Robert Silverberg - Shadow on the Stars

Copyright c) 1958 and 1986 by Agberg, Ltd.

Cover art and eForeword to the electronic edition copyright

c) 2002 by RosettaBooks, LLC

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information address Editor@RosettaBooks.com

First electronic edition published 2002 by RosettaBooks LLC, New York. ISBN 0-7953-1016-1

To Randall Garrett

Introduction

Unless I have lost count, which is entirely possible, Shadow on the Stars was my sixth novel-which makes it a very early work even among my early work; because in the far-off days of the 1950s I was writing a novel every few months, and I had a couple of dozen of the things on my record before I sprouted my first gray hair.

Beyond any doubt my first book was the juvenile novel, Revolt on Alpha C, which I wrote in 1954 when I was still practically a juvenile myself. Then came another juvenile, Starmans Quest, in 1956, and later that year my first ostensibly adult novel, The Thirteenth Immortal and in early 1957 the quite respectable novel Master of Life and Death-which probably ought to be given another turn in print one of these days. A few months later I wrote Invaders from Earth, another early book that causes me no embarrassment today. Thats five, and so Shadow on the Stars, written in October of 1957, would be the sixth. Of course, there were also the two Robert Randall collaborations with Randall Garrett, The Shrouded Planet and The Dawning of Light, in 1955 and 1956, but those werent solo jobs. And there were a couple of items like the pseudonymous Lest We Forget Thee, O Earth (1957) and Invisible Barriers (1957) that were patched together out of previously published magazine pieces, but they werent originally conceived as full-length novels, and I dont feel like counting them, and I hope youll be willing to ignore them too. So the book you are now holding is my sixth novel, give or take a few exceptions and footnotes.

It was written at the behest of the late Larry T. Shaw, a bespectacled and pipesmoking gentleman who edited a pair of magazines called Infinity and Science Fiction Adventures. Shaw, an old-time s-f fan, might have had a splendid career as an editor if he had ever found a major publisher to back him, for his taste was superb and he had the useful knack of coaxing writers to do their best work without seeming actually to be nagging them; but it was his fate always to work for marginal companies in short-lived ventures. Infinity was his special pride, a low-budget magazine that ran high-budget stories by the likes of Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, James Blish, Damon Knight, C.M. Kornbluth, and Algis Budrys; it even published Harlan Ellisons first science fiction story. I was a regular contributor to Infinity and many of my best short stories appeared there. The companion magazine, Science Fiction Adventures, was less ambitious, a blood-and-thunder operation done strictly for fun, featuring novelets of interstellar intrigue and blazing ray-guns. I was a regular contributor to SFA, too: in fact, I practically wrote the whole magazine. As I look through my file copies, I see a long story or two by me (usually under some pseudonym) in virtually every issue-Battle for the Thousand Suns, Slaves of the Star Giants,

Spawn of the Deadly Sea, and so on. I had fun writing these melodramas of the spaceways, and the readers evidently enjoyed them too, for my stories (under whatever pseudonym) were usually the most popular offerings in each issue.

The original format of SFA provided Three Complete New Action Novels (actually, novelets 15,000 to 20,000 words in length) in each issue, plus a few short stories and features. But with the seventh issue, October, 1957, editor Shaw decided to vary the pattern a bit, running only two novels, a long one and a short one. I was his most reliable contributor, so he asked me to write the Book-Length Novel to lead off that issue. I turned in a 28,000-word piece called Thunder Over Starhaven, which appeared under a pseudonym and which I eventually expanded into a novel. The innovation was successful, apparently, for soon Shaw tried another experiment: filling virtually an entire issue with one novel. Again he asked me to do the job. This time it was agreed that the story would appear under my own byline, since Robert Silverberg was by now a better known name than any of the pseudonyms I had been using in the magazine; and, since the story would bear my own name, I was a trifle less flamboyant about making use of the pulp-magazine cliches beloved by the magazines readers. There would be no hissing villains and basilisk-eyed princesses in this one, no desperate duels with dagger and mace, no feudal overlords swaggering about the stars. Rather, I would write a straightforward science-fiction novel, strongly plotted-but not unduly weighted toward breathless adventure.

Shadow on the Stars is what I called it, and that was the name it appeared under in the April, 1958 issue of Science Fiction Adventures. The cover announced in big yellow letters, A COMPLETE NEW

BOOK-35 and indeed it did take up most of the issue, spanning 112 of the 130 pages and leaving room only for two tiny short stories and the feature columns. Mainly it was a time-paradox novel-a theme that always has fascinated me-but there was at least one concession to the traditional policy of the magazine, a vast space battle involving an unstoppable armada of seven hundred seventy-five dreadnoughts. I chose to handle the big battle scene, though, in a very untraditional underplayed manner, as you will see; and I did a bit of fooling around with the ending, too, providing two twentieth chapters. The readers loved it. The next issue was full of letters of praise, including one that said, Silverberg is becoming a really disciplined artist, and asserted that Shadow on the Stars seemed somehow to synthesize the previously antithetical traditions of Robert A. Heinlein and E.E. Smith. (Actually, I thought it owed more to A.E. van Vogt.) And then Science Fiction Adventures went out of business, for reasons unconnected with the quantity of material I was contributing to it. A lot of magazines folded in 1958, including a few that I never wrote for at all.

The next destination for Shadow on the Stars was Ace Books. Editor Donald A. Wollheim bought it, retitled it Stepsons of Terra, and published it later in 1958 in his Ace Double Novel series, with a book by a British writer, Lan Wright, on the other side.

What Lan Wright is doing these days, I have no idea: But here is Shadow on the Stars, back in print under its original title for the first time since its historic original appearance more than forty years ago, for your amusement.

Robert Silverberg

Oakland, California

October, 2000

Ewing woke slowly, sensing the coldness all about him. It was slowly withdrawing down the length of his body; his head and shoulders were out of the freeze now, the rest of his body gradually emerging. He stirred as well as he could, and the delicately spun web of foam that had cradled him in the journey across space shivered as he moved.

He extended a hand and heaved downward on the lever six inches from his wrist. A burst of fluid shot forward from the spinnerettes above him, dissolving the web that bound him. The coldness drained from his legs. Stiffly he rose, moving as if he were very old, and stretched gingerly.

He had slept eleven months, fourteen days, and some six hours, according to the panel above his sleeping area. The panel registered time in Galactic Absolute Units. And the second, the Galactic Absolute Unit of temporal measure, was an arbitrary figure, accepted by the galaxy only because it had been devised by the mother world.