Ishmael in Love: A Short Story

By Robert Silverberg

A lonely dolphin narrates this touching tale of interspecies love from the Hugo and Nebula Award–winning author of Needle in a Timestack.
 
Meet Ishmael. He’s a bottle-nosed dolphin employed at a seawater recovery station on St. Croix. He’s the foreman of the Intake Maintenance Squad, which means he and his team clear the intake valves of obstructions like starfish or algae. He works hard for his wages of fish and is highly educated. He’s also in love—with a human. 
 
Lisabeth Calkins is a twenty-seven-year-old specialist in human-cetacean relations. Though immune to the charms of her human anatomy, Ishmael believes he has found his soulmate. She gave him his name, when he was only a number among many others. Sure, there are obstacles to their being together, just like in every other epic romance. Ishmael can see a way forward—through human interference, through biology, and even acts of sabotage. But can Lisabeth?
 
“Time and again, Silverberg sets the bar high for himself and then clears it, as in a tale told from the perspective of an English-speaking dolphin who has developed feelings for a human woman.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
 
Praise for Robert Silverberg and his short stories
 
“When Silverberg is at the top of his form, no one is better.” —George R. R. Martin, #1 New York Times–bestselling author
 
“The short stories in Robert Silverberg’s First-Person Singularities are inventive, sublime, and endlessly entertaining.” —Foreword Reviews
 
“Decades after being originally published, most of these stories are still just as entertaining and powerful as they were when first released. A singularly unique collection.” —Kirkus Reviews
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Media
• Release date: Aug 22, 2023
• ISBN: 9781504086486

Robert Silverberg

<p>Robert Silverberg has won five Nebula Awards, four Hugo Awards, and the prestigious <em>Prix Apollo.</em> He is the author of more than one hundred science fiction and fantasy novels -- including the best-selling Lord Valentine trilogy and the classics <em>Dying Inside</em> and <em>A Time of Changes</em> -- and more than sixty nonfiction works. Among the sixty-plus anthologies he has edited are <em>Legends</em> and <em>Far Horizons,</em> which contain original short stories set in the most popular universe of Robert Jordan, Stephen King, Ursula K. Le Guin, Gregory Benford, Greg Bear, Orson Scott Card, and virtually every other bestselling fantasy and SF writer today. Mr. Silverberg's Majipoor Cycle, set on perhaps the grandest and greatest world ever imagined, is considered one of the jewels in the crown of speculative fiction.</p>

Book preview

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Ishmael in Love

A Short Story

Robert Silverberg

Introduction

Dolphins have larger brains than we do, and some scientists believe that dolphin intelligence may be equal to ours, and, perhaps, in some ways superior. For the sake of this story I made the speculative assumption that that is true, true in spades: science-fiction writers are allowed to do that, of course, and in fact are supposed to do that. The result was what may be the only first-person story in all of literature that is narrated by a dolphin, a lovelorn dolphin at that, smitten by desire for a beautiful female human. (He is also a well-educated dolphin, too, judging by the phrase with which he begins his story.)

I wrote Ishmael in Love in the spring of that turbulent year, 1968, and it was first published in the July 1970 issue of Fantasy and Science Fiction.

Ishmael in Love

Call me Ishmael. All human beings who know me do. My own kind does not make use of the unit-structural designation [name] to distinguish individuals, but this is the name the humans gave me, and it will do. I was named by Miss Lisabeth Calkins, for whom I feel protective-chivalrous-sexual emotions [love]. Throughout my narrative it is understood that the designation Ishmael refers only