SOURCE: A review of Reflections and Refractions: Thoughts on Science-Fiction, Science, and Other Matters, in AB Bookman's Weekly, Vol. 100, October 20, 1997, pp. 963-64.

In the following review, the anonymous critic provides an overview of the thematic highlights of Reflections and Refractions.

Robert Silverberg, prolific author of dozens of novels and an enormous number of short stories, and editor of the influential New Dimensions anthologies, has also written a column of opinion in science-fiction magazines since 1978. First appearing in Galileo, then in Amazing Stories until 1994, and now in Asimov's Science Fiction, Silverberg's essays have touched upon a wide range of subjects from science and society to science-fiction movies, from the writer's life to the collapse of the Soviet Union, and from the legendary science-fiction editors of the 1950s to the Oakland Fire of 1992.

Reflections and Refractions collects the most notable of these columns published through early 1996, along with other miscellaneous...