Robert Silverberg's Many Trapdoors

One of the most popular, prolific, and important science fiction writers, Robert Silverberg is given penetrating analyses by major scholars and critics of the genre. Extending beyond the conventions of popular culture and pulp science fiction, the seven essayists assess Silverberg's body of work as being manifest of the modernist literary tradition, exploring techniques, such as irony, and themes, such as the fragility of identity, utopia and dystopia, and spirituality and transcendence.

Noted Silverberg scholar Thomas Clareson contributes an overview of Silverberg's literary career from his first story published in 1954 to the present, and the editors provide a bibliography of his fiction and selected secondary studies, referring to Clareson's definitive bibliography. The trapdoor metaphor used in the title relates to an observation by critic Russell Letson on the complexity of reading Silverberg, which he compares to an experience of one of Silverberg's characters: What seems to be a firm foundation for reality may in fact turn out to be a trapdoor.

CHARLES L. ELKINS is Professor of English at Florida International University. His publications have appeared in many journals, including Extrapolation, Science-Fiction Studies, and Journal of Popular Culture, and he has contributed to many critical anthologies and reference books.

MARTIN HARRY GREENBERG is Professor of Political Science at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay. Among his over 200 books are some 20 scholarly works in the science fiction field. He was co-editor, with Patrick A. McCarthy and Charles L. Elkins, of The Legacy of Olaf Stapledon (Greenwood Press, 1989).