Robert Silverberg | |
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Robert Silverberg in 2005.
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Born |
Brooklyn, New York City |
January 15, 1935
Pen name | Dozens |
Occupation | Novelist, short-story writer, editor |
Nationality | American |
Period | 1955–present |
Genre | Science fiction, fantasy, anthologies (as editor) |
Subject | Geography, history, nature |
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Signature | |
Website | |
robert-silverberg |
Robert Silverberg (born January 15, 1935) is an American author and editor, best known for writing science fiction. He is a multiple winner of both Hugo and Nebula Awards, a member of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame, and a Grand Master of SF. He attended every Hugo Awards ceremony since the inaugural event in 1953.
Silverberg was born in Brooklyn, New York. A voracious reader since childhood, he began submitting stories to science fiction magazines during his early teenage years. He received a BA in English Literature from Columbia University, in 1956. While at Columbia, he wrote the juvenile novel Revolt on Alpha C (1955), published by Thomas Y. Crowell with the cover notice: "A gripping story of outer space". He won his first Hugo in 1956 as the "best new writer". For the next four years, by his own count, he wrote a million words a year, mostly for magazines and Ace Doubles. He used his own name as well as a range of pseudonyms during this era, and often worked in collaboration with Randall Garrett, who was a neighbour at the time. (The Silverberg/Garrett collaborations also used a variety of pseudonyms, the best-known being Robert Randall.) From 1956 to 1959, Silverberg routinely averaged five published stories a month, and he had over 80 stories published in 1958 alone. In 1959, the market for science fiction collapsed, and Silverberg turned his ability to write copiously to other fields, from historical non-fiction to softcore pornography. "Bob Silverberg, a giant of science fiction... was doing two [books] a month for one publisher, another for a second publisher, and the equivalent of another book for a magazine... He was writing a quarter of a million words a month."
In the mid-1960s, science fiction writers were becoming more literarily ambitious. Frederik Pohl, then editing three science fiction magazines, offered Silverberg carte blanche in writing for them. Thus inspired, Silverberg returned to the field that gave him his start, paying far more attention to depth of character development and social background than he had in the past and mixing in elements of the modernist literature he had studied at Columbia.