To Be Continued (the title of a story herein, but also a cautious assertion) contains two dozen stories produced during the first six years of Silverberg's professional career: 1953-1958. These represent the merest fraction of what the ultra-prolific young lad wrote back then (he debuted at age 18) and have been chosen, for the most part, due to their above-average quality when compared to the rest of Silverberg's hurried but always competent output of this era. Indeed, there are no stinkers here, all of the stories remaining eminently readable some five decades after their initial appearances, albeit sounding old-fashioned at times. A few items are admittedly slight ("The Silent Colony," a short-short about sentient snowflakes!) but are deliberately placed as representative of certain modes that Silverberg employed back then. All the stories are buttressed by very illuminating autobiographical front matter from their author.

Let's look at some of the standouts. (The stories appear in order of original publication, charting Silverberg's early career very precisely.)

Although not a real winner, "Gorgon Planet" was Silverberg's first sale and so forms a valuable landmark as the opening entry. A nice little kicker of a closing line complements a robust adventure tale. The very next piece, "The Road to Nightfall," finds Silverberg already intent on stretching the boundaries of magazine SF of the period to produce a grim tale of a world worn down by war to merciless cannibalism.

Inspired by Faulkner, "The Songs of Summer" experiments with multiple viewpoints to tell the tale of a "primitive" human from our era thrust forward into a utopian future. "Collecting Team" strands a ship full of humans in what amounts to an interstellar zoo. And "A Man of Talent" places poet Emil Vilar unwittingly among his perfect audience.

Working in almost a Hal Clement style, Silverberg delivers astronomy-based frissons in "Sunrise on Mercury." Adapting the manners of Jack Vance produced "World of a Thousand Colors," about a murderer who faces exposure in a cosmic contest. Psychic vampirism is the topic of "Warm Man," while another kind of mutant power is on display in "The Man Who Never Forgot."

"The Iron Chancellor," about a robot chef running amok, was inspired by the work of Henry Kuttner, while "Ozymandias"—about an alien robot that bears the seeds of humanity's doom—seems to me a bit Simakian. Finally, "Counterpart" ventures into the realm of futuristic innovations in live theater in the manner of Walter Miller.

Welcome to a space-age bachelor pad

Robert Silverberg's long career has truly been majestic, exemplary, edifying and emblematic. Surveying all his novels would provide a map of everywhere the genre has been over the past five decades. But in lieu of such a massive reading project, sampling his short fiction will produce the same result. This project to collect the best of his short fiction charts not only the arc of his personal career, but also that of SF at large.

So, what do we learn on both levels from this opening salvo? On the microcosmic level, we get to watch the young Silverberg stretch his talents as he both embraces the parameters of his chosen field and chafes at its limits. We get to see the themes and topics and techniques that he would employ in his mature career in their earliest incarnations. For instance, the memory-imprinting technology of "Counterpart" reaches ultimate fruition years later in To Live Again (1969). As Silverberg himself points out, "The Man Who Never Forgot" presages in a tangential way the great Dying Inside (1972). The alien love affair of "One Way Journey" looks forward to Downward to the Earth (1969). The we-speaking alien of "Alaree," who cannot conceive of the concept of "I," reminds us of A Time of Changes (1971). And so forth.

So, aside from the sheer narrative pleasure still to be derived from these well-crafted tales, we can, as scholars, use them to bolster our understanding of the core concerns that drove Silverberg's fictions.

On the macroscopic level, these stories are a time capsule of the concerns and methods of magazine SF of the 1950s. Thanks additionally to Silverberg's generous anecdotal recollections, we can return to a bygone era of our genre and see the roots of contemporary SF more clearly. And what a fertile, productive period it was. Silverberg, along with young peers such as Budrys, Sheckley and Dick, represented a fresh generation of writers ready to move SF into newer, more sophisticated realms. It seems unlikely to me that many ostensibly straightforward stories of an earlier period would have come complete with references to Proust and Kafka, for instance, as we find in the mind-blowing "There Was an Old Woman," with its depiction of 31 clones and their struggle for self-fulfillment.

College-educated, ambitious, having assimilated a generation or three of past SF landmarks, Silverberg and his peers were intent on engineering a quiet revolution in the field they loved. And how well they succeeded. Our current literary landscape would be unimaginable without the existence of these stories.