Campbell insisted on reading it while we waited at his desk—all 15,000 words of it—but though he scowled and clenched his teeth from time to time, we knew we were safe when he made a small pencilled editorial change midway through the story, and he accepted it on the spot without requiring, as he had for the first story, any minor revisions.
Three months later we brought him "False Prophet"—the "Norvis" section of The Shrouded Planet. Campbell bought that too; but when we told him that we thought one more novelet of about 15,000 words would conclude the series, that diabolical editor sprang on us a surprise that I think he had been saving all along. He had seen what we could do at shorter lengths, and the three stories on hand would build reader interest nicely when he began publishing them a few months hence. Now, he said, we should end the series with a novel—a three-part serial, as we had originally intended!
I was now in my senior year at Columbia, and, though I was still managing to write short stories both on my own and with Garrett at a rate of three or four a month, a novel meant sustained effort of the sort I could not then find time to do. So we had to wait until the summer, after my graduation; and in August of 1956, in nine days of the most concentrated and exhausting work imaginable, we produced the 67,000-word novel The Dawning Light, writing in relays round the clock, sleeping when we could, one of us pounding out the first draft and the other revising it to final copy. We lurched down to Campbell with the manuscript, he read it with his usual promptness, and the check—my share was an enormous $904.50—arrived a few days later, just in time to pay for my honeymoon and the first month's rent on the apartment my bride and I had found on Manhattan's Upper*West Side. I was 21 years old then, and, I think, the youngest writer ever to have a novel published in Campbell's magazine.
By then the first stories in the series had been published. They were popular with the magazine's readers, and shortly we had an offer from a book publisher—Gnome Press, a semi-professional outfit that by dint of its early arrival in the field had managed to acquire rights to the best works of Asimov, Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke, Simak, Leiber, and other major writers. Gnome offered only a pittance, but that hardly mattered, considering the company we'd be keeping and the royalties we imagined would arrive over the years. We assembled the three novelets, along with some introductory and connective matter, into The Shrouded Planet, which was published in 1957; The Dawning Light, almost unchanged from its magazine version, followed in 1959. For a time we thought we would continue the series into a third volume, and we actually wrote one lengthy section, "All The King's Horses," in 1957, but for various reasons we never went beyond that point.
The Gnome Press books went out of print after a few years and are now rarities, and neither of the Robert Randall novels has been published again until this time. I confess that I was not very eager to see them come back into print, for I remember how cynically we went about the business of cooking up a story that would appeal to John Campbell, and how quickly the books were written, and how young and unseasoned we both were as writers. But as I look at them now I can see not only their obvious faults but also their virtues, virtues which made the stories popular in their own time and which justify editor Hank Stine's faith in reprinting them now. The books are not in the same class with Garrett's fine later works—his Lord Darcy stories, for example—or, say, my own Dying Inside or Night-wings. But why should they be? Those are the products of skilled writers long at their trade; The Shrouded Planet and The Dawning Light are the less assured, less accomplished work of young men. That much allowance must be made for them. But, taken on their own terms, the books are fun. I think cagey old John W. Campbell knew what he was doing, when he turned our wily outline topsy-turvy and told us to go home and write a series of novelets from the viewpoint of the aliens.
—Robert Silverberg
Book information
THE SHROUDED PLANET
Copyright © 1957 by Robert Silverberg & Randall Garrett
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review, without permission in writing from the publisher.
All characters in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
An ACE Book
ISBN: 0-441-76219-0
First Ace printing: September 1982
Published simultaneously in Canada
Manufactured in the United States of America