If the superficialities of the New Wave-Old Wave debate concealed any substantial issues, I suspect that they had less to do with stylistic experimentation, scientific content (“hard” versus “soft”), or the depiction of sex than with what may be loosely called world view. The themes and forms of American magazine science fiction have remained constant over the past fifty years; despite the tradition of dystopian, satirical, and disaster formulas, sf has been rationalist, materialist, voluntarist, and optimistic. It has tended to ignore the decay of Western belief systems documented by modernist literature and philosophy since the end of the nineteenth century. This is not the place for a detailed argument on this topic, but I suggest that resistence to the New Wave was strongly tied to a rejection of the pessimism and philosophical uncertainty of that fiction, and that those qualities are reflections of similar ideas to be found in modern literature from Dostoyevsky, Kafka, and Conrad through Joyce, Eliot, Yeats, and Beckett. What I will argue in some detail is that the fiction of Robert Silverberg has, since the early sixties, pursued the modernist themes of anxiety and alienation, that he has shaped science fiction materials to deal with themes that were not previously part of the American sf mainstream.

All of the surface themes of Silverberg's major fiction—immortality, new religions, archetypal renewal experiences, time travel, bodily transformations—conceal variations on the more powerful theme of anxiety, and the shape of his fiction is governed more by the exposition and resolution of anxiety than by the working out of science fictional processes. This is not to say that the science has suffered, or that his narratives are no longer sf,¹ but that the conventional focus on the process as represented by the science fictional idea and its implication is subordinated, in most cases, to the spiritual situation of the characters.² Even in Tower of Glass and The World Inside, the two books that Silverberg thinks of as “closer to pure science fiction, the exhaustive investigation of an extrapolative idea,” than any of his other work,³ the characters exhibit signs of distress that seem to be less environmental than existential. Elsewhere the weight of the fiction is borne by the psychic state of the characters, and the sf content exists not for itself alone, but as an element of a kind of fiction that extends the range of the genre and brings to the modernist tradition a new source of metaphors and formulas. In this, Silverberg is clearly part of the movement (in the sense of motion, not Movement) represented by Aldiss, Ballard, Delany, Dick, Ellison, Malzberg, Moorcock—and, I believe, by less expected figures such as Heinlein and Farmer.

The catalogue of writers just cited indicates some of what I mean when I speak of an interpenetration of modernist and sf traditions. In the work of these writers there is a retreat from the easy optimism and philosophical certainty of conventional sf and an acceptance of the intellectual and emotional disorder which is the burden of our century. A summary of the modern situation that I have found useful is contained in the first section of William Barrett's Irrational Man,⁴ a book which traces the decay of traditional ideas of order and meaning in our culture and the erosion of systems of belief that once supported us:

Alienation and estrangement; a sense of the basic fragility and contingency of human life; the impotence of reason confronted with the depths of existence; the threat of Nothingness, and the solitary and unsheltered condition of the individual before this threat. One can scarcely subordinate these problems one to another; each participates in all the others, and they all circulate around a common center. A single atmosphere pervades them all like a chilly wind: the radical feeling of human finitude.⁵

Silverberg's fiction, when laid out on the dissecting table, reveals various attempts to come to terms with such a “feeling of human finitude,” to ease anxiety and guilt, to make sense of life, to make the universe emotionally as well as intellectually intelligible. The response to anxiety has varied from the spiritual rebirths and messianic outpourings of Downward to the Earth, Nightwings, and A Time of Changes, through the uncomfortable or ironic accommodations of The Man in the Maze, To Open the Sky, or The Masks of Time, to those surrenders to fate which are alien to the spirit of American sf, if not of Western culture in general—“Born with the Dead,” “This Is the Road,” The Stochastic Man. It is less the response to anxiety, however, than the anxiety itself I wish to document here.

Anxiety appears in its primal form in three short works which also depart markedly from the conventions of magazine sf. “Schwartz between the Galaxies,” “Breckenridge and the Continuum,” and “The Science Fiction Hall of Fame”⁶ avoid linear plot and resolution, and even in the closest approach of the three to a conventional fulfillment of expectations—“Breckenridge”—there are elements designed to distance the reader from the narrative in a way that no traditional genre writer would employ.

In “The Science Fiction Hall of Fame,” a speaker questions his affection for and attraction to sf as he simultaneously reflects on his fears and uncertainties:

What's the purpose of life, anyway? Who if anybody put us here, and why? Is the whole cosmos merely a gigantic accident? Or was there a conscious and determined Prime Cause? What about free will? …

Big resonant questions. The kind an adolescent asks when he first begins to wrestle with the stuff of the universe. What am I doing brooding over such stuff at my age? Who am I fooling? (Capricorn Games, [hereafter cited in text as CG,] p. 26)

These reflections are intercut with scenes from imaginary sf stories featuring space opera, telepathy, future history, alien monsters, and fancy hardware, and with his recurring nightmare, in which he wanders an apparently endless maze of tunnels, passing but not communicating with alien beings.

The story has no resolution. The speaker finds his actual life unsatisfying: performing “one of those impossible impersonal mechanical screws” (CG, p. 26) while watching the live broadcast of the first moon landing, he feels nothing for either experience. LSD leaves him with a need to stay awake after coming down to “read Marcus's Starflame novels, both of them, before dawn” (CG, p. 33). His hypotheses concerning sf's hold on him go unproved (a desire for immortality? nostalgia for his youth?); only the dream recurs. The most likely answer is itself a puzzle: sf's “multiplicity of futures,” represented by the imaginary-story extracts, is also the tunnel maze of his nightmare.

Perhaps what I really fear is not so much a dizzying multiplicity of futures but rather an absence of futures. … Nothingness, emptiness, the void that awaits us all, the tunnel that leads not to everywhere but to nowhere—is that the only destination? If it is, is there any reason to feel fear? Why should I fear it? Nothingness is peace. (CG, pp. 34-5)

What he desires is a different sort of nothingness, “the center of the universe, where all vortices meet, where everything is tranquil, the zone of stormlessness. … This is the edge of the union with the All” (CG, p. 28). In the story's last paragraph, in what may not be a dream (but how are we to know in such a narrative)?, the green light carries him to the tunnel, and he is “launched on [his] journey” to an unknowable destination (CG, p. 37).

“Schwartz between the Galaxies” is less problematic in structure and in the form that anxiety takes. Schwartz is a anthropologist in a future where all cultures have blended to produce a single, homogenized planetary culture, and he is plagued by “too much of a sameness wherever I go” (Feast of St. Dionysus, [hereafter cited in text as FSD, p. 81). His professional response has been to call for a return to diversity, a “rebirth of tribalism,” an “ethnic revival” (FSD, p. 96); his personal response is to imagine himself, not in rocketliners and skyports, but aboard a starship filled with a diversity of lifeforms that reflect the variety and wonder of the universe. His dreamlike imaginings of the starship alternate with his experiences on a world lecture tour, and the dreams become stronger, until he gives himself to them entirely.

The triumph of dreamlife over reality is not a new theme, nor does the story offer any structural surprises or puzzles. It is the texture of the thing and the irony of Schwartz's situation that give it strength. This future, though apparently safe and prosperous, lacks the richness of detail that Schwartz needs; it is “a nugget of dead porcelain” (FSD, p. 79), smooth and featureless. Contrasted with this is the vision of plenitude contained by the starship—strange bodily forms, alien religions and philosophies, nearly-unintelligible categories (the Antarean whose gender is best defined as “not-male”). This is, literally, an anthropologist's dream, an opportunity to understand humanity by understanding the nonhuman; it also shows the connection between Schwartz's professional and personal anxieties: not only has he found his discipline without an object and himself “an evaluator of dry bones, not a gatherer of evidence” (FSD, p. 97), but the merging of all human cultures and races has robbed him of identity. In a world without distinct folkways and traditions, what can identity rest on other than the isolated individual? Schwartz holds to his Jewishness, but in trying to explain to his dream Antarean what that consists of, he eliminates theology, folkways, and character traits as applying to him. It is, then, that his parents were Jews, suggests the Antarean. No, Schwartz says, only his father, “and he was Jewish only on his father's side, but even my grandfather never observed the customs …” (FSD, p. 99). What this means is that Schwartz is not a Jew, at least according to matrilineal customs. Not only is his occupation gone, but his ethnic and cultural identity as well.

Schwartz is not just a disappointed academic, but a Wandering unJew, a man whose sense of self and place are threatened by a world which can offer him everything but a unique identity in a manageably small community which is itself a unit in a larger whole. The world-wide fame provided by the success of his book and his lecture tour (eighty million have heard him speak in one month) are not adequate substitutes, nor is the attempt to “find the primitive in himself” (FSD, p. 92) the same as being a primitive. The need represented by the dream of the starship is one for Stapledonian community, “Everyone joining hands and tentacles and tendrils and whatever, forming a great ring of light across space, creating union out of diversity while preserving diversity within union, everyone locked in a cosmic harmony, everyone dancing. Dancing. Dancing” (FSD, p. 104). His surrender to the dream is not so much a defeat (though as the world defines sanity, it must seem like catatonic withdrawal) as it is a sign of the depth of his need for identity in and with a community as a basis for living in and making sense of the universe.

“Breckenridge and the Continuum” is similar to “Schwartz” in structure (alternating scenes of mundane and visionary experience) and theme (the dissatisfied man finds himself in an exotic new environment that offers satisfactions unavailable in the mundane world), and seems to behave in a more conventionally science fictional manner. Breckenridge's complaint is more like that of the narrator of “The Science Fiction Hall of Fame” than that of Schwartz—“Life,” he says, “is empty, dumb, and mechanical”; he is “oppressed by a sophomoric sense of the meaninglessness of life” (CG, p. 61). At a dinner party, while a “famous anthropologist” speaks of the importance of myth as “an everlasting pattern which can be detected in the present,” and a woman at the table begins to recite Henry Vaughan's “The World,” Breckenridge feels ill and heads for the washroom. Instead, he finds himself facing first a prehistoric jungle, then a desert, and a voice tells him, “You have come to the place where all times are one, where all errors can be unmade, where past and future are fluid and subject to redefinition” (CG, pp. 69-70). It is not Vaughan's place outside Time, but a future desert through which Breckenridge and four companions journey to examine a long-dead city; this future milieu, and not the “real” present, contains the story's main line, the process by which Breckenridge becomes mythmaker and reviver of the sleeping inhabitants of the city. The myths begin as jumbled versions of our myths and fairy tales (“Oedipus, King of Thieves”), told to amuse his companions, but as the city comes to life, these fractured tales begin to form a coherent cycle, a “master myth” (CG, p. 80). In a dream Breckenridge learns how to bring the city fully to life; the sleepers awake; rain falls and the desert grows green. Breckenridge achieves his apotheosis; linking himself with Christ, Orpheus, and Homer, he can affirm that “‘There's meaning everywhere. … Dawn after dawn, simply being alive, being part of it all, part of the cosmic dance of life …’” (CG, p. 83). Finally, surrounded by his audience/congregation, “he experiences a delicious flash of white light. The world disappears” (CG, p. 83).

This affirmation-and-apotheosis climax is familiar from other Silverberg stories, but here it is distanced by a device that emphasizes the fictiveness of the narrative: two sections beginning, respectively, “Some possible structural hypotheses” and “Hypotheses of structural resolution” (CG, pp. 78, 80). The material in these sections offers the basics for a reading of the story that accounts for the main elements (Breckenridge, the four seekers, the city) and the themes they can be used to illustrate (LIFE AS A MEANINGLESS CONDITION, LIFE RENDERED MEANINGFUL THROUGH ART, THE IMPACT OF ENTROPY, ASPECTS OF CONSCIOUSNESS—CG, pp. 78–79). The “resolution” section suggests that renewal is the point of the story, and the next three sections go on to show Breckenridge's affirmation and apotheosis. The story's final section, however, seems to qualify what has gone before. First, it confuses the sense of neat alteration between the mundane and visionary parts of the story by showing Breckenridge on his way to JFK Airport (after his disappearance from the desert city?). He makes his way to the Sahara after sending a cable that says he is “VERY HAPPY STOP YES STOP VERY HAPPY STOP VERY VERY HAPPY STOP STOP STOP” (CG, p. 84) and is never heard from again. That night there are signs and portents, including an aurora over New York and rain in the Sahara—two phenomena associated with the desert city and its rebirth. What are we to make of this? Did any of the future part of the story really take place (i.e., is it sf?), or was it, like Schwartz's starship, a wish-fulfillment dream? I suspect that, as in the case of “The Science Fiction Hall of Fame,” the ambiguity is intentional, and that both stories abandon the representational mode common to sf (recall that for Heinlein sf is a branch of realistic fiction) in order to emphasize the literariness, the fictiveness of the form. The fact that both stories are thematically involved with the relationship between literature and anxiety—whether fiction is a symptom of or cure for anxiety—reinforces this possiblity. In these stories Silverberg pushes not only theme but form as well away from the traditional center of sf toward the reflexiveness of modernist fiction.

The novels are formally, if not thematically, closer to traditional sf models: there is rarely any doubt about whether an experience is real or not, and never the degree of structural disruption found in the shorter pieces. What there is, as I said above, is a weakening of the focus on process that characterizes so much American sf, and a foregrounding of the spiritual or psychological situation of the main character. Every novel since To Open the Sky begins with or works the protagonist into a state of anxiety.⁷ Minner Burris (Thorns) and Muller (The Man in the Maze) have been physically re-engineered by inscrutable aliens, with attendant psychic distress; Gunderson (Downward to the Earth) is guilt-haunted and desirous of penance; Wuellig the Watcher (Nightwings) and Reynolds Kirby (To Open the Sky) face crises of religious faith; and so on. These various guilts, uncertainties, pains, anxieties, and emptinesses are not practical problems, to be solved or resolved by the application of appropriate scientific or technical knowledge; nor are they simple ethical, moral, or psychological problems awaiting the touch of the right philosophical, theological, or therapeutic system to make things right.⁸ They resist rational and, frequently, irrational solutions alike. And despite the frequency of messianic endings, in which pain is ended for the protagonist and salvation promised for all others who want it, the bulk of Silverberg's fiction, of all lengths, since 1962 has offered, at best, qualified solutions to the pains of existence.

The Stochastic Man offers an interesting and difficult version of the qualified solution. Where novels such as The Masks of Time, To Open the Sky, and The Man in the Maze contain internally qualified or ironic resolutions, The Stochastic Man seems to bring its protagonist to a peaceful equilibrium at its close: Nichols has weathered his doubts about seeing the future, has survived the loss of his wife and his ambitions for political influence, and has apparently found a way to accept the unfreedom of a deterministic universe without becoming a zombie as his guru Carvajal had. But this acceptance of determinism is troublesome for the audience this book is likely to have—we are taught to value even the illusion of freedom, sometimes more than life itself, and this book inverts that value structure by insisting that, if we accept its vision,

We will see, we will understand, we will accept the inevitability of the inevitable, we will accept every turn of the script gladly and without regret. There will be no surprises; therefore there will be no pain. We will live in beauty, knowing that we are aspects of the one great Plan.⁹

That Silverberg goes this far from Western solutions, I think, is a measure of the depth of the anxiety he seeks to portray. It is, in its way, more frightening than the nightmare of “The Science Fiction Hall of Fame.”

What drives Nichols to embrace the static certainties of Carvajal's vision is a dialectical progress from his worst fears that the universe is random (which he characterizes as “adolescent cynicism”—The Stochastic Man, hereafter cited as TSM, p. 6), through a faith in cause and effect and stochasticity, to the complete security of his faith in a determined universe. It is this movement from fear of the “gigantic dice game, without purpose or pattern” (TSM, p. 5), to the safety of a “fully structured, fully determined life” (TSM, p. 138) that provides the action of the book, rather than an examination of how seeing works or why the paradoxes inherent in such a process do not apply. (In fact, Nichols admits that there are paradoxes, but he “prefer[s] not to examine them too closely”—TSM, p. 157.) Metaphysical questions, epistemological problems—all the usual concerns of philosophical inquiry—are as irrelevant as the science fictional curiosity about process. What matters here is not How or even Why; the script is beyond intellectual understanding. Only human accommodation to the script matters. Nichols's story is one of the triumph of faith over stubborn intellect and will, of the realization that freedom (dangerous in a causal universe, meaningless in a random one) is illusory and only the fixed script is real.

There are other attitudes, other ways of seeing the world presented as foils. The Transit creed that captures the belief of Nichols's wife Sundara is a combination of Eastern ego-renunciation and existentialist radical freedom: in a chaotic, impermanent universe, the way to shed the self and the pains of existence is to yield to the flow of change,

… because nothing is unbendingly foreordained, everything is within our individual control. We are the existential shapers of our destinies, and we are free to grasp the Truth and act on it. What is the Truth? That we must discard our rigidly conceived self-images. … (TSM, p. 76)

Nichols, of course, is “not comfortable with chaos” (TSM, p. 77), and resists the Transit invitation to get off the wheel their way.

The politician, Paul Quinn, on the other hand, is a traditional Western man, determined to impose his will on the world, to create himself by his own efforts. He is, predictably, frightened by Nichols's gift and by the fixed future it implies. Although he is not threatened by Transit, his ambition (an ego attachment) makes him quite unlike them. He has no desire at all to get off the wheel, although he would probably accept the Transit notion of the power of the will to make the self, to control personal destiny. If Sundara is will attempting to shed ego in a chaotically fluid universe, Quinn is ego imposing its will on whatever universe is pliant enough to allow that to happen.

Carvajal is nothing at all. He has given up will and ego and curiosity in his acceptance of the script. There is for him no place for the questions or assertions of any aspect of the self; the future is fixed, and he has seen it, and questions of why and whether, of meaning, simply do not apply. “The script,” he says, “admits of nothing other than acceptance” (TSM, p. 100). Nichols's reaction to this “deterministic existential passivity” is not simple. He is repelled by the passivity but attracted by the peace it promises: “How comforting it might be, I thought, to live in a world free of all uncertainty” (TSM, p. 101). In the end, his own response to the gift of seeing is quite different from Carvajal's.

What Nichols settles on is a messianic version of Carvajal's acceptance of the unchangeable script. Rather than allowing himself to be eaten up by the vision of his own death, he will attempt to share the gift with others, until we are all as gods, serene in our knowledge of things as they must be. I doubt that many readers are able to accept Nichols's solution to the problems of making sense of the world—I can't, for one, although I can understand the forces that drive him to seek it. This puts the whole book in a curious position—internally (and science fictionally) it works as a hypothetical solution to real problems. If the universe were deterministic, and if one could develop the ability to see the patterns, then Lew Nichols's story is no more unlikely than that of Edmund Gunderson in Downward to the Earth, and the healing of spiritual ills no less acceptable. But for an audience strongly conditioned to believe in a free, probabilist universe, the ending is no more satisfying than that of “The Science Fiction Hall of Fame.”¹⁰ Lew Nichols has found a resting place, a faith; Silverberg's readers may find themselves so distanced from the content of the solution that it seems no better than the fear of chaos that it is a response to.

Silverberg has presented us with other, less alien resolutions, but none that seems final; his fiction does not add up to an answer but to a set of questions and a willingness to explore. What remains constant is the pain. To read his fiction is to face that pain over and over, sometimes finding a momentary stay, more often not. The publication of Shadrach in the Furnace, followed by Silverberg's retirement from writing, does not put a period to the search, only an ellipsis. The experience of reading Silverberg is like that of Tom Two Ribbons in “Sundance”: “… you are searching for realities. It is not an easy search. It is like falling through many trapdoors, looking for the one room whose floor is not hinged.”

Notes

1. I am not sure what Darko Suvin would say about this, though—see “On What Is and Is Not an SF Narration: With a List of 101 Victorian Books That Should Be Excluded From SF Bibliographies,” Science-Fiction Studies 5 (March 1978), 45-57. See also Stanislaw Lem's review of A Time of Changes, “Only a Fairy Tale,” SF Commentary 52, pp. 8-9.

2. To Open the Sky is the novel that marks Silverberg's departure from process-oriented sf; see my “Introduction” to the Gregg Press reprint of that novel (Boston: Gregg Press, 1977).

3. Robert Silverberg, “Sounding Brass, Tinkling Cymbal,” in Hell's Cartographers, ed. Brain Aldiss and Harry Harrison (1975; rpt. London: Futura Publications, 1976), p. 40.

4. “The Present Age,” in Irrational Man (1958): rpt. New York: Anchor Books, 1962), pp. 3-68.

5. Barrett, p. 36.

6. “Schwartz between the Galaxies” appears in The Feast of St. Dionysus (New York: Scribners, 1975), hereafter cited in the text as FSD; “Breckenridge and the Continuum” and “The Science Fiction Hall of Fame” appear in Capricorn Games (New York: Random House, 1976), hereafter cited in the text as CG.

7. I would argue that even the dystopian The World Inside deals with the failure of a planned and prosperous society to satisfy all human needs, though the slant taken is psychological; environmental rather than philosophical/existential. And the picaresque Up the Line contains a strain of sexual obsession that is a comic modulation of the sexual obsessions of “In the Group” or “Born with the Dead.”

8. For this reason, readings of individual works that lean on established ideological/moral philosophical/therapeutic systems are in danger of missing the stubbornness of the anxieties Silverberg portrays. For example, George W. Tuma's “Biblical Myth and Legend in Tower of Glass: Man's Search for Authenticity” in Extrapolation 15 (May 1974), 174-91, does a fine job of outlining the book's issues, but in its reliance on a Christian existentialist point of view, it reads into the book an affirmation I find doubtful.

9. The Stochastic Man (1975: rpt. Greenwich, CN: Fawcett Gold Medal, 1976), p. 240. Hereafter cited in the text as TSM.

10. If there is any doubt as to the possibility of such externals interfering with acceptance of the book's resolution, see two reviews: Spider Robinson in “Galaxy Bookshelf,” Galaxy (May 1976), pp. 114-16; and Pauline Jones, “Son of Towering Inferno,” Foundation 10 (June 1976), 93-96. Both reviewers clearly have trouble accepting the book's determinist ideas despite admiration for other aspects of it.