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.
One of the things Poul Anderson was known for throughout his literary career was world-building. Much of this was planetary design, based on the natural sciences, in which he started out with stellar type, planetary mass, orbital radius, and elemental abundances and worked out the geology, meteorology, and biology of a world.
Anderson was certainly one of the masters of this, up there with Hal Clement and Vernor Vinge. But he put equal effort into social scientific worldbuilding, creating economies, polities, and cultures, and developing plots for his stories from the conflicts they gave rise to.
Orion Shall Rise, a 2024 Prometheus Hall of Fame finalist for Best Classic Fiction, is a nearly pure example of social scientific world-building, set not in a distant solar system but on a future Earth.
