Reflections
Round Robin
by Robert Silverberg
Among the trendy things in the science-fiction world of the 1970s was what was known as the “shared world” anthology, in which the editor of the book would propose a theme and a miscellaneous group of writers wrote stories based on it. Sometimes they worked consecutively, each one devising his or her story on the basis of what the others had written before, and sometimes each took a whack at the theme without knowing what the others had written.
One of the first of these to make a splash was Robert Asprin’s Thieves’ World, which ran for a dozen volumes, starting in 1978. But there had been plenty of predecessors. One very successful one, from 1952, was The Petrified Planet, edited by Fletcher Pratt, with three novellas by Judith Merril, H. Beam Piper, and Pratt, all set on the same world. I borrowed the three-novella formula myself for The Day The Sun Stood Still (1969), and edited many similar volumes in the decade that followed. Other editors produced a host of shared-world books. Sometimes the various writers scrupulously followed the initial outline, and sometimes they went off on wild tangents of their own, resulting in incoherent and bewildering cumulative narratives. Of the numerous other shared-world projects in that era, I think the most significant was Harlan Ellison’s Medea, for which Hal Clement, Frederik Pohl, Larry Niven, and Poul Anderson established the specifications of a world. Theodore Sturgeon, Thomas Disch, Frank Herbert, and I worked out story details at a live gathering in 1975, and a whole galaxy of stellar SF writers wrote stories based on all that material. (The book, Ellison being Ellison, did not appear until 1985, and then went out of print, never to reappear, because of a disagreement between editor and publisher. It’s well worth finding in the used-book market.)
Not that the shared-world idea was anything new back then. Charles Dickens was involved in one in 1864 called Mugby Junction that involved five writers. Another, The Fate of Fenella of 1894, was the product of two dozen writers, among them Conan Doyle and Bram Stoker. The concept came to science fiction in 1933, when Science Fiction Digest, a semi-professional magazine devoted to news of the field, launched the extraordinary seventeen-part serial Cosmos, written by some of the most celebrated sf writers of the time (and a couple of the most obscure). The magazine released one installment per issue as a stapled-in supplement, finally concluding the vast project in 1935. All of it was collected in 2015 by Fiction House in one hardcover volume, which can still be purchased on the internet, but a far superior reissue, aptly called The Ultimate Cosmos, came out in 2025. This huge volume, edited by those remarkable science-fiction scholars David and Daniel Ritter, with the assistance of Sam McDonald, John L. Coker III, and Rob Hansen, includes not only the original stories and illustrations done in their era to accompany them, but also a new story, the winner of a contest designed to provide a substitute for the original final installment, which in its day was universally considered an inadequate conclusion to the great epic. Also provided is a great deal of supplementary material, letters from the contributors, extracts from the host magazine, and much more, making The Ultimate Cosmos an invaluable guide to the early years of science-fiction publishing in the United States.
Cosmos was the idea of Raymond A. Palmer, then a science-fiction fan and fledgling writer, who years later would go on to a highly visible and controversial career as editor of the magazine Amazing Stories and several other titles. With the encouragement of Julius Schwartz and Conrad Ruppert, the men behind Science Fiction Digest, Palmer rounded up an odd assortment of professional writers who, astonishingly, agreed to write segments of the shared-world novel without payment, and presented them with an outline of the plot that began in this fashion:
“Seven of the various bodies of the Solar System are inhabited by intelligent beings, all different in structure and composition. One (or more) of each of these beings receive a mysterious message, apparently generated and originating somewhere out in space, which urgently requests that each of the Solar System’s intelligent races send a representative to a meeting place for a conference on something interesting and vital to the whole Solar System.” The outline goes on to reveal that the Solar System is threatened by an invasion from Alpha Centauri. A villain hiding in a crater on the Moon is mentioned. The Red Spot of Jupiter is shown to be a menace. There will be terrible space battles . . . and so on and so on.
Unquestionably there were seventeen installments to Cosmos, but reckoning the number of writers is a little tricky. The sixth section is credited to one “Rae Winter,” which was actually a pseudonym for Ray Palmer himself, hastily filling in when the designated author, Miles J. Breuer, fell ill. (Palmer also wrote the tenth installment under his own name.) The seventh segment was a collaboration between Otis Adelbert Kline and E. Hoffman Price, two veteran pulp writers who batted out their chapter one rainy afternoon with the help of many cups of Turkish coffee. And another story was the work of Eando Binder, the pseudonym for the collaborative brothers Earl and Otto Binder. So eighteen writers were involved, but one did two sections and two other sections were written by two writers each.
The writers Palmer chose for the project were a varied crew. Two were superstars of the era: A. Merritt, far more famous than the others, best known for vivid fantasy novels such as The Moon Pool and The Ship of Ishtar, and E.E. “Doc” Smith, whose vast series of Lensman novels was still in the future, but who was already greatly celebrated for such novels as The Skylark of Space and Spacehounds of IPC. Nearly as well known was John W. Campbell, whose specialty then was space-opera novels heavy with scientific jargon, but who would go on a few years later to become the most important editor in science-fiction history. Backing them up were such experienced pros as Ralph Milne Farley, known for his “Radio Man” novels, Arthur J. Burks, a prolific contributor to a myriad pulp magazines in many fields, and the aforementioned brother writing team that called itself Eando Binder, experienced producers of space opera. Edmond Hamilton, a reliable creator of space-battle events, was chosen to write the final installment. Then came David H. Keller, Bob Olsen, Francis Flagg, and J. Harvey Haggard, all regular contributors to the sf magazines of the day, though hardly household names nowadays; the collaborators Kline and Price; and two promising younger writers, Lloyd Arthur Eshbach and P. Schuyler Miller. Palmer, as noted, wrote two sections. The final and most improbable contributor was Abner J. Gelula, who had just three stories published at the time, but who apparently was chosen because one of them was about the menace of robots, a theme that Palmer was eager to include in the novel.
Farley started things off by creating the three main protagonists—Dos-Tev, the deposed emperor of Lemnis, a world of the Alpha Centauri system, Mea-Quin, his elderly science adviser, and Bullo, described as a “workman,” though later writers in the series would give him higher status. Dos-Tev has been overthrown by the power-mad tyrant Ay-Artz, who, not content with ruling on Lemnis, is planning now to invade our own Solar System, four light-years away. (He will make use of faster-than-light travel, Farley tells us—a concept that was only beginning to be explored in science fiction.) Dos-Tev, with a spaceship of his own, will try to outrace Ay-Artz to our solar system, gather allies there, and thwart his evil plan.
The second story, by David H. Keller, provides a wildly absurd plot situation, the first of many here. Robots on Earth have developed to the point where they are making the human race superfluous, and the world’s richest man conceives the scheme of transporting a young couple to, of all places, Mercury, where as a kind of second Adam and Eve they will bring forth new humanity. Soon after they arrive they get a message from Dos-Tev, telling them to proceed to a crater on Earth’s moon for a conference to discuss the menace of Ay-Artz.
The next six chapters—by Burks, Flagg, Campbell, Palmer writing as “Winter,” Kline and Price, and Gelula, advance the main story about half an inch while we are shown the various intelligent races of the solar system receiving Dos-Tev’s message and reacting to it. Flagg’s story is pleasantly preposterous, dropping in all sorts of alien terms (teeba, lirum, nager, etc.) without defining them. (The teeba was apparently an important bodily organ, and one of the later writers makes narrative use of it while admitting in a letter to Palmer that he has no idea what it is.) Gelula depicts an Earth totally controlled by robots in a way foreshadowing today’s most paranoid fears of artificial intelligence. Campbell, who had a degree in physics and wanted you to know about it, offers a murky piece replete with references to mass, volume, kinetic energy, and the fourth dimension, which in the science fiction of the 1930s was regarded as a place situated at some angular remove from our three-dimensional world. Campbell also introduces a secondary villain from another dimension to whom he gives the deplorable name of the Wrongness of Space, thereby sticking the succeeding writers with that unfortunate cognomen.
The conference on the Moon finally takes place in Palmer’s own chapter—the inexperienced Palmer doesn’t make much of it—and then follow some frenzied space-battle chapters, by Haggard, Miller, Eschbach, and Binder, plus the two undoubtedly best segments of the group, Merritt’s lovely “The Last Poet and the Robots,” in which the automaton peril is dealt with, and Doc Smith’s “What a Course!,” which demonstrates to the other contributors how really to write a space battle. The big disappointment of the book is Edmond Hamilton’s final chapter—that very experienced professional writer simply ducks most of the situations developed by his predecessors, astounds his readers by killing off Dos-Tev and his two companions, and, when the despicable Ay-Artz reaches the Solar System and makes his headquarters on Neptune, Ay-Artz puts together a disintegrator ray in one afternoon and destroys not only Neptune but also Pluto and Uranus in side effects. (The Wrongness of Space has been eliminated with similar ease by an earlier writer.) That concluding chapter troubled most of the readers of the era, and for the Ultimate Cosmos omnibus the Ritters had the clever idea of holding a contest for a new finale. This was won by Sara Light-Waller, with a remarkable piece faithful to the mood of the book, but far superior to Hamilton’s job.
Most of the stories are pretty awful, crude in style and implausible in plot, but nevertheless, reading them one after another, I found myself oddly charmed by Dos-Tev’s journeys through various dimensions and the vicissitudes of the secondary protagonists. And the supplementary material supplied by the editors provides detailed insight into the early days of science fiction in the United States—a delightful book, a very valuable one, for which I give hearty thanks.