Robert Silverberg’s Reflections – December 2012
‘Where Silverberg goes today, the rest of science fiction will follow tomorrow’
Reflections is a regular column by multi-award-winning SFWA Grandmaster Robert Silverberg, in which he will offer his thoughts on science fiction, literature and the world at large.
This month: Libraries . . .
I was always a reader — I had begun to master the knack of it before I turned four — and my parents saw that I was well supplied with books from an early age. (I still have some of them: Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, The Complete Lewis Carroll, Ivanhoe, The Maltese Falcon, a Rudyard Kipling omnibus, Padraic Colum’s retellings of the Greek and Norse myths, and an assortment of books about dinosaurs, geology, botany, and astronomy, inscribed to me on various birthdays, dating from 1943, 1944, 1945.) My life as a science fiction writer, I’m certain, was constructed out of that hodgepodge of science and fantasy, the dinosaur/astronomy/geology books, the adventures of Odin and Thor, Zeus and Hermes, Carroll’s two novels of Wonderland, and the rest.
But very quickly I learned that although I had an abundance of books at home, there was a marvelous place called the library that had even more, infinitely more, more books than I could possibly ever read even though I took an armload of them out every week . . .
You can read the rest of the column here, and find Robert Silverberg’s eBooks here. Please note: each column will remain on the site for one month only.
