HAWKSBILL STATION – Robert Silverberg (1968)

It is one of the wonders of the written word that a novel about time travel actually functions as a time machine itself – albeit a shaky one. Reading Robert Silverberg’s Hawksbill Station takes us back to the end of the 60ies, but not fully: the possibility of truly experiencing the context in which readers in 1968 read this short novel for the first time is forever lost in time.

According to Lawrence Block, Silverberg wrote 4 books a month at the end of the 50ies and the beginning of the 60ies, “a quarter of a million words a month”. He did so in lots of genres, including “about 200 erotic novels published as Don Elliott” – to pay off the house he bought.

If anything, Hawksbill Station shows that Silverberg was indeed a hardened professional: the prose is rock solid and the pacing is great. But solid prose and great pacing don’t necessarily save a novel from becoming dated. So, has this story about a penal colony for future political prisoners in the early Paleozoic aged well?

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THE MAN IN THE MAZE – Robert Silverberg (1969)

Robert Silverberg’s bibliography is massive. The guy wrote tons of stuff. In 1968, the year he published The Man in the Maze serialized in Worlds Of If, Silverberg released three other novels, 8 books of non-fiction and 8 short stories, according to this glowing review on Fantasy Literature. Ah, quality and quantity.

Then again, this novel is just 192 pages in a pocket edition – the good old days of brevity. Today, a story like this would be published as a novel of at least 492 pages, adding lots and lots of world building and an attempt at deep backstory for the characters. In other words: authors and publishers alike would try to give it the veneer of serious literature. The wonders of word-processing indeed – it only makes the length and depth of Dune or LOTR all the more impressive.

So, what we get in The Man in the Maze is ideas condensed to their basic form, draped in a fast paced action/mystery story to make the medicine go down. It’s snappy pulp, yes, but it has deep ambitions – or does it?

I was drawn to read more of Silverberg since I read his classic Dying Inside, a fantastic fuck off to intellectual snobbery, that even today is mistaken as serious literature with metaphors about dying. His tone just felt right.

What about The Man in the Maze?

DYING INSIDE – Robert Silverberg (1972)

Okay, first things first: Dying Inside is not really a scifi book. It’s a rather small story about David Selig, living in the second half of 20th century America. Selig can read minds – only he and one other guy he meets can do this – and his power is diminishing. That’s it. No speculative science, no future worlds, no space stuff, nothing, just one guy who inexplicably can read minds. That’s not a negative, it’s just something candidate readers should know.

Dying Inside easily fits in with earlier scifi, taking mental powers seriously – just like books as diverse as Foundation And Empire (1952), Childhood’s End (1953), The Demolished Man (1953), More Than Human (1953), The Santaroga Barrier (1968) or The Lathe Of Heaven (1971).

In a way, Dying Inside is the most pure of all those: Silverberg doesn’t give justifications for Selig’s powers, there’s no paranormal scientific framework, no Freudian veneer, no nothing. Selig’s powers are a coincidence. On the surface level, it’s just a character study of a speculative character losing his mutant mental power. On top of that, Selig doesn’t do anything spectacular with his powers. He doesn’t try to make money out of it, there’s no action, no mystery plot, no sleuthing. So, space opera fans should look elsewhere for their dose of entertainment.

All these caveats aside: I liked Dying Inside. Why? What’s a way to approach and appreciate this novel? I don’t care much for the approach of Michael Dirda – Washington Post book critic – who points to the easily recognized surface metaphor: yes, Dying Inside is about a character realizing he will die someday, “a common human sorrow, that great shock of middle age”. I don’t feel Silverberg has particularly interesting or profound things to say about that shock. So, another approach maybe?