Rovert Silverberg - Up The Line

But Silverberg’s novel makes it clear that he himself does not agree with this postmodern attitude, that the past is there only to dazzle ignorant tourists and have some fun. The plot of the novel forms a strong critique of this view, as our protagonist, following his desires with little regard for history and what it could teach him, industriously replicates all his problems (including himself), until he is woven into a tangle more complicated than anything outside time-paradox fiction could easily be. By doing this the book makes it clear that the time-paradox genre can be used both to discuss attitudes toward history, and to express those moments in our life when we are most tied in knots by our desires and regrets.

What’s this? Time paradox puzzler as autobiographical fiction?

Yes. Definitely. That’s the kind of writer Silverberg was and is: extremely prolific but relatively reticent in personal matters, he has always been inclined to speak through the masks of his fictions, and to use the seemingly distant tropes of science fiction to tell his story, or rather to express his existential situation. And never more so than during the period in which this novel was written.

Silverberg began young, like quite a few other science fiction stars, falling in love with sf as a young teenager; by the age of nineteen he was up and running as a fully functioning professional writer, cranking out millions of words of science fiction for the many magazines and few small sf publishing houses of the 1950s. In these years he learned his craft and made a living, but he also gained a reputation for the heartless manufacture of generic filler material, a reputation that bothered him more than anyone else. The truth is that getting published at a very early age is a mixed blessing, because no matter how much one wants to become a writer, there remains the problem of having something to say, and this is a problem that cannot be solved by reading more books, but only by living more years. Thus it is that the very few writers who have written interesting fiction in their teens or early twenties, do so usually after a premature entry to adult life that often does great harm to them (cf. Raymond Radiguet).

So, although Silverberg sold a great deal of science fiction and made a living by writing, he was not satisfied. And then the science fiction magazine market collapsed and disappeared. This might have presented an insuperable problem to a less resourceful person, and indeed the history of science fiction is strongly marked by this event. If you track the important writers of science fiction by mini-generations marked by the decades, a process that works much better than it should to periodize the history of the genre, then what is significant about the generation of the 1950s is that almost every one of their careers was deformed or shattered in one way or another. I won’t recite the list of famous names, because each has a different story that needs explication, but the cumulative effect of all of them together suggests that something powerful was going on. And there is no great mystery to it. The pay was abysmal, so that it was hard to make a living at it; and the culture did not value science fiction as literature, rather the reverse, so that it was hard to maintain, in the face of such universal disdain and dismissal, the emotional stance that one was writing crucially important and very fine avant-garde literature. That happened to be true, as the long run proved, but who could be sure when the great bulk of the world seemed to regard it as trash?

So most of the great Fifties sf writers went silent, for periods short or long. They found other work, or became very poor. Many left the field and only came back years later, if at all. Even the prodigious Asimov left, for non-fiction and teaching. Only Philip K. Dick of all that generation powered on through this period, but he published a great deal of nonsense at high speed, and collapsed eventually under the strain; and all along he exhibited what his biographer calls “hypergraphia,” a useful disease for a writer, perhaps, but part of a suite of disorders ranging from drug use to paranoia to something like epilepsy, and a fatal stroke at age fifty-one.

So this was a very, very difficult time. Later generations of science fiction writers, appearing in a world full of enthusiastic readers, money, academic interest and general acclaim, can have no idea. In essence the generation of the 1950s broke down a ghetto wall with their foreheads, creating the open field that followed — even the world view that followed — for the younger generation to party in. It is not a debt that can be repaid, but it can be acknowledged.

Silverberg, however, being a strong-willed and practical man, confronted by this situation, was not going to break his pate or cry in his beer. He took a route more like Asimov’s than Dick’s, and turned to non-fiction. He wrote mostly for younger readers, and most of his books concerned history or prehistory. He became a figure quite like Metaxas in Up the Line ; an ever-more skillful guide to the past, showing young clients the fascinations of history both natural and human, working like Metaxas from the refuge of a palatial mansion. In these years he published books on underwater archeology, archeological hoaxes, lost cities and vanished civilizations, living fossils, El Dorado, the Great Wall of China, and other, mostly historical, subjects. Perhaps there was a book on Byzantium in there as well. In any case, he made himself a second career as a guide to the past, and in the process he also discovered that scholarship was a craft like any other, open to anyone willing to learn the methods and do the work; it was not something confined to the esoteric worlds of the academy. To his repertory of writing skills he added those of a practicing scholar.

Meanwhile, science fiction had been changing yet again. The generation of the Sixties was arriving, and along with it all the radical social developments of that turbulent decade. Many of the new stars in science fiction were about Silverberg’s age or just a bit younger, and they were energetically using all the time-worn tropes of science fiction to “express themselves” as it was then said, in what was a characteristic Sixties act, but also a crucial aspect of art. Silverberg, no longer compelled by financial necessity to crank out fiction as fast as possible, returned to his first love, his hometown, at his own pace and on his own program. The tenor of the times influenced him, inspired him, and, as he put it, he “joined the revolution.” This was no immediate conversion, but the natural process of growth of an ambitious writer, who, after all, despite all that had already happened, was still only thirty years old, an age when many writers are just beginning; and really, at about the age when people have lived enough to have new things to say. Inevitably these life experiences include bad things as well as good, and some of the bad things have powerful lessons in them. So, despite his great energy, and his smooth negotiation of the professional troubles of his time, Silverberg was not immune to things like illnesses, or his house burning down (no doubt influencing the wistful descriptions of Metaxas’s lovely home in Up the Line ), or troubles in relationships to people and places.

In any case, his mid-Sixties novel Thorns marked the rise to a new level in his work, wherein he too began to use the tropes and devices of science fiction to express what his life felt like to him during those crazy years. Up the Line comes from a few years later, written in 1968, in the middle of the craziness. Thus the particular intensity of the book, which could have been a light crossword puzzle kind of thing, but is not. Thus Metaxas, with his palatial home tucked away in a private place and time, and his highly-honed ability to present the past to his clients. He stands for a Silverberg from just a year or two before; but significantly, our protagonist Jud Elliott can only aspire to Metaxas’s happy state, and Jud’s attempts to achieve a similar situation go spectacularly awry. Things going wrong: this novel is a comedy, and it is funny, but it is one of those black comedies where things go wrong and then the more the protagonist tries to fix them the more wrong they become, until the ending is at one and the same time an O. Henry-style punchline and a deep existential truth, neat as a pin and just as sharp.