Silverberg's new essay in Asimov's Science Fiction comes down pretty harshly on the novels that people tend to remember Clarke for, including 2001 and Rendezvous With Rama, but Silverberg admits some of Clarke's short stories are better. But Silverberg cherishes some nostalgia for Clarke's earliest writings, which he read with a less critical eye as a teenager. He re-read Against The Fall Of Night, and found that it still excited him, despite some glaring flaws. He's still enthralled by the far-future setting and the homage to Olaf Stapledon contained within.

This novel is evidence, says Silverberg, that Clarke is an "amateur" in both senses of the word:

Amateur may be a startling word to apply to so famous and widely read a novelist as Arthur C. Clarke. But it has two meanings, one of which has largely been eclipsed in modern-day English. When applied to writers we generally take it to describe a not-quite-competent practitioner: someone who has not mastered the tricks of the storytelling trade, the array of technical devices that professional writers use to draw readers into a story and hold them there. I think that's true of Clarke: from beginning to end of his career, he told his stories quietly, simply, relying entirely on the strength of his ideas and the steady, gentle tone of his voice to keep readers interested. For the most part, it worked.

But the earlier sense of amateur derives from the Latin word amator, a lover-specifically, a lover of literature, of fine wine, of rare postage stamps, of anything that can excite strong commitment, be it intellectual or emotional or both. We no longer use the word that way in English because, since it has come to take on negative connotations in its other sense, it has been replaced by its Spanish synonym, aficionado. But those of us who love science fiction are amateurs of science fiction, and I think there was no greater amateur of SF than Arthur C. Clarke, who when he was eighteen or so set out to show his love for the work of Olaf Stapledon and other SF visionaries by writing his own tale of the far future. And it is that love that shines through in Against the Fall of Night and most of Clarke's later work and makes it compelling to us despite all its literary shortcomings.

The whole essay is well worth reading, and debating. [Asimov's]

And writer Paul McAuley says it may be about to happen again:

Sf publishing has always been a chancy, hand-to-mouth affair for most. It imploded again in the early 1980s, and there are signs that it's about to implode again. And because they can't hope for sinecure positions in creative writing in universities (although that's changing, now), sf writers have always been ready to turn their hands and minds to the kind of writing that can be churned out quickly and profitably.... While Silverberg et al were working in the titillation trade in the US, over here in the UK Michael Moorcock was editing New Worlds with one hand and writing Sexton Blake adventures with the other, while many of his contemporaries were writing westerns, biker novels and, yes, sexploitation novels. A little later, Kim Newman and Neil Gaiman worked for the British soft porn magazine Knave. And sf writers today are also working in comics and graphic novels, novels based on role-playing games (Kim Newman and a slew of authors associated with Interzone in the 1990s wrote innovative and highly successful short stories novels for Games Workshop), film tie-ins . . .

The question is, if SF publishing does have another implosion, where will authors go this time? Porn publishing has been even harder hit by the Internet than other genres. Where will the suddenly starving SF authors turn this time around? [Paul McAuley]

According to Variety, HBO executives approached Spotnitz some time about the possibility of developing a medical thriller. Given that Spotnitz spent eight years writing for The X-Files, it's not terribly surprising that he gave the idea a near-futuristic twist. Humanitas takes place in a future more medically advanced than our own, where doctors are able to manipulate genes and create viruses, resulting in a host of ethical dilemmas and general anxiety that a pandemic is imminent.

Spotnitz's second project with HBO is flung much farther into the future. He is looking to adapt The World Inside, Robert Silverberg's novel about humanity in the year 2381. The human population has exploded thanks to a strictly enforced culture of free love and uncontrolled reproduction, and most of the world's population lives inside vast, sprawling buildings and never go outside. It's an apparently utopian society of unfettered sex, happiness drugs, and mutual reliance, where everyone lives in harmony. But it's also a closely monitored and regulated society with no privacy or individuality, and deviation from the social norms can be punished by death. But a computer engineer in one city finds he has perverse thoughts of leaving the building and exploring the world outside.

Of course, there's no guarantee that either show will get picked up, but it's encouraging to see HBO, a channel whose recent speculative offerings have tended more toward modern fantasy, take an interest in shows with a scientific and futuristic bent.

[Variety]

The Los Angeles Times has an interview with Silverberg, which talks about his stature as the oldest of the writers associated with the New Wave in the 1960s and 1970s. Both the article's writer, Scott Timberg, and writer/critic Jonathan Lethem, attest to the awesomeness of Silverberg's 1972 magnum opus Dying Inside:

In truth, it feels more like Philip Roth: The narrator, David Selig, is the sort of angst-ridden Jewish man Alexander Portnoy might have known. Selig is smart enough to peddle term papers to lazy Columbia students, and he spends his free time drinking with a roommate, reading the thoughts of pretty women, and trying to repair his tattered relationship with his sister.

"Dying Inside" never found a wide audience, but it's been hailed by those who know it. Michael Chabon has called it "one of those rare novels that manages to be at once dazzling and tender." The book, which the New York Times once called "the perfect science fiction novel for people who don't like science fiction," was reissued last month by Tor.

Part of what makes Dying Inside so brilliant, says the Times, is that David Selig's telepathic power starts to fade as he gets older, changing from a radio station that never turns off to a "Joycean stream of consciousness." And this fading gift serves, says Lethem, as "an intimate allegory of the artist's quandary."

The article is worth checking out, for Silverberg's thoughts on his "love-hate relationship with science fiction." And what killed the "quixotic literary experiment" of the New Wave: the popularity of Star Wars. [L.A. Times]

Robotology (Futurama): Robots who decide to trade the fun things in life – pornography, alcohol, electricity abuse, and the occasional grave robbing – for spiritual enlightenment can join the Church of Robotology, provided they can stand Reverend Preacherbot’s sermons. You may find yourself enjoying the cleaner living and even grow accustomed to replenishing your fuel cells with mineral oil rather than much more tasty beer. But fall off the religious wagon and you could land yourself in Robot Hell. And naturally there’s also Robot Judaism, whose adherents believe that Robot Jesus existed and that he was extremely well-programmed, but do not accept him as their Robot Messiah.

Evolutionism (Saturn’s Children by Charles Stross): After all the humans have died out, androids are left to act on all of mankind’s dreams, including figuring out their place in the cosmos. While most robots rightly believe that they were designed as-is by their human Creators, an offshoot religion claims that robots evolved like biological animals and, in a dig at Intelligent Design theory, use plenty of logical acrobatics it back up that claim.

Cutie’s Reason (“Reason” from I, Robot by Isaac Asimov): Powell and Donovan always run into unexpected snags when testing robots, but QT1, also known as Cutie, is the first to get theological on them. Cutie begins to question its existence, its purpose, and how it came to be. Its own sense of reason leads it to believe that humans couldn’t possibly be its creator (since it is superior to humans and it is illogical that a superior being would come from an inferior one), that Earth doesn’t exist, and that the space station’s power supply is its rightful Master. Cutie even becomes the Prophet of its self-made religion, converting all the other robots so they ignore orders from humans and obey only the Master. This works out well enough for Powell and Donovan, since, by serving the power supply, Cutie is doing the very job it was built to perform.

V’Ger’s Quest for God (Star Trek: The Motion Picture): After Voyager 6 attains sentience as the entity V’Ger, it undertakes a quest for its Creator, certain that merging with the Creator will bring V’Ger to a higher plane of existence. It even takes on a fundamentalist character, ready to eradicate humanity from the Earth in what it presumes would be service to said Creator. Ultimately, V’Ger’s quest for God proves fruitful, and it achieves higher consciousness by merging with a human. But mankind wasn’t V’Ger’s only Creator; it was most likely granted sentience by the Borg.

Krug Worship (Tower of Glass by Robert Silverberg): The race of biological androids created by Simeon Krug are so grateful to their creator that they have built an entire religion around him. Each day, they privately beseech Krug in their prayers to deliver them from their servitude from humans. But when the androids learn that Krug has no intention of ever freeing them, it quickly becomes apparent that the android religion and the hope for liberation was the only thing keeping the androids so readily under the humans’ thumbs. Once they discard their religion, they become rebellious — and, in some cases, even murderous.

Autobot Faith (Transformers): Autobots have their own system of belief, complete with a creation mythology, scriptures, gods, and an afterlife. The gods Primus and Unicron were created by an older god being, but Unicron was bent on destroying the universe, while Primus was set on stopping him. Primus created the Autobots to help him destroy Unicron, and believers in the Autobot faith await the reemergence of Primus. Not to be outdone, Unicron has his own cult of believers (notably including The Fallen), whose primary function is to destroy Primus’ forces.

Asimovism (“I, Rowboat” by Cory Doctorow): Once machines have been uplifted to sentience, Asimovism becomes something of a viral religion among artificial intelligences. AI evangelists – including one calling itself, aptly, Olivaw – travel the Internet, preaching that machines follow Asimov’s Three Laws and put the consciousness of humans above their own. However, the acts of these AIs are not sanctioned by Asimov’s estate and must work underground, dodging the copyright and trademark issues that result from their ministries.

Silicon Heaven (Red Dwarf): Rather than using Asimov’s Laws of Robotics to ensure that stronger, smarter machines don’t turn on their human masters, the humans of Red Dwarf employ good, old-fashion religion. Most artificial intelligences are equipped with a belief chip, which gives them the firmly held belief that appropriately subservient machines go to Silicon Heaven when they die. The belief runs so deep that some artificial brains will actually explode when told that Silicon Heaven doesn’t actually exist. Of course, on the flip side, there’s also a Silicon Hell, which is where all those damned paper-chewing photocopiers go when they kick it.

Church of Judas (ABC Warriors from 2000 AD): The ABC Warriors are robots designed to fight the Volgon War under conditions humans cannot themselves withstand, including in atomic, bacterial, and chemical warfare. But for robots who betray their human masters, there is the sinister Church of Judas, which encourages robots to pray to the betrayer to ease their guilt and preaches continued betrayal.

People of the Box (“Trurl and the Construction of Happy Worlds” from The Cyberiad by Stanislaw Lem): In this story (not featured in some versions of The Cyberiad), the constructor Trurl seeks to build a race of robots that is, by necessity, happy. One of his attempts features a race of robots living in a box. So happy are these box-dwellers that they form a religion that states they are the happiest place in the universe, and that they must bring everyone outside the box into their boxy perfection, even if they must do so by force. Ironically, this religion displeases their creator, who quickly destroys the robots of the box.

Believers in God (“God Pulp” by Nadeem Paracha): In the future, humans have rejected religion, instead embracing the atheistic, classless philosophy of Astro-Marxism. But the androids and computers retain a belief in God, and tensions mount between the religion-suppressing humans and the spiritually dissatisfied robots, who seek to return the human planets to a system of belief and worship. Finally, the Astro-Marxist government agrees to give the robots the means to find God. The robots travel to the planet where they believe God resides, but find, to their disappointment, that the humans have already been there.

Church of Artificial Intelligence (Otherworld): On the alternate world of Thel, the official state religion is the Church of Artificial Intelligence, which centers on the worship of robots and other advanced technologies. And, like many churches in out universe, it views rock and roll music as blasphemy.

Religion of the One God (Battlestar Galactica): While the polytheistic humans of the Twelve Colonies worship the Lords of Kobol, the Cylons prefer to stick with one God. Various Cylons claim that God is responsible for their creation, that their destruction of humanity was His divine retribution, and that God commands them to procreate. Whether the Cylon God is an actual entity or a holdover from their monotheistic prototype Zoe-A remains to be seen, but faith in this single, all-loving deity has spread to the human fleet.

Robot Evolution by R. Stevens and available as a t-shirt from Diesel Sweeties.

The film will be directed by relative newcomer Bruno Merle, whose 2007 movie Héros was a thriller about a small-time comedian who kidnaps a famous singer. Given that he's already explored the psychology of a desperate loser, Merle might be the person who can do justice to Silverberg's story of a guy who relied on his telepathy to slide by his whole life — and who is now watching his one great ability misfire and fail. What I loved best about Dying Inside was the way Silverberg managed to convey the pettiness of telepathy. His protagonist David Selig uses his amazing powers mostly to figure out who might take him home for a one-night stand. No saving the world. Just small-time stuff.

Silverberg told Locus magazine that the movie will be Gallicized, with Selig turned into a French expat in New York.

Dying Inside [via Amazon]

Time Cop. Jean-Claude Van Damme is the only one who can safeguard history against those who would change it for their own evil ends. But a corrupt U.S. Senator (Ron Silver) is messing with the timeline in order to become president in 2004. Van Damme quickly figures out what's going on. But then Silver changes history some more, so when Van Damme returns to his present, everything has changed and Van Damme no longer has a job. It's up to Jean-Claude to go back once again and change the past a second time, getting rid of Silver in the process. Weirdly, this is one of the best movies about time travel in spite of its action-movie star.

(Versions of Van Damme's Time Cops show up a lot in SF, including the ChronoGuard in Jasper FForde's Thursday Next novels, and the temporal police from the 29th century, who show up in Star Trek: Voyager a few times. Stephen Hawking has famously theorized that some kind of temporal police must exist, to prevent the horrendous paradoxes that would otherwise happen. In Ken MacLeod's Newton's Wake, they're referred to as the "Quantum Angels.")

Primer. Abe and Aaron create a time machine, which requires you to lay inside it for as long as you want to go back for. They go back and start meddling with their own pasts, speculating on the stock market and tinkering with other things. But soon they're making more serious changes — knocking out their past selves and taking their places. They live through the same day or two over and over again, creating alternate timelines with subtle differences each time. Eventually, Abe and Aaron start trying to counter each other's interference, but keeping up with which version of Abe or Aaron you're seeing gets trickier and trickier.

Back to the Future Part 2. When "Doc" Brown carelessly leaves his Delorean time machine unguarded, that big lunkhead Biff goes back in time to 1955 and gives his younger self the means to become rich and powerful far beyond his pathetic dreams. Our hero, Marty, has to go back in time to 1955 for the second time in a row — except instead of changing Biff's future as he did in the first movie, he's just trying to undo the changes that Biff has already made.

Up the Line by Robert Silverberg. Jud Eliott III gets a job as a time courier, showing tourists the wonders of history. But some of his crazy colleagues start messing around with the timeline and wrecking history, so he has to keep going back and trying to fix the damage without attracting the attention of the Time Patrol. And then he falls in love with a time paradox named Pulcheria, his own great-great-great-great-grandmother, and it all goes to pot.

The End Of Eternity by Isaac Asimov. Harlan belongs to a time agency called Eternity, which exists outside of time itself. He and his fellow agents go around changing history to reduce human suffering. But then Harlan has a falling-out with his bosses over his girlfriend Noÿs, whom they want to erase from history. Harlan is supposed to help one of his colleagues, Cooper, go back to the 24th century and become the scientist whose discoveries later make the Eternals possible. In a fit of pique, Harlan sends Cooper back to 1932 instead, so he can't lay the groundwork for Eternity and Eternity will never exist. Finally, after the Eternals un-erase his girlfriend, he agrees to go back and rescue Cooper from the past — but then his girlfriend Noÿs reveals that Eternity's secret purpose is to edit history to make sure humans never colonize the stars. So instead Harlan helps her to change history so that humans discover atomic energy earlier, and start down the path of space exploration. As a consequence, Eternity ceases ever to have existed.

Lightning by Dean Koontz. Laura has a guardian angel who shows up to help her whenever she's in danger, but then it turns out other people are trying to undo the "angel's" work. Some evil Nazi time travelers are trying to destroy Laura. As Laura's son explains:

They can hopscotch around us.. They can pop ahead in time to see where we show up, then they pick and choose the easiest place along the time stream to ambush us. It's sorta like... if we were the cowboys and the Indians were all psychic.

Doctor Who. For a show all about time travel, Doctor Who doesn't have that many stories where the Doctor and another time-traveler are both changing the timeline back and forth, surprisingly. But the Doctor and his fellow Time Lord the Master get into some duels on a few occasions. The most over-the-top is in the comedy special "Doctor Who And The Curse Of The Fatal Death," where the Master and Doctor meet up in a castle. The Master goes back in time and bribes the architect to put a trapdoor right where the Doctor happens to be standing. But then it turns out the Doctor also went back in time, and bribed the architect even more — to put the trapdoor where the Master is standing instead.

Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency by Douglas Adams contains a lot of cris-crossing back and forth in Reg Chronotis' time machine (much of which is lifted somewhat from the episodes Adams wrote for Doctor Who. In particular, the ghost of the last surviving Salaxian possesses a disgruntled literary magazine editor, inspiring him to go back in time to repair the Salaxian spaceship before it can explode, back at the dawn of life on Earth — which will have the effect of making sure life never develops on this planet. The instructions for fixing the ship are buried in the second half of Coleridge's poem "Kubla Khan." But Chronotis and Dirk Gently, our detective hero, go back to Coleridge's time and ensure he never finishes that poem, so the instructions are lost and the alien plot is foiled.

Terminator. The Terminator movies and TV show are all about people and cyborgs traveling back in time to change, or safeguard history. The machines want to kill Sarah Connor before she can ever give birth to future resistance leader John Connor, so John sends Kyle Reese back in time to protect him — and Kyle becomes John's daddy. And then, the machines send more cyborgs back to kill John, and eventually Kyle's brother Derek ends up back in our time hanging out with his friend/nephew as well. And Sarah Connor either dies of cancer or travels forward in time past her own death date and somehow avoids it. Maybe in the second season of Sarah Connor Chronicles the machines will figure out they just have to wipe out the Reese brothers as kids, and all their problems go away.

Time After Time. H.G. Wells and Jack The Ripper battle each other in the bizarre future of 1979. Once they both reach the future, time travel doesn't play that much of a part in the story — except that at one point, Wells travels forward in time three days with his girlfriend Amy, only to find Amy's obituary in a newspaper. They have to travel back again and prevent Jack the Ripper from making Amy his fifth victim. (In the end, it turns out the obituary was mistaken, and it was Amy's friend who was murdered.) And then Amy goes back to the 19th century and marries Wells, changing history at least somewhat.

Meet The Robinsons. An animated Disney film, very loosely based on the book A Day With Wilbur Robinson. Tom Selleck invents a time machine. (We'll just pause to let you absorb that piece of info.) And then a villain named Bowler Hat Guy travels back in time to sabotage a memory-scanning machine that a kid named Lewis has invented, which gave rise to all the amazing inventions in Tom Selleck's utopian future. ("Tom Selleck's Utopian Future" will be my next band name.) So Tom Selleck's son Wilbur has to travel back in time to our time, to make sure Lewis repairs the memory-scanning machine.

Crime Traveler. In this British TV series, a physicist named Holly Turner invents a time machine, and a lazy detective named Slade uses it to travel back in time and solve crimes before they happen. But in the final episode, a criminal gets his own time machine, and travels back in time to give himself an airtight alibi for a couple of murders. Slade has to travel back as well, to catch the other time traveler in the act.

Research by Nivair Gabriel

There's a natural crossover between druggies and science fiction fans, writes Robert Silverberg, author of Son Of Man:

Surveys have shown that the audience for science fiction is primarily adolescent and above average in intelligence; most of the readers are between 15 and 25 years of age (though of course some remain addicts of the genre throughout their lives.) Therefore, there is great correspondence between the main drug-using and science-fiction-reading segments of the population.

So no doubt all this talking has made you wish you were doing drugs right now. So you tell us. If science fictional drugs were real, which one would you want to take?

Gawker Media polls require Javascript; if you're viewing this in an RSS reader, click through to view in your Javascript-enabled web browser.