Revered science fiction writer Robert Silverberg celebrates a milestone today, Jan. 15, 2026.
He turns 90 today. So happy birthday, Mr. Silverberg!
That’s a long lifetime for any man, even in the 21st century, but its especially impressive and worth commemorating for Silverberg, one of the greatest and most prolific science fiction writers of the past century.
A GRAND MASTER OF SF
A Grand Master of SF since 2004 and a member of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame, Silverberg has won multiple Hugo and Nebula awards for his novels, novellas and stories.
Among his most noteworthy works are the novels Downward to the Earth, The World Inside, Dying Inside, A Time of Changes and Lord Valentine’s Castle (the first of his Majipoor series) and the novella “Nightwings.”
Although it’s less well known, he’s also basically a libertarian in his views – as he confirmed to me in a conversation we had in the 1980s at a World Science Fiction Convention.
A FREQUENT PROMETHEUS NOMINEE
Although Silverberg hasn’t won a Prometheus Award, his work has been nominated for our award more than nine times. And more than once, his fiction has been recognized as a finalist.
So why hasn’t Silverberg won a Prometheus Award?
There’s no question that Silverberg is a wonderful writer. Take it from the critics, or his numerous awards. Or simply read his work.
While incredibly prolific at his peak in the 1950s, 1960s and early 1970s, Silverberg slowed down a lot by the 1980s, when the Prometheus Awards first hit their stride. In fact, he retired in 1975, reportedly due to burnout and marketing issues – although he returned in 1980 with Lord Valentine’s Castle, the first of several novels in his acclaimed Majipoor series.
Thus, most of his earlier novels have only become eligible, 20 years after publication, to be considered for the Prometheus Hall of Fame category.
Yet as good as they are, and as popular as they are with readers (including LFS members), most Silverberg novels simply don’t fit the Prometheus Award.
That’s the biggest reason, in my view, that he hasn’t been recognized with a Prometheus award. And that makes sense, since much of Silverberg’s fiction tends to focus more on personal relationships, world-building and a variety of science fiction topics rather than politics. That’s actually refreshing, and certainly his choice as a writer.
Although several of Silverberg’s novels dramatize the dangers of power and abuse of power, they usually don’t center on libertarian themes.
SILVERBERG’S MOST LIBERTARIAN NOVEL
An exception is A Time of Changes, winner of the 1971 Nebula Award from his peers in the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association.
Frequently nominated for the Prometheus Hall of Fame, Silverberg’s novel has been recognized more than once as a Prometheus Hall of Fame finalist, most recently in 2020. (Speculative fiction first published, performed or recorded at least 20 years ago may be renominated in this category if it doesn’t win.)
Set in the distant future on a human-settled planet, A Time of Changes revolves around an exiled prince Kinnall Darival who challenges his society’s orthodoxy and its Covenant, which teaches that the self is to be despised.
Presented in first-person voice and in the style of an autobiography as Kinnall awaits capture and imprisonment for his cultural crimes, the novel takes place within a communalist culture where the first person singular is forbidden, and words like “I” or “me” are considered obscenities and major social errors.
Revealing personal thoughts and feelings to another is taboo in Velada Borthan, and considered a high crime.
Falling in love with his bond sister, Kinnal learns from an Earthman about a miraculous drug that enables two people to bare their souls to each other via telepathy. When he uses the drug with his beloved, the consequences are revolutionary, sparking major changes.
A SIMILAR CONCEPT TO RAND’S ANTHEM
LFS members may notice similarities in the novel’s world-building and theme to Anthem, Ayn Rand’s 1938 novella, which was inducted into the Prometheus Hall of Fame in 1987.
Like Anthem, A Time of Changes has a profoundly individualistic and liberating theme about the rediscovery of the self as the foundation for freedom, progress and the pursuit of happiness.
It’s important to mention that Silverberg has stated that he was unaware of Rand’s novella until after A Time of Changes was published. He’s also said that his aim in depicting such a society was “completely different” from hers.
Still, many LFS members and other freedom-loving sf/fantasy fans can’t help but see individualistic and meta-libertarian themes in Silverberg’s novel.
One might say that while Rand’s expression of such themes is Apollonian and poetic in style and spirit, Silverberg’s dramatization of the importance of discovering and affirming the self is more Dionysian and psychological.
Perhaps partly reflecting the zeitgeist of the late 1960s and early 1970s, A Time of Changes in some ways embodies the countercultural energies and hallucinogenic drug use among the rising younger generation of that era.
Yet from another perspective, Silverberg simply found fresh and compelling ways to dramatize the common sf trope of telepathy – a favorite in Andre Norton novels and much other sf/fantasy of the 1950s and 1960s.
At this point, Silverberg truly is retired. May he continue to enjoy life and the fruits of his decades-long labors.
But many of his best novels, including A Time of Changes, remain worth reading. And worth considering again, for our award.
ABOUT THE LFS AND THE PROMETHEUS AWARDS
* Join us! To help sustain the Prometheus Awards and support a cultural and literary strategy to appreciate and honor freedom-loving fiction, join the Libertarian Futurist Society, a non-profit all-volunteer international association of freedom-loving sf/fantasy fans.
Libertarian futurists understand that culture matters. We believe that literature and the arts can be vital in envisioning a freer and better future. In some ways, culture can be even more influential and powerful than politics in the long run, by imagining better visions of the future incorporating peace, prosperity, progress, tolerance, justice, positive social change, and mutual respect for each other’s rights, human dignity, individuality and peaceful choices.
* Prometheus winners: For a full list of Prometheus winners, finalists and nominees – including in the annual Best Novel and Best Classic Fiction (Hall of Fame) categories and occasional Special Awards – visit the enhanced Prometheus Awards page on the LFS website. This page includes convenient links to all published essay-reviews in our Appreciation series explaining why each of more than 100 past winners since 1979 fits the awards’ distinctive dual focus on both quality and liberty.
* Watch videos of past Prometheus Awards ceremonies, Libertarian Futurist Society panel discussions with noted sf authors and leading libertarian writers, and other LFS programs on the Prometheus Blog’s Video page.
* Read “The Libertarian History of Science Fiction,” an essay in the international magazine Quillette that favorably highlights the Prometheus Awards, the Libertarian Futurist Society and the significant element of libertarian sf/fantasy in the evolution of the modern genre.
- Check out the Libertarian Futurist Society’s Facebook page for comments, updates and links to the latest Prometheus Blog posts.
I read a LOT of Silverberg as a teenager – especially 1981. Given my current interests, I re-read Recalled to Life a few years ago as well as To Live Again, and will revisit Master of Life and Death (read in July 1981). In 2022, I read all nine volumes of his selected short fiction. The fact that nine (thick) volumes is “selective” speaks to Silverberg’s prolific output, even after his incredible early years.
Despite my inhaling vast quantities of Silverberg, I have never thoughts of his work as especially libertarian. I appreciate your highlighting of A Time of Changes and will re-read it.
Politics aside, some of my favorites: Dying Inside, The World Inside, Tower of Glass, The Second Trip, The Stochastic Man, Downward to the Earth, Up the Line, Son of Man, Born with the Dead, A Time of Changes, and The Book of Skulls.
Hey Robert, if you are reading this, please get plan to get yourself put into biostasis when the time comes. I’m tired of losing forever my favorite writers.