SOURCE: “‘Falling through Many Trapdoors’: Robert Silverberg,” in Extrapolation, Vol. 20, No. 2, Summer, 1979, pp. 109-17.

In the following essay, Letson details the development of modernist themes of anxiety and alienation in Silverberg's fiction since the early sixties, focusing in particular on their treatment in the short stories “Schwartz between the Galaxies,” “Breckenridge and the Continuum,” and “The Science Fiction Hall of Fame.”

If the superficialities of the New Wave-Old Wave debate concealed any substantial issues, I suspect that they had less to do with stylistic experimentation, scientific content (“hard” versus “soft”), or the depiction of sex than with what may be loosely called world view. The themes and forms of American magazine science fiction have remained constant over the past fifty years; despite the tradition of dystopian, satirical, and disaster formulas, sf has been rationalist, materialist, voluntarist, and optimistic. It has tended to ignore the decay of Western belief...