Introduction to
FLIES:
Robert Silverberg is one of my oldest friends. He is an excellent writer. Additionally, he is the compleat professional, which is unfortunately interpreted by the yahoos as meaning he is a story factory. They're wrong, but that's beside the point. More on Silverberg the Writer in a moment.
Silverberg the Fellah goes like so: he is from Brooklyn and he doesn't want any applause. He used to edit a fan magazine called Spaceship which was extremely literate. He graduated from Columbia University. He is married to Bobbie, who is a lovely research physicist, and they live in a stately manse that at one time belonged to Fiorello La Guardia. He has had somewhere between fifty and sixty hardcover books published on topics ranging from zoology to archaeology and back again. His first published story was in 1953, "Gorgon Plant," which appeared in the Scottish science fiction magazine, Nebula. He won a Hugo in 1956 as Most Promising New Writer, beating out (of all people) the author of this introduction.
Like many writers in the field of speculative fiction, the author of this introduction envies Silverberg's ability to get the job done. The delusion that genius and madness are but opposing faces of the same rare coin is one to which most writers subscribe, as a cop-out. It allows them to be erratic, beat their wives, demand fresh coffee at six ayem, come in late with manuscripts, default on their obligations, laze around reading paperback novels on the pretext that they are "researching," pick up stakes and move when things get too regimented, snarl and snap at fans, be tendentious or supercilious. It is safe for all of us to goof off as long as we can bilk the Average Man into believing it is necessary for the creative process. Silverberg does not operate on this principle. He works a steady schedule. He practices his craft five days a week, six hours a day. Writing is what he does, and not to do it means not to be functioning.
Unlike writers who find intricate and brilliant ways to send themselves into slumps, blocks, pressures, binds and hideous life-situations, Silverberg's orderly work-habits mean he can be relied upon. He has thus produced a large body of work of substantial merit, all the more impressive when one considers how many really memorable novels and stories and non-fiction works he has had published while in his twenties. Now, in his early thirties, Bob Silverberg writes books like Man Before Adam, Lost Cities and Vanished Civilizations, Home of the Red Man: Indian North America Before Columbus, Needle in a Timestack, The Time-Hoppers, and the marvelous book of living fossils, Forgotten by Time. His interests and authority have long since moved out of the realms of fiction, as a casual listing of only a few of his books demonstrates.
Yet Silverberg is a product of the field of science fiction. He is one of the last of the fans-turned-professional, and though the bulk of his income and assignments comes from other kinds of writing, he returns with pleasing regularity to speculative fiction, to re-establish his reputation, to reinforce his roots, to pleasure himself with the kind of stories he can only write in this form. Of these, his latest is presented here. Perhaps it is because of my decade-long friendship with Bob, and my acquaintance with much of what he has written, but I submit "Flies" is one of the most penetrating, most originally-written stories he has ever attempted. And the attempt is a success.