Nine Silverberg stories

Press, Volume CXV, Issue 33965, 4 October 1975, Page 10

Nine Silverberg stories

Sundance. By Robert Silverberg. Abelard-Schuman. 192 pp. N.Z. price $7.30. A Hugo Award winner and former president of the Science Fiction Writers of America, Robert Silverberg is a comparatively young, and with more than 60 books published since 1954, notably successful science fiction writer. The nine short stories in this book represent the best of his writings, the earliest, “Neutral Planet” and “The Overlord’s Thumb” both having been published in 1957 and the most recent, “Sundance,” published in 1969. The title story tells of the distress of a Sioux Indian at the extermination of an apparently intelligent life form of an alien planet. The process for this man of working through his own inner conflict, and the racial memories of the genocide practiced on his own forefathers, leave some disturbing options at the story’s end. The other stories, though more straightforward, are no less interesting. “The Pain Peddlers” takes the medium of television to a perverted extreme; extreme also is the enmity between the protagonists in “Neighbor,” and “Organ Draft” reflects yet another extreme in a future where transplant surgery has the old cannabilising the young for spare parts.