Voyagers: Twelve Journeys Through Space and Time

by Robert Silverberg

Every science-fiction story is a voyage of some kind--to a world of a far-off galaxy, to our own world of the distant future or the remote past, to some interior corner of the human soul. In VOYAGERS: Twelve Journeys through Space and Time, Science Fiction Grand Master Robert Silverberg collects twelve of his finest short stories and novellas, all of which carry readers to the next level of imagination and into a new universe of the mind. This new collection spans 60 years of work by Hugo Award-winning Robert Silverberg, traveling from one end of the universe to the other, from the dawn of time to its final hours. A journey through its pages reveals time-travelers from the future come back to witness a catastrophe of our own time, Spanish conquistadores looking for--and finding--the Fountain of Youth, a tourist in Mexico stepping into an alternative universe, and spacefarers among the stars making a surprising discovery. The range of these stories, the kinds of voyages they describe, just begins to demonstrate the scope of science fiction, and the lengths the mind can leap. After all, that's the point of science fiction: to envision the unknown, the previously unexplored, the thing which is not.

Genres: Short Stories, Science Fiction, Fiction, Time Travel, Aliens

386 pages, Paperback

First published April 20, 2021

About the author

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Robert Silverberg is a highly celebrated American science fiction author and editor known for his prolific output and literary range. Over a career spanning decades, he has won multiple Hugo and Nebula Awards and was named a Grand Master by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America in 2004. Inducted into the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame in 1999, Silverberg is recognized for both his immense productivity and his contributions to the genre's evolution.
Born in Brooklyn, he began writing in his teens and won his first Hugo Award in 1956 as the best new writer. Throughout the 1950s, he produced vast amounts of fiction, often under pseudonyms, and was known for writing up to a million words a year. When the market declined, he diversified into other genres, including historical nonfiction and erotica.
Silverberg’s return to science fiction in the 1960s marked a shift toward deeper psychological and literary themes, contributing significantly to the New Wave movement. Acclaimed works from this period include Downward to the Earth, Dying Inside, Nightwings, and The World Inside. In the 1980s, he launched the Majipoor series with Lord Valentine’s Castle, creating one of the most imaginative planetary settings in science fiction.
Though he announced his retirement from writing in the mid-1970s, Silverberg returned with renewed vigor and continued to publish acclaimed fiction into the 1990s. He received further recognition with the Nebula-winning Sailing to Byzantium and the Hugo-winning Gilgamesh in the Outback.
Silverberg has also played a significant role as an editor and anthologist, shaping science fiction literature through both his own work and his influence on others. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with his wife, author Karen Haber.

Reviews

[Alexander Peterhans · Rating 3 out of 5]

A collection of short stories by Robert Silverberg based on the widest definition of voyages.

The chosen stories cover a wide span of time, and each is introduced by Silverberg. It often happens that in such a construction, the introduction will contain spoilers - none of that happens here, the introductions are actually quite informative and interesting.

The stories are varied and entertaining, but only a few really spoke to me - We Are For The Dark, to name one, which is basically like a literary version of a Warhammer 40k story.

I'm afraid I feel most of the stories do show their age, and not in a charming way.

In Another Country - 3 stars
Travellers - 2 stars
Chip Runner - 3.5 stars
Looking For The Fountain - 3 stars
Ship-Sister, Star-Sister - 3.5 stars
The Changeling - 3 stars
We Are For The Dark - 4 stars
The Trouble With Sempoanga - 3.5 stars
The Sixth Palace - 3.5 stars
Why? - 3 stars
The Pleasure Of Their Company - 4 stars
Thebes Of The Hundred Gates - 3 stars

(Thanks to Three Rooms Press for providing me with an ARC through Edelweiss)

[Benjamin Thomas · Rating 5 out of 5]

Robert Silverberg is well known as a grand master of science fiction and while he has written in other genres, it is his science fiction tales that have made him a legend. With a career spanning more than 60 years, his longevity is matched only by his productivity. From 1956 to 1959, he routinely averaged five published stories a month, and he had over 80 stories published in 1958 alone. While his novels have garnered much acclaim, I believe it is his short stories and novellas (his favorite form) that have propelled him into the stratosphere.

This collection of 12 stories provides excellent examples from his body of work, traversing most of his career. The theme is, obviously “voyaging” or “traveling” in one form or another. Silverberg himself is an experienced world traveler, and many of these tales reflect ideas he first garnered on his own journeys. These stories reflect various concepts of “voyaging” such as travelling to the far corners of the universe, time travelling, or even travelling into the depths of one’s own soul. They have all appeared in published form before, often in magazines such as “Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine”, “Amazing Stories”, or in various anthologies. Each story includes a nice introduction by the author describing how and when it came to be.

Over the past few years, I have been straying further and further away from my youthful love of science fiction. Lured away by other interesting genres perhaps or maybe just choosing poor samples. Often, I seem to run into science fiction stories that sacrifice good storytelling (characterization, plotting, pacing, etc.) in favor of too much detail. Many times, it seems authors are more interested in trying to show how smart they are than in telling a good story. Happily, this collection is not like that. Here, Silverberg displays his range, showing different styles, different levels of “hard science”. There are a couple of ‘literary’ examples here as well as less serious yarns but always, always, there is a good, compelling story that kept me turning the pages. I am pleased to say that it has reignited that feeling I once had about science fiction and I plan to dive into the genre more readily in the future than I have for quite some time.

Highly recommended.

[Karla · Rating 4 out of 5]

I received an advanced reader copy of this book through the LibraryThing Early Reviewers program.
These 12 stories are collected around the broad theme of travel. They were gleaned from 60 years of work by science fiction master Robert Silverberg. Each includes a brief intro by the author. Here are some quick summaries:
1) In Another Country: This novella of time-travel was written as a companion piece to the great story 'Vintage Season' by the writer C.L. Moore.
2) Travelers: A short story about a quartet of space travelers who can skip around the universe at will. Most worlds they visit are unique and perfectly beautiful. Re-birth technology allows for very long lives of leisure and adventure. But is life worth anything without struggle? Eventually, one of their party chooses a hideous world called Sidri Akrak for their next destination. An imaginative rumination on mortality.
3) Chip Runner: In this story, a 15-year-old becomes anorexic in his quest to escape his corporal body and mentally 'fall into' and explore inside microchips, the atomic and sub-atomic universe, and even the nature of reality itself.
4) Looking for the Fountain: This is a tale about Don Juan Ponce de Leon and the quest for a miraculous fountain that bestows manly strength.
5) Ship-Sister, Star-Sister: A cool story that Silverberg later developed into a novel. A spaceship with a small crew is 16 million light years from earth, traveling through 'nospace' on their mission of exploration. Their only communication with earth is through a young, blind crewmember who is telepathically linked with her identical twin on earth. Metaphysical ideas related to universal consciousness.
6) The Changeling: Silverberg dedicated this strange story to Philip K. Dick. When a man on a Mexican trip visits the Temple of Quetzalcoatl, he suddenly becomes another person with a different life and a wife he doesn't know. (Queue some 'twilight zone' music.)
7) We Are For the Dark: This is a well written philosophical novella about a religious order undergoing a crisis. A Lord Magistrate is in charge of choosing who leaves Earth to follow and spread what they call Darklaw out to the heavens. This story explores interesting concepts concerning matter and antimatter and symmetry along with religious themes.
8) The Trouble With Sempoanga: A very short story about a beautiful tourist planet where the native population harbors a dismal 'zanjak' parasite. If you catch it (via sex), you are quarantined and can never leave.
9) The Sixth Palace: This is an SF spin on the fable of a vast, fabulous treasure trove guarded by a large sentinel (a robot in this tale). Is anyone successful in answering a series of questions so they can pass and collect (steal) the intriguing, well-described treasures? Riddle me this.
10) Why?: Two men in an Exploratory Corps having been seeking new worlds for years when one asks the old existential question of 'why are we doing this'.
11) The Pleasure of Their Company: Imagine you are a president escaping a violent military coup by taking off in an spaceship and leaving family and friends behind. It's too dangerous to contact home. You only have AI-type electronic 'cubes' programmed to simulate individual personalities for conversation. What cubes do you take along (while you're saving your own skin)? Perhaps Ovid, Plato, Alexander the Great, Shakespeare, Hemingway, Attila the Hun, your wife, your child, your best friend?
12) Thebes of the Hundred Gates: This novella was inspired by a fantastic Egyptian trip that Silverberg took in 1990

[Jared Millet · Rating 5 out of 5]

Robert Silverberg has become one of my favorite classic SF authors. He's certainly one of the most prolific, and his writing has stood the test of time almost as well as Ursula Le Guin's. I'm also glad that I didn't read him when I was younger (back when I devoured Asimov & Clarke) because it means I get to discover his work now. Voyagers is a great introduction to his work, a kind of "greatest hits" sampler of stories built on the theme of extraordinary journeys. Read it, and if you dig it, then there's a lot more where this came from - mostly to be found in Subterranean Press's nine-volume Collected Stories of Silverberg series that I've been working my way through for the last few years.

Received as a Goodreads Giveaway

[Lori L (She Treads Softly) · Rating 5 out of 5]

Voyagers: Twelve Journeys through Space and Time by Robert Silverberg is a very highly recommended, excellent collection of twelve science fiction stories of voyages. Science Fiction Grand Master Robert Silverberg has selected a sampling of twelve short stories/novellas that span his career from 1957 to 2021. All of the stories represent voyages of various kinds and are set in a wide range of time periods. The variety of stories are well-chosen and riveting, as well as thoroughly engrossing and entertaining. The quality of all the stories is excellent and Silverberg has chosen well from the plethora of choices found in his writing career. As with any collection of stories, some will resonate with you or capture your imagination more than others, but they really are all outstanding. Each story begins with a brief opening introduction by Silverberg.
Contents include:
Introduction by Robert Silverberg
In Another Country: This novella is set in the world of Vintage Season written by C.L. Moore and interweaves Silverberg's story in the world she created.
Travelers: A group of intergalactic tourists who visit various worlds visit a nightmare world of monsters.
Chip Runner: A young man wants to live in the subatomic space between electrons.
Looking For The Fountain: An alternate history story featuring Don Juan Ponce de Leon.
Ship-Sister, Star-Sister: A ship that is 16 million light years from earth can only communicate with Earth through the telepathic link of a twin with her sister who is still on Earth. He expanded the idea into a novel in 1996, Starborne.
The Changeling: A man on a vacation in Mexico suddenly finds himself in the life of a man in an alternate universe.
We Are For The Dark: A novella where a religious order chooses who leaves Earth to spread their beliefs through the universe.
The Trouble With Sempoanga: A tourist destination known as the most beautiful planet in the galaxy harbors a parasite which places you in permanent quarantine on the planet should you contract it.
The Sixth Palace: Two soldiers of fortune travel to a world where a treasure is guarded by a robot.
Why?: A team of two men who joined the External Exploration Corps and spend their time endlessly visiting and documenting new planets begin to question their career choice.
The Pleasure Of Their Company: A leader fleeing a junta only has AI copies of family, friends, and historic figures to keep him company as he journeys in space to his place of exile.
Thebes Of The Hundred Gates: A time traveler goes back to ancient Egyptian in search of previous travelers who didn't return.

Disclosure: My review copy was courtesy of Three Rooms Press via Library Thing in exchange for my honest opinion.
http://www.shetreadssoftly.com/2021/0...

[Doctor Moss · Rating 4 out of 5]

I haven’t ever been a big fan of Robert Silverberg. I couldn’t point to any particular book or story by him as one of my favorites. But this is a very good collection, and very Silverberg.

What I mean by “very Silverberg” is good, imaginative fiction, demonstrating his skill at writing an entertaining and thought-provoking story without any allegiance to a genre-driven style.

I was actually a little surprised at how engaged I was by the stories collected here. For the most part, they aren’t stories that linger in my mind, that haunt me days after I’ve read them. But Silverberg has the gift of grabbing you with a story’s premise and keeping the drama of the story alive until the end. And often the ending isn’t what I was expecting, without his resorting to tricky surprise endings for their own sake.

There are twelves stories and novellas here, mostly from the 1980s and 1990s, but one going back to the 1950s.

Silverberg writes in answer to the question, what if things were different than they are? What if the Fountain of Youth were real (in some sense), and the Spanish conquistadors succeeded in finding it? What if time-travel tourism were possible? What if it were possible to slip from one possible world into another, just like this one but not quite?

The idea of slipping from possible world to possible world is a story that Silverberg says was inspired by Philip K. Dick, and you can certainly see that in both the idea and its execution (the story titled The Changeling). But Silverberg is not a writer like Dick — for Dick, the idea was the thing, and the story was its vehicle. For Silverberg, the idea is the start, and the story transcends it, makes it more engaging, more entertaining.

A great example is the final story in the anthology, Thebes of the Hundred Gates. It’s a time-travel story, but it doesn’t engage the paradoxes of time travel so much as take off into an exploration of human nature, the worth of a life, what we owe to ourselves and to others, . . .

Silverberg couldn’t match Dick idea for idea, but his strength is elsewhere, in the storytelling itself. So much so, that the longer the stories in the collection, the more I felt occupied by them.

Silverberg says the novella is his favorite form, and that may be his best, too. Exactly the length that fits his exploration of ideas and lives from a chosen angle. There are several of that length here. The novella isn’t the creation of an entire world, like the classic novels of fantasy and science fiction — it is much more contained and neat.

That’s where I think Silverberg is at his best.

[Lisa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Voyages is classic Science Fiction at its best and Silverberg is the master. I have read most of the author’s novels but few of his large collection of short stories. Therefore, I was excited to get my hands on this book for review. It totally cemented my love and respect for Silverberg as one of my favorites in the genre.

This collection of short stories, twelve in total, showcases his prowess at writing short fiction. All the stories have been published in the past, mainly in magazines. Silverberg has written a short introduction to each that I found insightful. Not only does he explain a bit about how the story came about, he gives us a small look into his world and thought processes as a writer.

All the stories in the collection center on the theme of travel. Some stories, such as the first, In Another Country, involve time travel. Other stories involve travel in other forms. An example of this is Looking For the Fountain which involves an alternate universe. My favorite of the group, and the longest in this collection, is We Are For the Dark which involves traveling vast distances across space.

Regardless of how you like your travel, these stories are a fabulous curation. I highly recommend this anthology to lovers of classic Science Fiction. This is a book anyone would be proud to have in their collection.

I received a free copy from the publisher, via Library Thing’s Early Reviewer program, in exchange for my honest review. For more book reviews, and author interviews, see my blog at www.thespineview.com.

[Darth Dragonetti · Rating 5 out of 5]

In my more than a few years as a science fiction reader and enthusiast, I had never read any work of Robert Silverberg, and knew next to nothing about his output - until now. Enter "Voyagers," the 2021 compilation. The present book collects 12 of Silverberg's stories from across his (very!) lengthy career, all reprints. The 12 tales all deal with journeys in some form or fashion, whether they be literal or much more figurative. The twelve stories really run the gamut of travel, from your familiar spacefaring adventures (Ship-Sister, Star Sister; We Are for the Dark) to journeys through time (In Another Country) to alternate history (Looking for the Fountain) to journeys of the mind (The Chip Runner), and even more besides. The stories are masterfully written bar none, with fabulously cosmic ideas. The stories are often quite cerebral and get a little "far out," and thus may not be for everyone. They also do not often wrap up neatly, and you're left with an incomplete idea that may be off-putting to some readers. However, it's clear to see why Silverberg has had such a long and successful career. These are deep stories of substance, written with a skillful craft seen in only a few writers in every generation. If you enjoy this type of science fiction, you'll want to indulge in "Voyagers," and will most assuredly enjoy every morsel.

[Moses Bakst · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good collection. Glad to be introduced to this author. Very mixed bag of stories though.

In Another Country x/5:
I actually read this story last, because I wanted to pick up Vintage Season first. I didn't end up loving that story, so I really wasn't committed to reading an 80 page sequel.

Travelers 3/5:
I'm not big on fantasy, but this story kept my attention. Also, classic sci-fi authors are so weird about women.

Chip Runner 5/5:
As an Electrical Engineer, I loved this one. Makes no sense scientifically but I was able to suspend disbelief and enjoy this story a lot.

Looking for the Fountain 2/5:
Cool premise and great execution, but I was just not invested in it.

Ship Sister, Star Sister 3/5:
Moved a little slow for my taste but blended sci-fi and fantasy pretty well

The Changeling 4.5/5:
So great. Such a simple idea but executed to its depth. Lost .5 because why does sex always have to be a part of these plots but overall such a good idea.

We Are for The Dark 2/5:
Big well developed world but the first part had way too much unessesary setup.

The Pleasure of Their Company 1/5:
I couldn't get invested in this story in any way. The only interesting idea here is those essence-cubes and I didn't care about them.

Thebes of the Hundred Gates 4/5:
A lot of historical research went into this story and it shows. Some plot points, especially how the time-traveller met the others, felt very deus-ex. Also a 15 year old??? When reading old sci-fi you just need to filter that stuff out I guess.

[K. Counihan · Rating 4 out of 5]

12 Stories, some short, some long

An assortment of 12 Voyages thru space and time. A few so, so stories, but for the most part 9 or so good stories. I have read almost all of Robert Silverberg 's books. I think if you have read and liked any of his books you will like this collection.

[Adrienne Raw · Rating 3 out of 5]

Received as an ARC through Goodreads Giveaway.

I haven’t read a lot of classic scifi, so Voyagers was an excellent opportunity to dive into some of the things I’ve missed. The stories in this collection range for short jaunts into fantastical worlds to longer explorations of the complex themes of the human condition. I enjoyed the longer pieces the most, where Silverberg characters and world-building have space to breath. “We Are For the Dark” was my favourite; it’s themes of religion-based imperialism and colonization were fascinating. I get a classic-Outer-Limits vibe from a lot of these stories, and as a huge fan of the series, these stories evoked fond memories. They’re distinctly stories of their time and offer an interesting peak into this era of science fiction.

[Zacch · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fun read! The book is aptly named and most of the stories leave me wanting more at the conclusion.

I would definitely recommend this to a sci-fi lovers

[Rob Stevens · Rating 2 out of 5]

Mildly interesting and a bit mediocre, the endings fall flat. Best story: Thebes of the Hundred Gates.

[Timothy · Rating 4 out of 5]

12 stories:

In Another Country (1989)
Travelers (1999)
Chip Runner (1989)
Looking for the Fountain (1992)
Ship-Sister, Star-Sister (1973)
The Changeling (1982)
We Are for the Dark (1988)
The Trouble with Sempoanga (1982)
The Sixth Palace (1965)
Why? (1957)
The Pleasure of Their Company (1970)
Thebes of the Hundred Gates (1992)