Rovert Silverberg - Up The Line

There is, in other words, a kind of grimness to all this hilarity, that has to do with Silverberg’s loss of his house, and the general tenor of the times. This painful comedy extends even to the “bawdy” material of Jud’s hunt for sex or love, which after all occupies so much of the text. That this hunt gets mixed up with Jud’s genealogical interests is one way of suggesting that he needs some kind of meaning to attend the matter; and indeed, he makes the classic discovery that “sex with love is better than sex without love.” All well and good — but the point is significantly vitiated by the fact that he knows his Pulcheria no better than the rest of the women he has bedded, and his love for her has been sparked, as he himself admits, by her pulchritude. As good a start as any to a relationship, no doubt, but more is required for such a thing to last. Jud never has the chance to learn the elementary lesson that good-looking people are not universally good; indeed it costs many of us painful years of experience to learn that. Whether this also pertains to Silverberg’s life at that time, is not the job of an introduction to say: but those were very wild years, years of “free love” and “sexual revolution,” and Silverberg married young, divorced, and only years later ended up with his true partner: so it may not be venturing too much beyond the public facts to suggest that when the guru in the text says to the protagonist, “You aren’t real. Believe me. Believe me. You’re your own ghost. Pack up and clear out!” there is a particular edge and force to the observation, only accentuated by the startling chill of the final line.

So — enjoy this technically adroit and heartfelt comedy, of course! But watch out you don’t find yourself confronting another version of yourself, in a dark hallway in Byzantium, arguing which one of you is real, and how you can get out of the mess you have gotten yourself into.

— Kim Stanley Robinson

December 4, 2001