Robert Silverberg (1935– ) is an influential US writer and editor of science fiction and fantasy who began to explore science fiction while studying at Columbia University. He has won multiple Hugo and Nebula Awards during a long and distinguished sixty-year career. He won his first Hugo in 1956 for Best New Writer and for most of his life has balanced his writing with a prodigious editing schedule, having edited or coedited more than seventy anthologies. These anthologies, including the Universe series, would have been considerable, noteworthy achievements even had Silverberg not written fiction; Silverberg has often championed new writers and nontraditional fiction. He was inducted into the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame in 1999 and received the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America Grand Master Award in 2004.
During the late fifties, Silverberg wrote, by his estimation, a million words a year, mostly for various magazines and Ace Doubles, before briefly retiring from science fiction due to what some termed a collapse in the market. However, in the mid-1960s, Silverberg returned with material that was considered far superior and mature compared with his fifties output, including the novels Downward to the Earth, The World Inside, and Dying Inside. Silverberg once again retired from writing in the late seventies, due to the stresses of thyroid issues and a house fire, but he returned in 1980 with his vastly popular Majipoor series, starting with the novel Lord Valentine’s Castle. Both Silverberg’s novels and short fiction are immensely popular with readers. He is one of the few writers to adapt to the changing landscape of genre fiction over a span that saw the rise of the New Wave, feminist SF, cyberpunk, and Humanism.
“Good News from the Vatican” (Universe 1, 1971) won the Nebula Award. It showcases Silverberg’s oft-neglected gift for satire in a humorous story that pokes fun at religious power structures.