the universe was too strait and close,” he wrote. “I was almost stifled for want of air; but now it is enlarged in height and breadth, and a thousand and a thousand vortexes taken in; I begin to breathe with more freedom, and think the Universe to be incomparably more magnificent than it was before.”
***
AND NOW WE HAVE PROOF, thanks to NASA and the Kepler telescope, that that multitude of worlds that Fontenelle imagined more than three hundred years ago is really out there. The trouble is that we can’t reach them, because the speed of light is likely always to be the limiting velocity not just for us, but for all the inhabitants of those other galaxies, and, barring the development of some quasi-magical means of faster-than-light travel, that makes the idea of intergalactic contact improbable.
So, as I said a decade ago and am forced still to believe, there won’t be any Galactic Federation; there’ll be no Bureau of Interstellar Trade; no alien wines or artifacts will turn up for sale in our boutiques. Nor will we meet the real-life equivalents of George Lucas’s Wookiees, Doc Smith’s Arisians, Fred Pohl’s Heechees, Larry Niven’s Kzinti, or—just as well, perhaps—A.E. van Vogt’s terrifying Coeurl. The aliens exist, I’m sure, but the sea that separates us from them, and them from us, is just too wide. And as Guillaume de Conches said in a different context, long ago, Nullus nostrum ad illos, neque illorum ad nos pervenire potest. None of us can go to them, and none of them come to us. Except, let me quickly add, by way of the tales that science fiction writers tell.
—Robert Silverberg
THE SILENT COLONY
It’s not unusual or particularly disgraceful for a young writer to imitate the work of the writers he admires. That’s one way to discover, from the inside, how those writers achieve the effects that the young writer finds so admirable. I’m not talking now of the various reworkings of the themes of Joseph Conrad that I’ve done over a period of years, or my deliberate pastiche of C.L. Moore, In Another Country. Those were the stunts of a mature writer having a little fun. I mean a novice’s flat-out imitation of his betters purely for the sake of mastering their stylistic or structural techniques.
When I began my career in the early 1950s there was a group of about a dozen science fiction writers whose work held special meaning for me—Henry Kuttner, Cyril Kornbluth, James Blish, Alfred Bester, etc. (In 1987 I brought my favorite stories by those writers together in the autobiographical anthology, Robert Silverberg’s Worlds of Wonder, more recently issued under the title, Science Fiction 101, which I recommend to any beginning writer who is as hungry to see print as I was sixty-plus years ago.) There was a particular cluster within my group of favorites whose work I paid special attention to: Robert Sheckley, Philip K. Dick, Jack Vance. Their stories seemed to me the epitome of what I wanted my science fiction to be like; and from time to time during the first five or six years of my career I would—consciously and unabashedly—do something in the model of one of those three, so that I could see, word by word, how they went about constructing such splendid stories.
“The Silent Colony” is one of my Sheckley imitations: an attempt at mimicking his cool, lucid style and his ingenious plotting. I wrote it late in the autumn of 1953, while I was a sophomore at Columbia writing science fiction stories in whatever spare time I could steal from my studies. Sheckley, who was then about 25 years old, had begun selling only a year or two earlier. Already his fiction was appearing in leading slick magazines like Colliers and Esquire as well as in every sci-fi publication: from the top-ranked Astounding and Galaxy to the wildest and wooliest of pulps. He even had a collection of his stories published in book form by a major publisher. It was a dazzling beginning to a career: I, seven years younger, envied him frantically. If I couldn’t be Robert Sheckley, I could at least learn to write like him. “The Silent Colony,” it seems to me now, is a creditable try at a Sheckley story, given the difference in our ages and technical skills. The three doomed alien visitors to Earth were, I think, reasonably original creations. It didn’t sell to Esquire, or even Galaxy, but it did sell. On the strength of my contract for my novel Revolt on Alpha C my new agent—I had acquired an agent by then, Scott Meredith, who represented such top figures in the field as Vance, Dick, Arthur C. Clarke, and Poul Anderson—had, after nine tries, sold it (for $15) to Robert W. Lowndes, editor of Future Science Fiction in June of 1954. Lowndes needed a very short story to fill his October 1954 issue, published in August, and so, most unusually, “The Silent Colony” was in print just a couple of months after it was accepted.
I spent the summer of 1954 editing a mimeographed newspaper in a children’s camp a hundred miles north of New York City; and great was my pride when the October Future arrived up there and I displayed my story to my fellow campers—three pages tucked away at the end of the issue, with stories by Philip K. Dick, Algis Budrys, and Marion Zimmer Bradley more prominently displayed. I didn’t mind its inconspicuous placement. One didn’t expect a little snippet of a story like that to be featured prominently. And Dick, Budrys, and Bradley all were older than me. Each of them had been writing professionally for two or three years already, so I didn’t begrudge them their names on the cover. What mattered was that I was in the issue too—my first short story to be published in a widely distributed American magazine. Only three pages: but bigger and better things were to come. I was sure of it.
SKRID, EMERAK, AND ULLOWA DRIFTED through the dark night of space, searching the worlds that passed below them for some sign of their own kind. The urge to wander had come over them, as it does inevitably to all inhabitants of the Ninth World. They had been drifting through space for eons; but time is no barrier to immortals, and they were patient searchers.
“I think I feel something,” said Emerak. “The Third World is giving off signs of life.”
They had visited the thriving cities of the Eighth World, and the struggling colonies of the Seventh, and the experienced Skrid had led them to the little-known settlements on the moons of the giant Fifth World. But now they were far from home.
“You’re mistaken, youngster,” said Skrid. “There can’t be any life on a planet so close to the sun as the Third World—think of how warm it is!”
Emerak turned bright white with rage. “Can’t you feel the life down there? It’s not much, but it’s there. Maybe you’re too old, Skrid.”
Skrid ignored the insult. “I think we should turn back; we’re putting ourselves in danger by going so close to the sun. We’ve seen enough.”
“No, Skrid, I detect life below,” Emerak blazed angrily. “And just because you’re the leader of this triad doesn’t mean that you know everything. It’s just that your form is more complex than ours, and it’ll only be a matter of time until—”
“Quiet, Emerak.” It was the calm voice of Ullowa. “Skrid, I think the hothead’s right. I’m picking up weak impressions from the Third World myself; there may be some primitive life-forms evolving there. We’ll never forgive ourselves if we turn back now.”
“But the sun, Ullowa, the sun! If we go too close—” Skrid was silent, and the three drifted on through the void. After a while he said, “All right, let’s investigate.”
The three accordingly changed their direction and began to head for the Third World. They spiraled slowly down through space until the planet hung before them, a mottled bowl spinning endlessly.
Invisibly they slipped down and into its atmosphere, gently drifting towards the planet below. They strained to pick up signs of life, and as they approached the life-impulses grew stronger.
