Concept Sci-fi

Gary Reynolds talks to Robert Silverberg (July 2008)... 

Can you begin by telling us a little about yourself and how you got into writing?

I started reading science fiction (first Wells and Verne, then the pulp magazines of the 1940s) when I was about ten. That led me to try writing some stories myself.  The first ones were, of course, awful, but by the time I was fifteeen I was getting encouraging little rejection notes from the editors, and by the time I was eighteen I started to get acceptance letters.  I had a full-fledged professional career going by the age of twenty.

How do you approach the art of writing a novel?  What techniques/processes do you use?

I start with the barest minimum of an idea, sometimes only a title (Dying Inside is the best example of that) and start sketching on the back of the handiest bit of scrap paper the sort of story that might develop from an idea or a title of that sort.  Gradually a plot emerges, and a protagonist, and a background texture, and the rest fills in by subconscious processes.  Eventually I write an elaborate outline -- the one for Lord Valentine's Castle was about 5000 words long -- that sets forth the story situation, the protagonists and their conflicts, and some hint of the envisaged resolution.  And then I am ready to go. 

I begin with chapter one and work consecutively through the story to the end, pausing each morning to revise the work 
of the day before, and usually printing out the first hundred or hundred fifty pages of the book and doing extensive revisions before moving onward.   When I have a complete first draft I read it through, as does my wife, and I do another set of revisions based on that reading.   Only rarely do I feel that any further work is necessary.

What are you currently working on?

I'll be doing a short story for Fantasy & Science Fiction's 60th anniversary issue this fall.   Otherwise there's nothing much on my schedule.  After having been such a busy writer for more than half a century, I don't feel like writing any more novels, and these days I'm doing short stories only for specific projects and upon direct editorial request.  Call it semi-retirement.  I doubt that I'll ever quit writing entirely, but I don't expect to be particularly active as a writer in the years ahead.  There are plenty of writers half my age to take up the slack.

You've been writing for a long time.  How do you think that the genre of science fiction has changed over the years?

When I began reading it more than sixty years ago, it was pretty much a pulp-magazine genre, centered in magazines named Amazing Stories and Thrilling Wonder Stories.  John Campbell's Astounding Science Fiction was the only magazine that attempted in format and narrative technique to escape from the pulp stereotypes.  But by the time I was seriously thinking about a writing career, new magazines like Galaxy and Fantasy & Science Fiction had upped the literary ante considerably, and many of the old pulp magazines had cast off their action-adventure-formula 
identities, so it seemed to me that the best writers of the day (Sturgeon, Leiber, Blish, Kornbluth, Vance, etc.) were the models to follow, and, to the best of my abilities, I did.  

When the shift from magazine-centered fiction to paperback-centered fiction got under way in the 70s, we saw publishing companies reaching out to the largest possible audiences, which meant a lowering of literary standards, and today, I'm afraid, we are pretty much back to the old pulp formulas (with certain honorable exceptions, of course.)  

I find I read very little science fiction nowadays and get very little pleasure from most of what I do attempt.  My discomfort with what I read these days is one factor in my current inactivity as a writer.  I don't think that I could ever return to a central position in the field as it is now constituted, and I don't feel like occupying a peripheral one.  It's far more pleasing to sit back and play the elder-statesman role without actually doing very much, since I feel like a stranger in a  strange land whenever I get very near the current publishing scene.

What's the worst piece that you've written and why?

It was called "The Excluded Middle," it was based on a really dumb premise, and after every magazine in the field had rejected it in the early 1950s I tried to give it to a magazine that had stopped paying for the fiction it ran, and even they turned it down.  I don't know where the manuscript is, so I can't even reprint it now as a curiosity piece. But my recollection of it is that it's a spectacularly awful story.  I was, I guess, around sixteen when I wrote it.

Many of your books written some time ago still 'read' well today, both in terms of writing style and the ease with which the reader can relate to the characters.  Why do you suppose that is?

What can I say?  I don't see myself as an antique.   I worked very hard to master narrative technique and sought to write books that would be stylistically pleasing and would involve the readers in the actions of interesting characters.   That was my goal right from the start, and if my books can still be read thirty and forty years later, it means that I succeeded at what I set out to do. 

It doesn't seem surprising to me that people can still read my books.  They weren't written all that far in the past, after all, and good books don't date quickly.  F Scott Fitzgerald's books can still be read nearly seventy years after his death.   Dickens is still widely read, though he died in Queen Victoria's time.  In our own field I don't see Bradbury or 
Asimov or Clarke's work disappearing yet, though the best of it is older than mine.   It's a modern fallacy to think that good writing has a shelf life of five or ten years.

Dying Inside was published in 1972 and describes Columbia University around about the same time.  Why choose Columbia in the 1970s when you attended the same university in the mid-50s?  Did the 1970s university and its culture  influence your life in any way?

I chose Columbia in the 1970s rather than in the 1950s because I was trying to write a novel set in the contemporary world, not in the already distant Eisenhower era.   I did my best to capture the spirit of the era in which the book was set, but I was not an active participant in campus life during the 1970s -- quite the contrary.  I don't think I had been anywhere near the place in ten or fifteen years.

Dying Inside, although classified as sci-fi, has quite a loose science fiction element and can easily be enjoyed by non-science fiction fans.  What are your views on the current trend to integrate SF with mainstream fiction?

Is there such a trend?  I hadn't noticed.  I see writers like Michael Chabon and Neil Gaiman and Neil Stephenson coming in from what seems to me like a place outside the field, and making a success of it, but I'm not familiar with current trends in science ficton and don't know if any major integration of SF and mainstream fiction is going on.  

Whenever I look at the SF racks in a bookstore, I see garish paperbacks with tinfoil lettering and exploding spaceships on the cover, primarily, and that doesn't seem like mainstream fiction to me.