The Best of Robert Silverberg: Stories of Six Decades

This well-chosen retrospective, which adds three stories to the 2004 limited-edition collection Phases of the Moon, spans 56 years of SFWA Grand Master Silverberg’s writing life, starting in his early career with 1954’s “The Road to Nightfall” and ending with 2010’s “The Prisoner.” In 26 elegantly conceived and written stories, protagonists travel through time, philosophize, question their morals and faith, and pursue unknowable, elusive women. The narrator of “Nightwings” endures a crisis of faith over his order’s age-old vigil against alien invasion. In “The Far Side of the Bell-Shaped Curve” a time traveler tries to manipulate his time line to keep the woman he desires. A bereaved husband in “Born with the Dead” pursues his wife beyond death to her very peculiar afterlife. Francisco Pizarro and Socrates engage in a battle of wits in “Enter a Soldier. Later, Enter Another.” Thanks to Silverberg’s commentary on each decade and story—wry, candid, and unencumbered by false modesty—the anthology also functions as a memoir of a great career in genre literature. (Dec.)