So most of the great Fifties sf writers went silent, for periods short or long. They found other work, or became very poor. Many left the field and only came back years later, if at all. Even the prodigious Asimov left, for non-fiction and teaching. Only Philip K. Dick of all that generation powered on through this period, but he published a great deal of nonsense at high speed, and collapsed eventually under the strain; and all along he exhibited what his biographer calls “hypergraphia,” a useful disease for a writer, perhaps, but part of a suite of disorders ranging from drug use to paranoia to something like epilepsy, and a fatal stroke at age fifty-one.
So this was a very, very difficult time. Later generations of science fiction writers, appearing in a world full of enthusiastic readers, money, academic interest and general acclaim, can have no idea. In essence the generation of the 1950s broke down a ghetto wall with their foreheads, creating the open field that followed — even the world view that followed — for the younger generation to party in. It is not a debt that can be repaid, but it can be acknowledged.
Silverberg, however, being a strong-willed and practical man, confronted by this situation, was not going to break his pate or cry in his beer. He took a route more like Asimov’s than Dick’s, and turned to non-fiction. He wrote mostly for younger readers, and most of his books concerned history or prehistory. He became a figure quite like Metaxas in Up the Line; an ever-more skillful guide to the past, showing young clients the fascinations of history both natural and human, working like Metaxas from the refuge of a palatial mansion. In these years he published books on underwater archeology, archeological hoaxes, lost cities and vanished civilizations, living fossils, El Dorado, the Great Wall of China, and other, mostly historical, subjects. Perhaps there was a book on Byzantium in there as well. In any case, he made himself a second career as a guide to the past, and in the process he also discovered that scholarship was a craft like any other, open to anyone willing to learn the methods and do the work; it was not something confined to the esoteric worlds of the academy. To his repertory of writing skills he added those of a practicing scholar.
Meanwhile, science fiction had been changing yet again. The generation of the Sixties was arriving, and along with it all the radical social developments of that turbulent decade. Many of the new stars in science fiction were about Silverberg’s age or just a bit younger, and they were energetically using all the time-worn tropes of science fiction to “express themselves” as it was then said, in what was a characteristic Sixties act, but also a crucial aspect of art. Silverberg, no longer compelled by financial necessity to crank out fiction as fast as possible, returned to his first love, his hometown, at his own pace and on his own program. The tenor of the times influenced him, inspired him, and, as he put it, he “joined the revolution.” This was no immediate conversion, but the natural process of growth of an ambitious writer, who, after all, despite all that had already happened, was still only thirty years old, an age when many writers are just beginning; and really, at about the age when people have lived enough to have new things to say. Inevitably these life experiences include bad things as well as good, and some of the bad things have powerful lessons in them. So, despite his great energy, and his smooth negotiation of the professional troubles of his time, Silverberg was not immune to things like illnesses, or his house burning down (no doubt influencing the wistful descriptions of Metaxas’s lovely home in Up the Line), or troubles in relationships to people and places.
In any case, his mid-Sixties novel Thorns marked the rise to a new level in his work, wherein he too began to use the tropes and devices of science fiction to express what his life felt like to him during those crazy years. Up the Line comes from a few years later, written in 1968, in the middle of the craziness. Thus the particular intensity of the book, which could have been a light crossword puzzle kind of thing, but is not. Thus Metaxas, with his palatial home tucked away in a private place and time, and his highly-honed ability to present the past to his clients. He stands for a Silverberg from just a year or two before; but significantly, our protagonist Jud Elliott can only aspire to Metaxas’s happy state, and Jud’s attempts to achieve a similar situation go spectacularly awry. Things going wrong: this novel is a comedy, and it is funny, but it is one of those black comedies where things go wrong and then the more the protagonist tries to fix them the more wrong they become, until the ending is at one and the same time an O. Henry-style punchline and a deep existential truth, neat as a pin and just as sharp.
There is, in other words, a kind of grimness to all this hilarity, that has to do with Silverberg’s loss of his house, and the general tenor of the times. This painful comedy extends even to the “bawdy” material of Jud’s hunt for sex or love, which after all occupies so much of the text. That this hunt gets mixed up with Jud’s genealogical interests is one way of suggesting that he needs some kind of meaning to attend the matter; and indeed, he makes the classic discovery that “sex with love is better than sex without love.” All well and good — but the point is significantly vitiated by the fact that he knows his Pulcheria no better than the rest of the women he has bedded, and his love for her has been sparked, as he himself admits, by her pulchritude. As good a start as any to a relationship, no doubt, but more is required for such a thing to last. Jud never has the chance to learn the elementary lesson that good-looking people are not universally good; indeed it costs many of us painful years of experience to learn that. Whether this also pertains to Silverberg’s life at that time, is not the job of an introduction to say: but those were very wild years, years of “free love” and “sexual revolution,” and Silverberg married young, divorced, and only years later ended up with his true partner: so it may not be venturing too much beyond the public facts to suggest that when the guru in the text says to the protagonist, “You aren’t real. Believe me. Believe me. You’re your own ghost. Pack up and clear out!” there is a particular edge and force to the observation, only accentuated by the startling chill of the final line.
So — enjoy this technically adroit and heartfelt comedy, of course! But watch out you don’t find yourself confronting another version of yourself, in a dark hallway in Byzantium, arguing which one of you is real, and how you can get out of the mess you have gotten yourself into.
— Kim Stanley Robinson
December 4, 2001