Reflections Robert Silverberg Once upon a time long ago, before Wikipedia was the merest electronic spark, the Encyclopedia Britannica was the fount of all knowledge. I bought my first set of the Britannica in 1956, when I was setting out as a freelance writer and felt that I needed to know everything about everything in order to write a science fiction story. I lost that set twelve years later, in a fire in my house, and replaced it with the 1968 edition, which then was the last word in modern factuality, sixteen shiny volumes. Along the way I acquired two
