[The Collected Stories of Robert Silverberg 06] • Multiples - 1983–87 - The Collected Stories of Robert Silverberg Volume Six

By the time this present group of stories was written I had passed through the cultural turbulence that engulfed nearly everyone’s life in the wild, stormy period we know as “the Sixties,” which for me had actually lasted from 1968 to 1974 or 1975. I had come through my own angry four-year-long retirement from writing in the middle 1970s, and was working again at a steady pace, though not with the frenetic prolificacy of the pre-retirement years. At the beginning of this period my personal life was still pretty chaotic, a carryover from all that Sixties madness, and plenty of new chaos was going to descend on me while some of these stories were written, but I was tiptoeing toward an escape from the various messes that were complicating my life, and by the time the last five stories of this volume were being written I was heading into the stability of my second marriage.

—Robert Silverberg, from his Introduction

Table of Contents

Introduction

Tourist Trade

Multiples

Against Babylon

Symbiont

Sailing to Byzantium

Sunrise on Pluto

Hardware

Hannibal’s Elephants

Blindsight

Gilgamesh in the Outback

The Pardoner’s Tale

The Iron Star

The Secret Sharer

House of Bones