Alvaro Zinos-Amaro - Traveler of Worlds: Conversations with Robert Silverberg

Traveler of Worlds

A Fairwood Press Book

August 2016

Copyright (c) 2016 Alvaro Zinos-Amaro & Robert Silverberg

All Rights Reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or

by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording,

or by any information storage and retrieval system, without

permission in writing from the publisher.

Fairwood Press

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www.fairwoodpress.com

Cover and Book design by Patrick Swenson

ISBN: 978-1-933846-63-7

First Fairwood Press Edition: August 2016

Printed in the United States of America

In addition to exploring Silverbergs career, now in its sixth decade, this collection of transcribed conversations delves into aspects of Silverbergs lifesuch as his extensive travel, passion for film, opera and classical musicnot covered elsewhere.

A decade-and-a-half-long friendship, and working together on When the Blue Shift Comes, afforded Alvaro the opportunity to speak at length with Silverberg. The result: a remarkably candid series of conversations that will be of interest to science fiction readers and anyone curious about the writing life.

Silverberg is as brilliant as you expect him to be, and Alvaro Zinos-Amaro knows how to bring that brilliance out of him. An excellent and important book.

Mike Resnick, author of Santiago

Reading Alvaro Zinos-Amaros interviews with Robert Silverberg is a lot like parasailing: an exhilarating rush through atmosphere higher and richer than one usually inhabits, with sweeping views of everything below. Zinos-Amaro is a skilled interviewer and Silverberg a brilliant polymath looking back at a long life well spent. Writing, reading, travel, art, opera, archeology, foodhe talks wittily and interestingly about them all. I learned something on every page.

Nancy Kress, author of Yesterdays Kin

Robert Silverberg is always interesting to talk to, as he is a brilliant writer and a well-read and well-traveled man, as well as a long-time participant, observer, and historian of the science fiction community. Within that community he tends to be a fairly cool and deflective character, who talks about many other things before himself. That habit means this book is distinctly more than a sequence of ordinary conversations with him, because the well-prepared and congenial Zinos-Amaro has taken the time, and Silverberg has given the time, to talk at some length, and coherently, about many of his central interests, including his own life. It makes for a typically indirect but ultimately fascinating portrait of the artist, and a very nice supplement to his wonderful novels and stories.

Kim Stanley Robinson, author of Aurora

Bob Silverberg seems to have been born with delight in the sense of enwonderment. As he says in his insightful conversations with Alvaro Zinos-Amaro, [familiarity] leads to a lack of strangeness. And wonder requires a certain amount of strangeness. Pursuing that wonder, following a curiosity about archaeology and anthropology, history and modern cultures, and, of course, the future, led to a career illuminating such concepts in exquisite fiction and nonfiction. Readers have long shared in Bobs joy of discovery. Now, Bob and Alvaros perceptive dialog allows us to discover the brilliant man behind the writing.

Shelia Williams, editor of Asimovs Science Fiction

Traveler Of Worlds is a fascinating and erudite conversation that invites the reader to become a mesmerized fly on the wall. This is your best chance to peer into the life and mind of the legendary Robert Silverbergtake it.

Jack Skillingstead, author of Life on the Preservation

For Rebecca

This book was composed in eight days but took two decades to write.

In 1996, when I was seventeen years old, I discovered Robert Silverbergs work with Nightwings. The subtle melancholy of its three lyrical novellas moved me deeply. Beyond this, I was thrilled to realize that I had made first contact with a vast and cool intelligence, one that had spent decades producing enthralling stories now awaiting my discovery. I immediately hunted down as many Silverberg books as I could find, reading perhaps fifty over the next two years. It was a bibliophilic infatuation of the first order.

But I wasnt just hooked on the work itself.

With each book, I was struck by a growing number of questions regarding the author. How could one person have written so much, and at such a high level? His characters seemed to express every possible view and opinionwhat did he think, and why? Where had his travels taken him? What kind of music and films did he enjoy? What were his eccentricities and foibles and hobbies? What about the mysterious breakdown through overwork in the 1960s, and the mid-career retirement in the 70s? Above all, wherefrom sprang the creative well that had thrust up so many works of visionary wonder? The mysterious aloofness that other writers ascribed to Silverberg, the seeming impenetrability of his persona, only made these questions more tantalizing.

So I did research, starting with the backlog of whatever interviews I could find, moving on to Starmont Readers Guide 18, then lengthier academic studies. Correspondence seemed the next logical step, and in 1998, at the age of nineteen, I wrote Robert-soon-to-be-Bob Silverberg a fan letter. Over the next six years our exchanges engendered a long-distance friendship, cemented when we finally met in person in 2004. Eight years later, we published a book called When the Blue Shift Comes. For me it grew, at least in part, out of that same desire to understand I had experienced, fever-like, at seventeen.

The book youre holding in your hands right nowor perhaps reading on a screenstems even more explicitly from that aspiration to peel back layers, to decipher, and ultimately to connect.

Thus, while it is true in a literal sense that the conversations comprising Traveler of Worlds unfolded over four weekends in 2015, they were informed and shaped by years of deep, abiding curiosity about Silverbergs art and life, his experiences, his attitudes and beliefs. It is my craft and my science to Watch, says a character in Nightwings. Im delighted to share with you this investigation, the result of my own budding craft and science.

Science fiction is a field that has been graced by many very smart people, many of whom Ive had the privilege of knowing: Gene Wolfe, Samuel R. Delany, the late Joanna Russ and Alice Sheldon, Brian W. Aldiss, the late Tom Disch, Isaac Asimov, Avram Davidson, and Fred Pohl, and many others.

Robert Silverberg could without hesitation be added to the list of SFs smartest practitioners, and even amongst this brainy bunch, his intelligence stands out as impressive, as is the depth and breadth of his erudition, and the range of topics that interest his restless intellect. (Its not widely realized by SF readers today, who mostly know only his huge body of novels and short fiction, but in his time Silverberg has written over thirty acclaimed non-fiction books, on topics that range from El Dorado to the Mound Builders of the American West to Mesopotamia to the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, and from ghost towns to Sequoias to mammoths to atomic scientists to the tribesmen of prehistoric Europe.) Silverberg is also one of the most-traveled of SF writers, having followed his interests to exotic destinations all over the world.