Readers Choice: To the Dark Star

This week’s Readers’ Choice is Robert Silverberg‘s To the Dark Star: The Collected Stories Vol. 2. It comes to us care of Starman Dave, who calls it:

Silverberg’s second (and best) volume of his collected short stories. A brilliant assortment, ranging from serious and insightful to fun and playful. Each story is a little gem.

Covering the years 1962 – 1969, To the Dark Star shows the beginnings of the mature and original voice that would mark Silverberg out as one of the most important and dynamic voices in the history of the field. As Isaac Asimov once said: ‘where Silverberg goes today, the rest of science fiction will follow tomorrow’.

As the author himself says in his introduction:

This story, “To See the Invisible Man,” written in June of 1962, marks the beginning of my real career as a science-fiction writer, I think. The 1953-58 stories collected in To Be Continued, the first of this series of volumes, are respectable professional work, some better than others but all of them at least minimally acceptable—but most of them could have been written by just about anyone . . . In “To See the Invisible Man” the distinctive Silverberg fictional voice is on display for just about the first time.

SFWA Grand Master Robert Silverberg is without a doubt one of the finest writers the field of science fiction has ever seen. If you’d like to find out what makes him so special, we heartily agree with Starman Dave that this is an excellent place to start.

You can read more about Robert Silverberg in his Encyclopedia of Science Fiction entry and his SF works are available as eBooks from SF Gateway.