested that it had at least succeeded in boosting the general literary level of SF beyond the old pulp standards, and the effects of that would probably be permanent. By and large, I think I was right.
Column five continued to examine the New Wave’s rejection of old-fashioned notions of plot in favor of stylistic experimentation, and said, “We stand at the threshold of the 1980s; we have survived a time of revolution; we have, I hope, integrated our divergent excesses into something more harmonious; now let us produce a science fiction that avoids both elitism and subliteracy, fiction that holds readers so that they stand spellbound as we tell our tales, and cannot choose but hear.” Did we? I surely hope so.
And in the sixth and last Galileo column, in the magazine’s final issue, dated November 1979, I grumbled about the spelling errors in some recently published books and cited the legal phrase, Falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus—“False in one thing, false in everything.” If a writer doesn’t know how to spell, can we trust him to know anything else? And if a publisher doesn’t bother to correct the writer’s spelling errors, how much attention is the publisher paying to other aspects of his book, like inconsistencies of plot? I still feel that it’s a writer’s job to get everything right, from the spelling of words to the name of the capital of Albania. But here we are, thirty years later, and—well, I don’t want to get started on the current state of knowledge of such things as spelling and grammar, let alone geography. If I get myself properly wound up I might spend the next ten columns in one long vast lament.
