Godina izdanja: Ostalo
ISBN: Ostalo
Jezik: Engleski
Autor: Strani

Robert Silverberg - Up The Line

Sphere, 1978.
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Up the Line (1969) is a time travel novel by American science fiction author Robert Silverberg. The plot revolves mainly around the paradoxes brought about by time travel and is considered an example of the more sexually-permissive era of late 1960s American science-fiction, a reflection of the counterculture of its day.[1] It was nominated for a Nebula Award for Best Novel in 1969[2] and a Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1970 but lost to Ursula K. Le Guin`s The Left Hand of Darkness both times.[3]

It was originally serialized in Amazing Stories in 1969 and then issued as a paperback original by Ballantine Books later that year.[4]
Plot summary

Jud Elliott II is a failed Harvard history masters student in 2059. Bored with his job as a law clerk, he takes up a position with the Time Service as a Time Courier. After an introductory course, Jud shunts up and down the time line (`up the line` is travel into the past; `down the line` is forward time travel, but only to `now-time,` Jud`s present of 2059) as a guide for tourists visiting ancient and medieval Byzantium/Constantinople.

Jud`s problems include not only stupid tourists, but also greedy and mentally unstable colleagues who attempt to cause various types of havoc with the past. He is forced to break the rules in order to patch things up without drawing the attention of the Time Patrol.

When he meets and falls in love with the `marvelous transtemporal paradox called Pulcheria` - his own multi-great-grandmother - Jud succumbs to the lure of the past, creates irreparable paradoxes, and faces the inescapable clutches of the Time Patrol.

Silverberg`s narrative includes some cleverly worked out details about the problems of time-travel tourism. For example, the number of tourists who over the years wish to witness the Crucifixion of Jesus has increased the audience at the event from the likely dozens to hundreds and even tens of thousands. Time-tour guides re-visiting the same event must also take care not to scan their surroundings too closely, lest they make eye contact with themselves leading another tour party.

Silverberg`s interest in the Byzantine era of Roman history is put to use with a vivid description of Constantinople during the reign of Justinian, and the Nika riots of 532.
Reception

Algis Budrys reviewed Up the Line unfavorably, saying that if it were not for `the amount and kind of sex introduced` and the `long, descriptive passages on Constantinople,` it `would be a short story or novelette.` His review also discussed, at some length, various illogical elements in the novel`s plotting.[5]

Up the Line was nominated for a Nebula Award for Best Novel in 1969[2] and a Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1970.[3]
Spinoffs

In the 1990s, a series of six books were written, set in the same fictional world as Up the Line, called Robert Silverberg`s Time Tours:

The Robin Hood Ambush by William F. Wu
Glory`s End by Nick Baron
Timecrime, Inc. by Debra Doyle and James D. Macdonald
The Dinosaur Trackers by Thomas Shadwell
The Pirate Paradox by Greg Cox and Nick Baron
Caesar`s Time Legions by Jeremy Kingston

Robert Silverberg (born January 15, 1935) is a prolific American science fiction author and editor. He is a multiple winner of both Hugo and Nebula Awards, a member of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame, and a Grand Master of SF since 2004.[2][3][4]

Especially noted Silverberg works include the novella Nightwings (1969) and the novels Downward to the Earth (1970), The World Inside (1971), Dying Inside (1972), and Lord Valentine`s Castle (1980; the first of the Majipoor series).

As of 2015, Silverberg had attended every Hugo Award ceremony since the inaugural event in 1953.[5]
Early life

Silverberg was born on January 15, 1935,[6] to Jewish parents in Brooklyn, New York.[7] A voracious reader since childhood, he began submitting stories to science fiction magazines during his early teenage years. He received a BA in English Literature from Columbia University, in 1956. While at Columbia he wrote the juvenile novel Revolt on Alpha C (1955), published by Thomas Y. Crowell with the cover notice: `A gripping story of outer space`.[1] He won his first Hugo in 1956 as the `best new writer`.[2]
Career

In that year Silverberg was the author or co-author of four of the six stories in the August issue of Fantastic, breaking his record set in the previous issue.[8] For the next four years, by his own count, he wrote a million words a year, mostly for magazines and Ace Doubles. He used his own name as well as a range of pseudonyms during this era, and often worked in collaboration with Randall Garrett, who was a neighbor at the time.[9] (The Silverberg/Garrett collaborations too were published under a variety of pseudonyms, the best-known being Robert Randall.) From 1956 to 1959, Silverberg routinely averaged five published stories a month, and he had over 80 stories published in 1958 alone.[citation needed]

In 1959, the market for science fiction slumped due in part to changing tastes among readers, and also due to the bankruptcy of several leading magazines of the era.[10] Silverberg adapted by writing copiously in other fields,[11] from historical non-fiction to crime fiction and softcore pornography. As L.T. Woodward, M.D., he wrote a number of pop psychology and sexology books.[12] `Bob Silverberg, a giant of science fiction... was doing two [books] a month for one publisher, another for a second publisher, and the equivalent of another book for a magazine... He was writing a quarter of a million words a month`[13] under many different pseudonyms[14] including about 200 erotic novels published as Don Elliott.[15][16] In a 2000 interview, Silverberg explained that the erotic fiction `... was undertaken at a time when I was saddled with a huge debt, at the age of 26, for a splendid house that I had bought. There would have been no way to pay the house off by writing science fiction ... so I turned out a slew of quick sex novels. I never concealed the fact that I was doing them; it made no difference at all to me whether people knew or not. It was just a job. And it was, incidentally, a job that I did very well. I think they were outstanding erotic novels.`[17]
Literary growth

In the mid-1960s, many writers in science fiction were moving away from the adventure, hard science fiction and space opera themes that often characterized the early years of the genre, and writing stories with greater literary ambitions, psychological sophistication and experimental methods (see New Wave science fiction). Frederik Pohl, then editing three science fiction magazines, offered Silverberg creative freedom in writing for them.[11] Thus inspired, Silverberg returned to the field that gave him his start, paying far more attention to depth of character development and social background than he had in the past and mixing in elements of the modernist literature he had studied at Columbia.[citation needed]

Silverberg continued to write rapidly—Algis Budrys reported in 1965 that he wrote and sold at least 50,000 words (`call it the equivalent of a commercial novel`) weekly[14]—but the novels he wrote in this period are considered superior to his earlier work; Budrys in 1968 wrote of his surprise that `Silverberg is now writing deeply detailed, highly educated, beautifully figured books` like Thorns and The Masks of Time.[18] Perhaps the first book to indicate the new Silverberg was To Open the Sky, a fixup of stories published by Pohl in Galaxy Magazine, in which a new religion helps people reach the stars. That was followed by Downward to the Earth, a story containing echoes of material from Joseph Conrad`s work,[15] in which the human former administrator of an alien world returns after the planet`s inhabitants have been set free. Other acclaimed works of that time include To Live Again, in which the memories and personalities of the deceased can be transferred to other people; The World Inside, a look at an overpopulated future; and Dying Inside, a tale of a telepath losing his powers.

In the August 1967 issue of Galaxy, Silverberg published a 20,000-word novelette called `Hawksbill Station`. This story earned Silverberg his first Hugo and Nebula story award nominations.[19] An expanded novel form of Hawksbill Station was published the following year. In 1969 Nightwings was awarded the Hugo for best novella. Silverberg won a Nebula award in 1970 for the short story `Passengers`, two the following year for his novel A Time of Changes and the short story `Good News from the Vatican`, and yet another in 1975 for his novella Born with the Dead.
Later career

After suffering through the stresses of a major house fire[20] and a thyroid malfunction, Silverberg moved from his native New York City to the West Coast in 1972, and he announced his retirement from writing in 1975.[21] In 1980 he returned, however, with Lord Valentine`s Castle,[11] a panoramic adventure set on an alien planet, which has become the basis of the Majipoor series—a cycle of stories and novels set on the vast planet Majipoor, a world much larger than Earth and inhabited by no fewer than seven different species of settlers. In a 2015 interview, Silverberg said that he did not intend to write any more fiction.[22]

Silverberg received a Nebula award in 1986 for the novella Sailing to Byzantium, which takes its name from the poem by William Butler Yeats; a Hugo in 1987 for the novella Gilgamesh in the Outback, set in the Heroes in Hell universe of Bangsian Fantasy; a Hugo in 1990 for Enter a Soldier. Later: Enter Another.[2] The Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame inducted Silverberg in 1999, its fourth class of two deceased and two living writers,[3] and the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America made him its 21st SFWA Grand Master in 2005.[4]
Personal life

Silverberg has been married twice. He and Barbara Brown married in 1956, separated in 1976 and divorced a decade later. Silverberg and science fiction writer Karen Haber married in 1987.[23] They live in the San Francisco Bay Area.[9] Before the age of 30, Silverberg was independently wealthy through his investments, and once owned the former mansion of New York City Mayor Fiorello La Guardia.[24][20]