First-Person Singularities
Stories
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- £8.99
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- £8.99
Publisher Description
First-Person Singularities, stories by science fiction Grand Master Robert Silverberg, features eighteen tales written over the course of his forty-year career, all told in the first-person singular. Inspired by W. Somerset Maugham’s Six Stories Written in the First Person Singular, a fiercely realist collection from the 1930s, Silverberg takes on the challenge, offering up his own unique sci-fi twist and “running the gambit of singularity.”
Every story in First-Person Singularities offers a one-of-a-kind narrator: a dolphin feeling the pangs of love for a human being; a computer eager to convince us of its sanity; a Greek god who has surreptitiously survived into modern times; an alien visitor living in disguise in a New York City hotel. Even a pudgy, timid Henry James gets the Silverberg treatment as the witness/narrator of H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds! Each story features a special introduction by Silverberg himself, providing the inside scoop on his experience writing for and publishing with the greatest science fiction magazines of the past and present.
First-Person Singularities includes an introduction by Hugo-award winning sci-fi author John Scalzi (Redshirts).
Robert Silverberg is one of the giants of the sci-fi genre, with four Hugo Awards and six Nebula Awards to his name. He was inducted into the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame in 1999 and named a Grand Master by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America in 2005.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Genre legend Silverberg's ambition, imagination, versatility, and skill are all in evidence in this superior collection of 18 thought-provoking first-person short stories, which were written over five decades. Time and again, Silverberg sets the bar high for himself and then clears it, as in a tale told from the perspective of an English-speaking dolphin who has developed feelings for a human woman ("Ishmael in Love") and another in which an alien crablike creature, disguised as a human, is dismayed to find that he's an object of attraction for a persistent neighbor ("The Reality Trip"). He riffs on Joseph Conrad in "The Secret Sharer," which features a very different kind of stowaway. He also cleverly anticipated Jurassic Park in "Our Lady of the Sauropods," an 1980 story in which DNA has been used to bring dinosaurs back to life, with very different consequences from those that Michael Crichton imagined. Silverberg's creative story premises are matched by a remarkable ability to make his characters sympathetic, whether human or not. This fine retrospective collection is worth any SF reader's time.
