Robert Silverberg: "Warm Man," "World of a Thousand Colors," and "En Route to Earth"

We recently read a story by Robert Silverberg that debuted in Venture in 1958 and was reprinted in the 1969 Silverberg collection Dimension Thirteen and thought it was pretty good.  So let's look at the table of contents of Dimension Thirteen and pick out three more late Fifties tales by Silverberg...OK, lets see what these three 1957 stories, "Warm Man," "World of a Thousand Colors," and "En Route to Earth" are all about.  We'll read them not in book form, but in their original published versions in scans of magazines that try to use sex appeal to get you to part with that hard-earned 35 cents in your pocket; you can find these scans at the internet archive and/or luminist.org.

"Warm Man" (1957)

This story, which premiered in an issue of F&SF that has what I think may be a caricature of Lucille Ball on its cover, might qualify as a weird or horror story, and has the kind of structure that an episode of The Twilight Zone would have.  

"Warm Man" is set in an upper-middle class suburb of New York full of gossips, bored housewives who sleep around, college profs and stock brokers.  A new guy, a bachelor by the name of Hallinan, moves in, and the woman who is sort of the neighborhood busybody and who is always hosting parties invites him to a shindig where he meets everyone.  The locals find themselves unburdening themselves of all their woes to the kind and understanding Hallinan, and afterwards feeling relieved, even though Hallinan himself had but little to say.  For some weeks this goes on, with everybody feeling better from the opportunity to talk to Hallinan and divulge to him their secret sorrows.

The revelatory ending of the story indicates that Hallinan is a "receiver empath" who absorbs people's emotions and derives some kind of satisfaction or sustenance from them.  He meets an untimely end when he speaks to a young child, a shy kid who is the perennial victim of bullies--the boy is a bashful introverted outcast because he is a telepath who can read minds and project his thoughts into the minds of others; using his powers disturbs people, so he rarely uses them.  When he realizes Hallinan is receptive to his emotions, the boy transmits his sorrow to the man, but because the pent up feelings of years constitute a more powerful volume of emotion that Hallinan can handle, the man dies of an overdose. 

A satisfactory piece of entertainment.  "Warm Man" has been included in multiple Silverberg collections, including The Best of Robert Silverberg, and Ellen Datlow reprinted it in her vampire anthology A Whisper of Blood.

"World of a Thousand Colors"  (1957)

"World of A Thousand Colors" first saw print in Super-Science Fiction; Silverberg's contribution is trumpeted on the cover but that blonde being disrobed by a murderous alien is not in the story.  "World of a Thousand Colors" has been reprinted in Silverberg collections--in fact is the title story of one--and in anthologies like Asimov and Greenberg's The Great SF Stories #19 and one called A Century of Science Fiction: 1950-1959: The Greatest Stories of the Decade, a volume edited by none other than the humble Robert Silverberg himself. 

"World of A Thousand Colors" reminded me at first of something Jack Vance might write, it being a story of a criminal in a galaxy-spanning future civilization.  The style is weaker than a typical Vance, though, and the theme and philosophy less complex and interesting.

Every five years or so a Test is held on the World of a Thousand Colors; the location of the planet is a secret, as is the reward given those who pass the Test--these winners are never seen again, and those losers who return safely have had their brains wiped of whatever happened on the mystery planet.  Everybody assumes the prize is something wonderful, however, and millions of people apply for a chance to take the Test, though only a handful each year make it through the preliminary tests.

  

Jolvar Hollinrede is a jewel merchant who wanders around the galaxy.  All his life he has wanted to take the Test, but he has always failed those preliminary weeding out tests.  By chance he meets a man who has earned a place among those selected to take the Test.  Hollinrede murders the man and impersonates him, taking his seat aboard the ship going to the barren World of a Thousand Colors for the current Test.  On the planet he meets the six other contestants, men and women of various human and nonhuman races--and those who administer the Test, flashes of color that float around.  The flashes explain that those who pass the Test are liberated from their physical forms, granted immortality and transformed into flashes of color themselves and join the perfectly harmonious society of these immaterial color people.  

The Test involves the contestants standing in a circle.  Colors flow out of them, a different one for each contestant, and the contestants must harmonize them so they become all the same color, fuse into white, the color that contains all colors.  Hollinrede the murderer's color is black, the color that is the absence of color, and he can't seem to change it--all the other six manage to harmonize, so their red, green, orange, etc., merge together to form a gray, but because Hollinrede's color stubbornly remains black they can't achieve whiteness.  The six decent people who passed all the tests designed to screen out jerk offs work together to break the bones of Hollinrede, the villain who got to the World of a Thousand Colors through murder and deception, and as he dies Hollinrede sees them harmonize and receive their reward.

(I guess we can all imagine how a 2024 college type would assess a story in which white symbolizes harmony and a diverse cast of people joins together to assimilate their individual representative colors into a universal whiteness.)

The crime parts of the story are entertaining, but the color harmonizing scene is a little boring, and the point or ideology of the story is a little too obvious and so is not thought provoking or challenging.  That Hollinrede is a bad person who deserves punishment instead of a reward is undeniable, so there is no dramatic tension there.  The question of whether it is desirable to lose your physical body and individuality and live in perfect harmony forever is one that is not so easily answered, but the characters just take as a given that this reward is awesome, so there is no tension there, either.

Acceptable, but not great.  

"En Route to Earth" (1957)

"En Route to Earth" appeared under the pen name Calvin M. Knox in Science Fiction Quarterly.  The cover illo, by Emsh, featuring a three-headed white man and a red-headed blue flight attendant, illustrates Silverberg's story, even though neither it nor its author are named.

The stewardess on the cover is Milissa, a Vegan, and after a year of serving on ships that only travelled locally, today for the first time she is working on a vessel that will travel via warpspace, taking her, the Vegan crewmen and the fifty passengers on a three-and-a-half day trip from her native Vega II to Earth.

"En Route to Earth" is a joke story.  There is no plot, really, just a series of gags.  I expected there to be a pro-diversity message, Milissa learning that people of all types are worthy of respect or all the different races on the flight working together to save the ship or something, but we don't even get that--Milissa doesn't make any decisions, overcome any obstacles, or change in any way.

I'll list half or so of the gags.  The three-headed Terran on the cover is a product of genetic engineering, and the three heads have conflicting personalities and fight each other--one flirts with Milissa.  The pink alien in the lower right corner of the cover has bought a 300-year old Terran SF magazine and is enraged that the heavies in the violent space opera in it look just like his people--he sells the magazine to a collector who happens to also be a passenger on the ship.  A pair of siblings from the Deneb system suddenly go into heat, one shifting from neuter to male and the other from neuter to female, and have to be rushed to the restroom so they can mate in private--they promise to name their offspring after Milissa.  A member of a worm-like species that reproduces by ejecting a cloud of spores suddenly can't stop herself from doing so.  (Many of the story's jokes have to do with sex, which I guess we sort of expect from Silverberg.) 

Silverberg keeps this one short, and the jokes aren't bad, just bland, so we won't condemn this one--we'll call "En Route to Earth" barely acceptable.

"En Route to Earth" would be reprinted in a Dutch collection of Silverberg stories named for the story we read a few blog post ago, "Eve and Twenty-Three Adams," as well as the World of a Thousand Colors collection. 

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The issue of Science Fiction Quarterly with Silverberg's "En Route to Earth" has intriguing ads for other magazines that tout SF and detective stories by Silverberg (under his real name and the Calvin M. Knox pseudonym), Harlan Ellison, A. Bertram Chandler, Carol Emshwiller, and others.  Maybe we'll check some of these advertised stories out soon.

"Scum Town" appears to be a rare Ellison story only reprinted in our own
21st century in a book now out of print