Robert Silverberg - The Masks of Time

It was the late winter of 1967 and I was preoccupied with a need to prove to the science fiction community that I was a reformed character. Back in the 1950’s, at the outset of my career, I had allowed some early discouragements in the marketplace to turn me into a purveyor of mass-produced claptrap; I had written (and sold) untold reams of stuff with titles like “Guardians of the Crystal Gate” and “Thunder over Starhaven,” unreconstructed zap-zap pulp adventure fiction. This phase lasted roughly from 1955 to 1958, after which I repented of my literary sins and resolved to write no more formula sf; but I wrote enough in those few years to tarnish my escutcheon for eons to come. When I returned to science fiction in the mid-1960’s, it was with considerably less cynicism and higher ideals, but I faced the severe problem of overcoming my earlier reputation and getting readers (and editors) to take me seriously. First with a handful of short stories, then with the novel To Open the Sky, I tried to demonstrate to my friends and to the readership at large that I had indeed outgrown the bad old days. But nobody much was listening. Just as I, as sophisticated and critical reader, had long ago decided that writers Q and P and R were such hopeless hacks that there was no sense wasting my time on even two sentences of their work, so too had most of my peers come to dismiss my writing out of hand.

Late in 1966 I wrote a book called Thorns which was so intense, so strong, and so high-pitchedly literary in tone that I was sure it would obliterate my youthful sins. (And it did: it shook everybody’s preconceptions about me, launched what was then known as “the new Silverberg” in a spectacular way, and went to the final balloting for the Hugo and Nebula awards.) But in the early months of 1967 Thorns was still unpublished and I still chafed under the need to make people see that I was a different sort of writer, and a different sort of human being, from the boy of 22 or 23 who had committed “Pirates of the Void” and its myriad companions.

Thorns,like To Open the Sky, had been published by Ballantine Books. Betty Ballantine, who had known me since the start of my career and had seen me mature and change, already was confident that my work of the new period was going to transcend and render invisible my hackwork, and she gave me virtually carte blanche to write as I pleased. On March 19, 1967, I sent her the outline for The Masks of Time. “As you see,” I told her, “I’ve got satire in mind this time, and while in many ways this book will echo the themes and concerns underlying Thorns, the whole narrative approach will be different: more accessible stylistically, more — well, charming. The element of the grotesque that figured so largely in Thorns won’t be so big here, and the criticism of society will be more explicit, in an implicit sort of way. I figure it’ll be a biggish sort of book, too — maybe about 100,000 words, if it really takes off. It has the sort of structure that can bear a lot of weight, so long as the ideas flow freely once I get my characters in motion through the world of 1999.”

Thornshad been intended at least in part as a look-at-me kind of book, full of stylistic novelties, literary references, flamboyant little numbers designed to show that its author, past evidence to the contrary, really was a reasonably cultured man whose private tastes were somewhat more elevated than could be determined from examination of what he once had written. Once I got that sort of exhibitionism out of my system, I felt no need to repeat it, but in Masks of Time I set out to demonstrate a different sort of rebellion against my pulp-magazine antecedents. The essence of pulp fiction is pace; incident follows incident remorselessly, with no time out for analysis, rumination, or digression. Although characterization is far from absent in the best pulp fiction, it is manifested through action and dialog rather than through exposition. I had generally followed these precepts closely; but in Masks I was going to allow myself the luxury of writing a more novelistic novel, one in which there was room for discussion, speculation, comment, and other side-matter that was not strictly in the service of advancing the plot. To that end I chose as my narrator that familiar Jamesian figure, an articulate and civilized man who is near but not quite at the center of events, and let him tell the tale at his own pace, never worrying about the editor’s winged chariot hurrying near.

It was, for me, an entirely new way to write. In the early novels I had fretted constantly about the demands of plot, of keeping the great mechanism ticking away toward its appointed resolution. In Thorns the need for constant verbal pyrotechnics made me tense. Here everything was unhurried. I enjoyed the novelty of not having to compress myself into the self-conceived 55,000-word mold of the early novels. Masks, when I finished it in June of 1967, was 80,000 words long, the longest novel I had written. Many years later, one (almost totally hostile) study of my work would criticize it for having been too long, over-wordy, facile, and undisciplined; facile perhaps, but one man’s undisciplined writing is another’s very much needed relaxation of arbitrary confines, and in the progression of my work it was vital to learn how to sprawl, to ramble, to explore side avenues.

A couple of months after I finished Masks, Thorns was published and achieved the effect I had hoped for: I was rehabilitated and respectable again within my field. By the time Ballantine issued Masks of Time in the spring of 1968 I no longer had to feel motivated by any need to atone for ancient literary sins, and could produce my books with care only for themselves in themselves, not as warriors in some battle I was waging against my own past. The change in my work drew an eloquently puzzled essay from Algis Budrys, then the book columnist in Galaxy, who noted, “How curious to see that Silverberg is now writing deeply detailed, highly educated, beautifully figured books like Thorns, or like his latest, The Masks of Time. Did he plan to become this way all along, or did we persuade him?” Budrys too objected to the pacing, to the presence of crowds of apparently superfluous characters, to “incidents that could easily have been left out,” but shrewdly observed, “Its defects are the opposite of those Silverberg’s work used to have… This is very much like what you’d expect from a Silverberg looking up over his shoulder and saying: (Here. Here. I’m an artist. See — here’s a piece of evidence to prove it. And another. And another.) But Silverberg has never betrayed the slightest trace of giving a damn what anybody said or thought. So maybe he was planning it this way all along. Maybe in the old days he’d whisper to a character: (All right, I’m making you out of cardboard, but what I’ve omitted I’m going to pack into somebody else, some day, and he won’t just be round, he’ll be dense!)”

Exactly so. All except the part about my not giving a damn what anybody said or thought. Igave more than a damn, possibly cared too much, and set out quite consciously to change what people were saying, what they were thinking. And succeeded. People who know only the last decade of my work find it hard to believe that I am the very same writer who committed “The Overlord of Colony Eight” and all that other early junk. He is not only nearly forgotten but almost mythical these days, except to me. Except to me.

At any rate, Masks of Time, in a glossy new edition. Here I am, midway between “Pirates of the Void” and Shadrach in the Furnace, trying out my real voice in public and liking the way it sounds.