Silverberg was born in Brooklyn, New York. A voracious reader since childhood, Robert Silverberg - born in 1935 in Brooklyn, New York - began submitting stories to science fiction magazines in his early teenage years. He attended Columbia University, receiving an A.B. in English Literature in 1956, but kept writing science fiction. His first published novel, a children's book called Revolt on Alpha C, appeared in 1955, and in the following year, he won his first Hugo, as "best new writer". For the next four years, by his own count, he wrote a million words a year, for magazines and Ace Doubles. In 1959 the market for science fiction collapsed, and Silverberg turned his ability to write copiously to other fields, from carefully researched historical nonfiction to softcore pornography for Nightstand Books. In the mid-1960s, science fiction writers were starting to be more literarily ambitious. Frederik Pohl, then editing three science fiction magazines, offered Silverberg carte blanche in writing for them. Thus inspired, Silverberg returned to writing, paying far more attention to depth of character and social background than he had in the past and mixing in elements of the modernist literature he had studied at Columbia. The books he wrote at this time were widely considered a quantum leap from his earlier work. Perhaps the first book to indicate the new Silverberg was To Open the Sky, a fixup of stories published by Pohl in Galaxy, in which a new religion helps people reach the stars. That was followed by Downward to the Earth, perhaps the first postcolonial science fiction book, a story containing echoes of some material from Joseph Conrad's work, in which the Terran former administrator of an alien world returns after it is set free. Other popularly and critically acclaimed works of that time include To Live Again, in which the personalities of dead people can be transferred to other people; The World Inside, a look at an overpopulated future; and Dying Inside, a tale of a telepath losing his powers, set at Columbia. In 1969 his “Nightwings” was awarded the Hugo as best novella. He won a Nebula award in 1970, for the short story “Passengers”, and two the following year (for his novel A Time of Changes and the short story “Good News from the Vatican”). He won yet another, in 1975, for his novella “Born with the Dead.” In 1986 he received a Nebula for his novella "Sailing to Byzantium", in 1990 a Hugo for the novelet "Enter a Soldier. Later: Enter Another", and in 2004 he was named a Grand Master by the Science Fiction Writers of America. In 1970, he was the Guest of Honor at the World Science Fiction Convention. Silverberg moved from his native New York to the West Coast in 1972, and he announced his retirement from writing in 1975. In 1980 he returned, however, with Lord Valentine's Castle, a panoramic adventure set on an alien planet, which has become the basis of the Majipoor series -- a story cycle set on the vast planet Majipoor, a planet much larger than Earth, inhabited by no less than six types of planetary settlers. Following this release, he has kept writing ever since. Roma Eterna(2003) is his most recent novel.



You are considered as one of the fundamental authors of sf. Do you feel to have marked and era in this kind of literature?


Before I began writing, most science fiction writers (with a few exceptions -- Bradbury, Vance, Leiber, Sturgeon) -- made use of the pulp-magazine techniques of narrative, strong on action and dialog, with relatively little description, introspection, or distinction of prose. It was simple, lucid, direct storytelling. What I attempted to do, beginning about 1966, was to combine the thematic material of science fiction and the narrative technique of literary fiction, introducing approaches to storytelling that were more common in what is called :"serious" fiction. I was not the only writer to take the writing of science-fiction seriously in that era, but I was one of the first and most prolific.

However, science fiction is not living a blast in these times. Is this a crisis, and which could be the reasons?

It turned out that most of the readers preferred the old-fashioned fast-paced kind of science fiction, the pulp-magazine kind, and the multitude of new readers who were brought to science fiction by the TV shows and the Star Wars movies had no interest in any other kind. The result was that most science fiction published now, at least in the United States, is aimed at readers with juvenile tastes. The paradox there is that readers with juvenile tastes want to read Harry Potter or play computer games, not to read science fiction, and readers with serious tastes have no interest in discovering modern science fiction, because when they take a casual look at the books on sale they see work packaged to look like juvenile fiction, with crude covers and sensationalist titles, and that doesn't appeal to them. Thus we are losing readers at both ends of the age spectrum.

Fantasy and technological thrillers - Rowling, but also Crichton and Brown are good examples - seem to have replaced science fiction in the dreams of people who love reading adventures. Why has this happened? And what do you think of series like Harry Potter and the dispute about the Da Vinci code?

I dealt with this in my last answer. About the Da Vinci Code I know nothing -- haven't read it, don't understand its popularity. Harry Potter is clever stuff, but also is a good example of the kind of herd phenomenon tha t sweeps the young. Every child HAS to read Harry Potter, the way every adolescent needed to follow Michael Jackson in 1984, because those who don't are excluded from the group. This phenomenon has nothing to do with literary values, only with mass conformity. As for Crichton etc., the commodity they sell is fear of science, whereas the best science fiction of earlier years (Asimov, Heinlein, Clarke) took the opposite attitude. Fear of science is rampant in our society today. Thus the dread of genetically modified foods, of stem-cell research, etc., etc., etc.

With Roma Eterna you take the path of alternate history. Why did you decide this?

I've always been interested in history -- real history -- and particularly in the history of the classical world. The ROMA ETERNA idea gave me a chance to play with that history.

In Roma Eterna you seem to prefer the psichology and the interaction of characters, more than describing an alternative scenario. Is this true?

It seemed to me that I was doing both.

Coming to your alternate Roman Empire, we suddenly find out that rather early in comparison with our normal time line Romans use steam power, rifles and gun. Harry Turtledove would have used dozens of pages to explain why. Why did you choose differently? Did you fear the effects of too much infodump?

Harry writes his way. I write my way. I saw no need to explain Roman engineering prowess. The Romans were great engineers and in the course of time, if not distracted by the upheavals that took place in our own time-line in the third and fourth centuries A.D., they would have continued to increase their technological skills.

In Roma Eterna the cause of everything seem to be the failure of the Jews' exodus and Moses' mission. Despite of this, we find Romans who are pious like Chistians. How could this be possibile without the rising of Jesus and Chistianity?

For one thing, I don't see Jesus and Christianity as the only source of piety. (Talk to any Muslim about that.) For another, I don't think I show my Romans as unusually pious. None of them pay much attention to their own gods, and the gods of others seem like amusing myths to them. My basic idea was that the dominance of Christianity in the Empire from Constantine's time onward in our own time-line weakened the Empire beyond repair, and it crumbled in Western Europe (though surviving, in a somewhat different form, in the East). Remove Christianity, I thought, and European Rome will not fall. This had nothing to do with religion in general, just with the specific effects of the sort of religion that early Christianity was.

Do you think alternate history could be an interesting mind exercise for history students in the Universities? I mean a way to go deeper in the cause-effect interaction?

Yes. Of course. Anything that sets the mind to speculating on cause and effect, or on the forces that shape history, is valuable for students.

Coming back to science fiction: who's the most interesting author nowadays, on your opinion?


I'm not reading much science fiction these days, and when I do it's the classic stuff (most recently Stapledon's LAST AND FIRST MEN.) I don't know who the currently interesting authors are.

Many see in Charles Stross, Vernor Vinge and Greg Egan the future > of sf. Do you agree?


I've never read any Egan and I've read very little of Stross and Vinge, but these three names are names that I keep hearing, so they must be important figures in science fiction these days. Whether today's readers are prepared to respond favorably to fiction so complex and abstruse is not something I can say.

Do you share Stross' and Vinge's point of view on the fundamental role of internet in the future of mankind? Is internet really the singularity that will change our world for ever?


Certainly it has already changed our world forever. Consider this very interview -- you send me questions, I answer them, the whole transaction happens instantaneously and without any expense for the transfer of information. That's new. Thirty years ago this process would have taken weeks. And the transformation is just beginning. The presence of blogging and YouTube in the current American presidential campaign is another sign of the change; the problems newspapers and other print-media publications are having is another.

Do you know any Italian sf author, and, in case, what do you think of Italian science fiction?


I met Valerio Evangelisti once, but no modern Italian science fiction has been translated into English, and though I do have some understanding of Italian, it isn't good enough to allow me to read fiction in that language.

What will be your next novel like?


I have no idea. These days I am not a very prolific writer -- I spend much of my time traveling or reading , not writing -- and my next novel isn't even in the planning stage yet. Maybe there won't even be a next novel. After having written so many books over the past fifty years, I don't feel much inner pressure to write more of them.




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