SOURCE: “Silverberg's Time Machine,” in Extrapolation, Vol. 23, No. 4, Winter, 1982, pp. 345-61.

In the following essay, Gordon discusses “In Entropy's Jaws” within the context of twentieth-century time-travel literature. He explicates Silverberg's use of that tradition's conventions in his story, as well as Silverberg's extrapolations from contemporary scientific understanding of time.

According to the science fiction writer Barry Malzberg, when Robert Silverberg began to write science fiction as serious literature during the 1960s, what he did “was to take the clichéd, familiar themes of this field and do them right, handle them with the full range of modern literary technique.”¹ This is precisely what Silverberg achieves in his short story, “In Entropy's Jaws” (1971).² Through a complex narrative structure of flashbacks and flashforwards, he gives us a novel time travel story and a fresh view of the Einsteinian notion of the relativity or randomness of time. “In Entropy's Jaws” is...