Schwartz Between the Galaxies: A Short Story

By Robert Silverberg

The double worlds of a disillusioned anthropologist collide in the Hugo–nominated story from the Science Fiction Grand Master.
 
The world of 2083 has become a source of professional and personal frustration for superstar anthropologist Tom Schwartz. On a lecture tour, he flies across the globe in first class seats, but everywhere he travels to looks like the last place he’s been. Argentina, Papua, France, Mexico—there’s too much sameness wherever he goes. Western culture has homogenized the world. Even the people look alike. 
 
But in his mind is where the magic happens. There, he’s on a starship gliding through the interstellar depths. His fellow passengers are natives of the worlds of Capella, Arcturus, Antares, and Polaris. There are sinuous humanoids, self-contained reptilians, and even whale-like creatures who dance alongside of the ship and beckon him to join them. 
 
As Schwartz finds himself increasingly torn in two, he has a choice to make: accept the world as it is or join in the cosmic harmony of the dance . . .
 
Praise for Robert Silverberg and his short stories
 
“Where Silverberg goes today, the rest of science fiction will follow tomorrow!” —Isaac Asimov
 
“When Silverberg is at the top of his form, no one is better.” —George R. R. Martin, #1 New York Times–bestselling author
 
“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: 9781504086493

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

cover.jpg

Schwartz Between the Galaxies

A Short Story

Robert Silverberg

Introduction

Judy-Lynn del Rey, the editor of the Ballantine Books science-fiction line (which was eventually renamed Del Rey Books in her honor) was one of the most significant figures in the history of science-fiction publishing. It was she who initiated a line of novels based on the wildly successful movie Star Wars, thus bringing hundreds of thousands of new readers into the field whose insatiable taste for space opera came to create a dominant demand for the stuff. At the same time she launched a series of Tolkien-influenced fantasy novels that became an immense commercial force. As a writer I was swimming against these two powerful currents, with such work as Dying Inside, The Book of Skulls, and the novella Born with the Dead exploring a dark literary side of science fiction; and so I felt uncomfortable with what my old friend Judy-Lynn was doing, and I think she was uneasy about the direction I was going in.

Nevertheless, when her company launched an original-fiction anthology called Stellar in 1973, she asked me—virtually commanded me—to write a story for her. Her stated policy was a reversion to the good old kind of s-f storytelling, as exemplified in the magazines of the 1950s. I don’t want mood pieces without plots, she warned. I don’t want vignettes. I don’t want character sketches … These yarns should have beginnings, middles, and ends. I too believed that stories should have beginnings, middles, and ends, though not necessarily in that order, and I liked to think that what I was writing would have fit into the best of those 1950s magazines. But I could tell, when I did Schwartz Between the Galaxies for Judy-Lynn, that it didn’t quite have that pulp-magazine flavor she was looking for. She grumbled, but she bought it anyway, having pressed me so hard for a story, and she ran it in the first issue of her anthology despite its somewhat