Robert Silverberg

Robert Silverberg is an enormously prolific science fiction and fantasy writer, and a winner of multiple Hugo and Nebula awards. Possibly his best-known work is the Majipoor sequence, beginning with the novel Lord Valentine's Castle.

His short story To See The Invisible Man was adapted for a 1980s episode of The Twilight Zone.


 * Adaptation Expansion: In the early 1990s, for no readily apparent reason, he wrote novel-length expansions of three of Isaac Asimov's most famous short stories.
 * Blind and the Beast: In "To See the Invisible Man", a man sentenced to a year of "societal" invisibility manages a brief conversation with a blind man, who ends up rejecting him just like everybody else.
 * Brain In a Jar: in Nightwings
 * Came Back Wrong: in Recalled to Life
 * Care Bear Stare: in Lord Valentine's Castle
 * Casual Time Travel: Deconstructed in "Needle in a Timestack"--with no system of Time Police, one narcissist with relationship issues manages to ruin a lot of lives.
 * Death World: in Face of the Waters and Planet Of Death. Oh, dear Lord in Heaven, Planet Of Death.
 * Demythtification: Gilgamesh the King
 * Divided States of America: in "The Palace at Midnight"
 * Dystopian Edict: in "To See The Invisible Man"
 * Easy Amnesia: How It Was When The Past Went Away has three drugs that do this, varying in what part of the brain they wipe. A paranoiac dumps all three of them in the water supply of a major city as a way of taking revenge on the world around him, and winds up creating a blissful cult of people who drink to forget all their mistakes and frailties. (This is apparently supposed to be a good thing.)
 * Equivalent Exchange: in The Time Hoppers, material objects can only travel to another time by swapping places with an equivalent mass.
 * Expendable Clone: The Far Side of the Bell-Shaped Curve.
 * Eyeless Face: Victor Farkas in Hot Sky at Midnight
 * After the End: At Winter's End and The New Springtime
 * A God I Am: "Flies", from Dangerous Visions. In the most horrifying way possible.
 * Hollow World: Across A Billion Years
 * Humans Are Ugly: According to the dolphin narrator of Ishmael in Love, anyway.
 * Humans Through Alien Eyes: Or sometimes, through the eyes of dolphins.
 * Immortality Seeker: in The Book of Skulls
 * Intelligent Gerbil: the Nildoror in Downward to the Earth
 * No Transhumanism Allowed: Played in a minor note in The Great Conglomeroid Cocktail Party. Transhumanism itself isn't necessarily bad--what's bad is when those who have modified themselves start to look down on (and exploit) everyone else.
 * Offered the Crown: Lord Valentine's Castle
 * Planetary Romance: Majipoor
 * Religious Robot: "Good News from the Vatican" is a satirical look at the election of the first robot Pope. Obviously to become Pope he'd have needed to spend years working his way up to cardinal.
 * Ringworld Planet: a concave world, in Across a Billion Years
 * Ripple-Effect-Proof Memory: in Up the Line
 * Thank the Maker: in Tower of Glass
 * Time Police: in Up the Line
 * Too Dumb to Live: The Far Side of the Bell-Shaped Curve. The main character's right about being on the far side of that bell-shaped curve of intelligence, but not necessarily right about what side.
 * Translation Convention: Explicitly pointed out in the foreword to Nightfall
 * Vichy Earth: in The Alien Years
 * The War of Earthly Aggression: in Revolt on Alpha C
 * Water Source Tampering: In "When the Past Went Away", amnesia-inducing drugs are dumped in a city's water supply, leaving everybody in the city with no memory of who they are.
 * Who Dunnit to Me?: in To Live Again
 * Xenofiction: Played with a lot.