Something Wild is Loose: 1969-72 (The Collected Stories of Robert Silverberg, Volume 3)
Robert Silverberg
Language: English
Pages: 345
ISBN: 2:00108056
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
"The world that these stories sprang from was the troubled, bewildering, dangerous, and very exciting world of those weird years when the barriers were down and the future was rushing into the present with the force of a river unleashed. But of course I think these stories speak to our times, too, and that most of them will remain valid as we go staggering onward through the brave new world of the twenty-first century. I am not one of those who believes that all is lost and the end is nigh. Like William Faulkner, I do think we will somehow endure and prevail against increasingly stiff odds.
"A great many strange and dizzying things happen to the characters in these sixteen stories, and in the fourteen stories of the 1972-73 volume that will follow. The reader who makes the journey from beginning to end of all thirty stories will be taken on many a curious trip, that I promise -- as was their author during the years when they were being written."
--Robert Silverberg, from the Introduction
stand a much better chance of still being the dominant inhabitants fifty thousand years from now. ~ The planet cleanses itself. That is the important thing to remember, at moments when we become too pleased with ourselves. The healing process is a natural and inevitable one. The action of the wind and the rain, the ebbing and flowing of the tides, the vigorous rivers flushing out the choked and stinking lakes—these are all natural rhythms, all healthy manifestations of universal harmony. Of
maybe you ought to go to the infirmary.” “Excuse me,” Skein says hoarsely, and leaves the lounge. When the hallucinations began, not long after the Coustakis overload, he assumed at first that they were memory disturbances produced by the fearful jolt he had absorbed. Quite clearly most of them involved scenes of his past, which he would relive, during the moments of fugue, with an intensity so brilliant that he felt he had actually been thrust back into time. He did not merely recollect, but
strands of the alien’s jellylike substance are wound around the man’s body. He recognizes the man to be John Skein. The communion in the pit ends; the man begins to clamber from the pit. The wind is rising. The sand, blown aloft, stains the sky grey. Patiently he watches his younger self struggling up from the pit. Now he understands. The circuit is closed; the knot is tied; the identity loop is complete. He is destined to spend many years on Abbondanza VI, growing ancient and withered. He is the
privilege of delivering a little analysis, too. Do you know what the real trouble with you is? With your music, with your soul, with everything? You don’t suffer. You’ve never been touched by pain, or, if you have, it doesn’t sink in. Look, you’re forty years old, and you’ve never known anything but success, and your music is played everywhere, an incredible achievement for a living composer, and you could pass for thirty. Or even twenty-seven. Time doesn’t claw you. I don’t recommend suffering,
Miss Elliot said that the Hopi, doing their annual snake dances on their mesas far to the north, had overdone things this year and sent rain clouds all through the state. Staunt, to the horror of the staff, went out each day to stand in the rain, letting the cool drops soak his thin gown, watching the water sink swiftly into the parched red soil. “You’ll catch your death of cold,” Mr. Falkenbridge told him sternly. Staunt laughed. He requested another wide-spaced print-out of The New Inn and