Robert Silverberg, prolific author of dozens of novels and an enormous number of short stories, and editor of the influential New Dimensions anthologies, has also written a column of opinion in science-fiction magazines since 1978. First appearing in Galileo, then in Amazing Stories until 1994, and now in Asimov's Science Fiction, Silverberg's essays have touched upon a wide range of subjects from science and society to science-fiction movies, from the writer's life to the collapse of the Soviet Union, and from the legendary science-fiction editors of the 1950s to the Oakland Fire of 1992.

Reflections and Refractions collects the most notable of these columns published through early 1996, along with other miscellaneous essays and introductions. In his foreword, “Pontifications,” Silverberg discusses his belief that the world and the universe are “intensely interesting places full of wonders and miracles, and that one way we can bring ourselves close to an appreciation, if not an understanding, is through reading science fiction.”

Silverberg is, of course, aware that not all that is published under the name of science-fiction lives up to that possibility. He writes, “I know how the finest s-f can pry open the walls of the universe for an intelligent and inquisitive reader, for it has done that for me since I was 10 or 11 years old, and it angers me to see writers and editors and publishers refusing even to make the attempt. In my own best fiction I have tried to achieve for other readers what H. G. Wells and Jules Verne and Robert A. Heinlein and Isaac Asimov and Jack Vance and A. E. van Vogt and Theodore Sturgeon and 50 other wonderful writers achieved for me ever since the time I first stumbled, wide- eyed and awe-struck, into the world of science fiction. And in many of the essays in this book I try, perhaps with the same naive idealism … to advocate the creation of more science fiction of that high kind and to urge the spurning of the drab simple-minded stuff that leads us away from the real exaltation that an intense encounter with the fabric of space and time can provide.”

Several essays look back to the importance of Silverberg's early interest in reading. A column on “The Books of Childhood” discusses reassembling books that Silverberg knew as a “dedicated user” of the Brooklyn Public Library, “an enterprise born not simply of nostalgia but from deep curiosity about the narrative material” that shaped him as a writer. He notes two by Padraic Colum, The Children of Odin and The Adventures of Odysseus and the Tale of Troy, and “The Complete Works of Lewis Carroll, the Modern Library edition … the first 271 pages of this 1293-page volume are given over, of course to the two Alice novels, which show signs of having been read and read and read. But the trail of fingerprints and eye-tracks indicates that I went right on to the next two novels, Sylvie and Bruno and Sylvie and Bruno Concluded, books that no one else I know has ever mentioned reading.”

He writes that he was, however, curiously disappointed when he examined a 1942 issue of Planet Comics. “I couldn't seem to recognize, in the crudely drawn pages of the issues I saw, the particular splendors that had illuminated my mind nearly half a century before. Perhaps the ink had faded; or perhaps I was looking at the wrong issue.”

Silverberg comments on Walter de la Mare's The Three Mulla-Mulgars. “It's a wonderful book, and I say so not merely because I see it through the eyes of the child who loved it: I reread it yet again a few months ago and was as profoundly moved by its beauty and mystery as I had been when I was nine.” He notes that his own novel Kingdoms of the Wall drew upon his recollections of having read the book, while Lord of Darkness is an imaginary autobiography of Andrew Battell, a historical person who appeared in de la Mare's novel. “So be it. No writer invents everything from scratch; our imaginations are billion-piece mosaics fashioned from everything we have ever experienced, including all that we have ever read.”

Silverberg's first story appeared in 1954, and his activity as a fan predated that by several years. A lengthy section entitled “Colleagues” assembles memoirs of a wide range of personalities. In one, Silverberg recalls how, at the World Science Fiction Convention in Philadelphia in 1953, he and a young fan from Cleveland, Ohio, named Harlan Ellison rented a hotel suite and allowed other fans to sleep on couches, chairs, or on the floor, for a few dollars, creating their own “convention within a convention.”

In his profile of the influential Donald Wollheim, Silverberg traces how Wollheim was responsible for bringing out paperback editions of A. Merritt and H. P. Lovecraft in the 1940s and edited the first anthology of original science-fiction stories, The Girl With the Hungry Eyes (1947). Wollheim's Ace Books first published J. R. R. Tolkien in paperback. When he was unable to get reprint rights to The Lord of the Rings, Wollheim brought out an unauthorized edition, acting on the fact that the hardcover edition had not been properly copyrighted. Silverberg also discusses how Wollheim influenced his own career as a writer. Other editors he remembers are John W. Campbell, Anthony Boucher, and Horace L. Gold, of Galaxy.

In an introduction to Warm Worlds and Otherwise (1975), a collection of stories by James Tiptree, Jr., Silverberg dismissed suggestions that the mysterious author of the stories was female, and made a number of now famous speculations about the personality of Tiptree. In late 1976, it became known that “James Tiptree, Jr.” was the pseudonym of Alice B. Sheldon. Tiptree/Sheldon had never claimed to be male, but the knowledge of politics, machinery, and the military contained in her stories, and the male voice of her work gave few indications that Tiptree was anything other than what “he” seemed. Silverberg writes:

Well, I certainly looked silly, didn't I! But—contrary to my good friend John Clute's assertion—I felt very little “discomfiture,” only surprise, and some degree of intellectual excitement. For what the Tiptree affair had done was to bring into focus the whole issue of whether such things as “masculine” and “feminine” fiction existed.

Silverberg had published several of the Tiptree stories in his New Dimensions anthologies. He looks at their correspondence, noting that he misread some of Sheldon's statements, and considers the question of gender stereotypes in literature.

In this section, there are also recollections of Asimov, Heinlein, Roger Zelazny, John Brunner, Harlan Ellison, Theodore Sturgeon, Jack Vance, Jack Williamson, Philip K. Dick, and Lester del Rey. Silverberg credits del Rey with having changed how Silverberg looked on the profession of writing, at a time when, in his early 20s, Silverberg was cranking out stories for magazines.

Reflections and Refractions presents an entertaining and lively volume of short essays from an acknowledged master in the field.