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There is no questionthat science-fiction writers have become more ambitious, stylistically andthematically, in recent years. (46) But this may have less to do withthe luring call of academic surroundings than with changing market conditions—a factorthat academic critics rarely take into account. Robert Silverberg, a former president of The Science Fiction Writersof America, is one of the most prolific professionals in a field dominated bypeople who actually write for a living. (Unlike mystery or Western writers,most science-fiction writers cannot expect to cash in on fat movie sales or TV tie-ins.) (47)Still in his late thirties, Silverberg has published more than a hundred books,and he is disarmingly frank about the relationship between the quality ofgenuine prose and the quality of available outlet. By his own account,he was “an annoyingly verbal young man” from Brooklyn whopicked up his first science-fiction book at the age of ten, started writingseriously at the age of thirteen, and at seventeen nearly gave up in despairover his inability to break into the pulp magazines. (48) At hisparents’ urging, he enrolled in Columbia University, so that, if worst cameto worst, he could always go to the School of Journalism and “get a nicesteady job somewhere”. During his sophomore year, hesold his first science-fiction story to a Scottish magazine named Nebula. Bythe end of his junior year, he had sold a novel and twenty more stories. (49)By th...