Reflections
Starting Out
by Robert Silverberg
As I write this, in the autumn of 2025—we work well ahead of publication date for these columns—it is about seventy years since I began my career as a professional science fiction writer. That’s a goodly number of years to have sustained any sort of career, and I find it hard to conceal my surprise at having lasted this long. Please forgive me for casting a retrospective look across that immense span of time.
It was my boyhood dream to write science fiction, once I started reading it in junior high school. I had discovered Jules Verne and H.G. Wells when I was about ten, and by 1948 I had gone on to find the science fiction magazines of the day, Amazing Stories and Thrilling Wonder Stories and others with similar gaudy names, and the very much less gaudy Astounding Science Fiction, these days soberly renamed Analog Science Fiction, where nearly all of the best SF was published. So of course I set out more or less immediately to write some science fiction myself. My first story, written in 1949 in collaboration with a classmate, Saul Diskin, who was destined to become a lifelong friend, was called “The Last Days of Saturn,” and I am guilty of no false modesty when I tell you it was truly terrible. (I still have the manuscript, but I will refrain from quoting anything.) I went on in the next few years to write some only slightly less terrible stories—I remember working endlessly on a fantasy set in ancient Babylonia, called, I think, “Priestess of Shamash,” filling page after page of a school copybook with an interminable outline, and eventually losing the thing somewhere. By dint of careful study of what was being published in the magazines of the day, I finally succeeded in writing something I thought stood a chance of selling—it was the one about time travelers coming back to change history, written in what I thought was a passable imitation of the style of Clifford D. Simak, short paragraphs and lots of dialogue. “This is powerful writing,” I recall telling my fifteen-year-old self, and sent it off optimistically to one of the SF magazines, which returned it in short order with an encouraging note of the sort that editors send to teenage wannabes who show at least a glimmer of talent. A glimmer, though, is all I showed back then.
But I kept at it—oh, did I yearn to see my name on the contents page of one of those gaudy magazines—and, well, reader, it finally happened. And would happen again and again, beyond my wildest adolescent imagining, story after story finding a home in print, once I had managed that initial breakthrough. I wrote about fifteen stories in 1951 and1952, sent them to one magazine after another (I kept a careful list of the submissions), and very swiftly got them all back, sometimes with those printed rejection slips and sometimes with encouraging editorial notes. I was one of a small group of young science fiction readers—the only name you would recognize today would be that of Harlan Ellison—who desperately wanted to get a story published in one of those magazines. We didn’t entertain hopes of competing with Robert A. Heinlein or Isaac Asimov or Ray Bradbury, or even with newer and less famous writers like Philip K. Dick or Robert Sheckley—we just wanted to sell something, to cross the all-defining barrier between amateur and pro. We kept close eyes on the magazines (and there were plenty of them in those days), watching with much eagerness and no small degree of competitiveness to see one of our names.
Joel Nydahl was one of the first to get there, with a story sold to Imagination, a minor but definitely professional magazine, that appeared in the May 1953 issue. We all looked on with mingled congratulations and envy, darkened by the fact that Nydahl was just fourteen years old. (That turned out to be the only story he would ever sell. Decades later, I met him at a science fiction convention, by which time I had established the major writing career of my adolescent dreams, and he had become a professor at a Florida university, and we joked together about the impact his one sale had had on the rest of us.)
Harlan announced his own first sale in the summer of 1953—a short story called “Monkey Business,” written in collaboration with another youngster named Dave Ish—but it turned out to be a cruel hoax, someone using a stolen letterhead to invent an imaginary acceptance letter. Since he was already one of my closest friends and we had evolved an odd kind of relationship that was a mixture of encouragement for each other and competitiveness, I watched the rapid coming and going of the initial Ellison triumph with very mixed emotions indeed.
And at last it was my turn. In September 1953, when I was a sophomore in college, I sold an article explaining science fiction fandom to Science Fiction Adventures, whose editor was Harry Harrison. That was one of the better science fiction magazines, and my fee of thirty dollars allowed me to call it a professional sale, but it didn’t really count for me, since it was only an article, not a story. I crossed that barrier, finally, in January, 1954, when the Scottish magazine Nebula accepted my story “Gorgon Planet” and paid me the munificent sum of $12.60 (which sounds trivial, but actually had the modern purchasing power of more than a hundred dollars). Virtually at the same time, the publishing house of Thomas Y. Crowell accepted my proposal for a young adult novel that was eventually called Revolt on Alpha C.
A terrific start, you might say, for the ambitious kid. Well, no. He didn’t quite see it that way. Nebula certainly qualified as a professional magazine, which published the first stories of Brian Aldiss and Bob Shaw, and fiction by Eric Frank Russell, Charles Beaumont, and, eventually, my pal Harlan Ellison. It was a handsome magazine and well regarded in the United Kingdom. But the problem for me was that It was a Scottish magazine. Its circulation in the United States was minimal—perhaps just a few dozen copies. My whole little circle of wannabe writers saw Joel Nydahl’s story in Imagination, but no one was going to see mine in Nebula. And at the same time I had sold an actual book—no small achievement for a beginner like me, enough to earn me representation with a major literary agent a year later—but all I had to show for it thus far was a contract. The book still had to be written and published. And it still wasn’t a story in one of the American science fiction magazines, which had been our real goal.
I had to wait another six months to put an end to all that quibbling. In June 1954, Robert W. Lowndes bought my little story “The Silent Colony” for his magazine, Future Science Fiction. The story was barely visible—1500 words, leading up to a silly punch line—but Future was a real magazine (though it had a reputation for paying very low rates for its fiction and at a very slow pace), and Lowndes was a real editor, with a decade and a half of experience behind him, and a beloved figure in the science fiction field who—because of his friendship with many well-known writers—had been able to coax a lot of superb fiction into his magazines despite his absurdly low editorial budget.
The story appeared in the October,1954 issue. Take that, Nydahl! Take that, Ellison! I was a pro at last.
I was still a teenage college kid, though, and my piffling little story surely caused no uneasiness among the likes of Philip José Farmer, Jack Vance, James Blish, Damon Knight, and the other contents-page regulars of the era. And in fact it was many moons before I sold another story. I wrote a few—they all came back in a hurry—but also I was busy with my schoolwork, my work on the campus newspaper, and the turbulence of college romance, and becoming the next Heinlein had to wait. Finally, in February, 1955, came that long-awaited second American sale, to Bill Hamling’s Imagination.
But then things started to happen quickly, so quickly that I could barely absorb the improbability of it all. In the spring of 1955, Randall Garrett, a capable writer who had sold stories to most of the leading SF magazines but who had problems with alcohol, came to New York and got in touch with Harlan Ellison, whom he knew in a distant way, and who had moved to New York himself in the hope of going forward with his writing career, which was still making no progress. I was living then at a residential hotel near Columbia University; Harlan moved into the same building, and then Garrett took a room there also. He and Harlan didn’t hit it off, but Garrett and I struck up a friendship right away—he was an experienced writer with self-discipline issues, and I was an ambitious beginner with more than the usual share of discipline, so we had things to offer each other. He suggested that we collaborate—and start right at the top, by proposing a novel for John W. Campbell’s Astounding, the dominant magazine in the field.
He took me downtown to meet Campbell, who saw me as a kind of new version of the 1941 Isaac Asimov—a bright college kid from Brooklyn who had a knack for constructing good stories. We pitched our novel, and Campbell, as was his wont, turned our idea inside out and told us to go home and write it as a series of novelettes. Which we did; and in August, 1955, he bought the first one. I was stunned. I was hardly old enough to vote, and I had sold a novelette to Campbell!
Garrett also took me to meet Howard Browne, the editor of Amazing Stories, a completely staff-written magazine that needed a couple of new writers. Howard hired us, agreeing to buy everything we brought him sight unseen, and I started right off by selling him one of the many rejected stories I had written in the last couple of years. Then Bill Hamling offered us the same deal—50,000 words of fiction a month for his two magazines. And I met Bob Lowndes, who bought two more stories, asking me to write one of them around a cover picture he had already bought. Next came the seasoned editor Larry Shaw, two new magazines—for one of them I found myself writing at least half the copy. The capper came at the 1956 World Science Fiction Convention, at which time Garrett and I had sold a three-part serial to Campbell based on our earlier novelettes, and where I was given a Hugo as most promising new author.
It was all a whirlwind. I had gone from nowhere in 1953 to being one of the most prolific SF writers in history by 1956. Hemingway had written of someone who “went bankrupt gradually, then suddenly.” That was how it was with my career, and I could hardly take time to believe it. I had been a fan who wistfully hoped to sell a single story, and here I was just a few years later with stories published in all the magazines. Years later Arthur C. Clarke said of me, “Bob Silverberg is the pro of pros”—I think the best compliment I have ever had. I wish my uncertain teenage self could somehow know of that.