The Chalice of Death (2 page)

I began to sketch an outline for a book that I called
Years of the Freeze
. I gave the outline to Wollheim the following week and he bought it right away and I wrote it that fall in one breathless rush, using a flimsy bridge table as my desk in my still mostly unfurnished new post-college apartment. He called it
The Thirteenth Immortal
when he published it in the Ace Double series in May of 1957. (Wollheim almost always changed my titles. He did it to almost everybody else, too.) It was printed back-to-back with James Gunn's
This Fortress World
, a reprint of a novel I had read and admired when it was first published in 1955. I had spent quite some time talking with Gunn at the 1955 World Science Fiction Convention, telling him of my aspirations as a writer.

So there I was, an author of Ace Doubles. And sharing a volume with James E. Gunn. Decades later, the Science Fiction Writers of America would name us both as Grand Masters, but I had no fantasies of such exalted future status back then. I was more than content just to have sold a book to Ace.

By the time
The Thirteenth Immortal
came out, I had already written and sold Wollheim a second book, published a few months later in 1957 as—his title again—
Master of Life and Death
. (My original title was the feeble
Gatewag to Utopia
.) My back-to-back companion this time was the Anglo-Irish writer James White, with
The Secret Visitors
. When I met White that month at the London science-fiction convention, we posed for photos back-to-back, though we weren't able to manage the reciprocally inverted configuration of an Ace Double.

Then came
Invaders from Earth
in the spring of 1958 (for once Wollheim kept my original title; the book was paired with
Across Time
by “David Grinnell,” a pseudonym for Wollheim himself) and
Lest We Forget Thee, Earth
just a month later (the companion was
People Minus X
by Raymond Z. Gallun, a writer who had been famous in the field before I was born), and
Stepsons of Terra
(my title:
Shadow on the Stars
) still later the same year, bound with Lan Wright's
A Man Called Destiny
. In the spring of 1959 came
Starhaven
, under the pseudonym of “Ivar Jorgenson,” this one a reprint of a previously published hardcover book. It was doubled with
The Sun Smasher
by Edmond Hamilton, another of my early literary heroes. Like Philip K. Dick and Poul Anderson and Murray Leinster and A. E. van Vogt, I had become one of the Ace regulars.

All three of my 1958–59 Ace books had their origins in work I did for Larry T. Shaw's magazine
Science Fiction Adventures
. Shaw, an old-time s-f fan, might have had a splendid career as an editor if he had ever found a major publisher to back him, for his taste was superb and he had the useful knack of coaxing writers to do their best work without seeming actually to be nagging them; but it was his fate always to work for marginal companies in low-budget ventures.
Infinity
was his special pride, a low-budget magazine that ran high-budget-type stories by the likes of Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, James Blish, Damon Knight, C. M. Kornbluth, and Algis Budrys. It even published Harlan Ellison's first science-fiction story. I was a regular contributor to
Infinity
and many of my best short stories appeared there. The companion magazine,
Science Fiction Adventures
, was a blood-and-thunder operation done strictly for fun by everybody involved, featuring space-opera novellas of interstellar intrigue and blazing ray-guns in the mode of the beloved old 1940s pulp,
Planet Stories
. I was a regular contributor to
SFA
, too: in fact, I practically wrote the whole magazine. As I look through my file copies, I see a long story or two by me (often under some pseudonym) in virtually every issue. I loved writing these melodramas of the spaceways, and the readers evidently enjoyed them too, for my stories (under whatever pseudonym) were usually the most popular offerings in each issue, according to the reader letters that Shaw received.

The original format of
SFA
provided “Three Complete Action Novels” (actually, novelets of 15,000 to 20,000 words in length) in each issue, plus a few short stories and features. In the fall of 1956, when the magazine was just a couple of issues old and I was already established as its main writer, editor Shaw had the idea of running a series of related novellas, since the series story had long been a favorite of s-f readers. (E. E. Smith's “Lensman” novels, Clifford Simak's “City,” Robert A. Heinlein's “future history” series, Henry Kuttner's mutant stories, etc., etc.) I was invited to dream up a three-part series for the magazine, and swiftly obliged.

The first of the three, “Chalice of Death,” which I wrote in December, 1956, ran in the fourth issue, dated June, 1957. I worked off the tried-and-true theme of a galaxy so widely settled by humanity that the location of Earth itself had been forgotten, and ended the story with the rediscovery of decadent old Earth and the prospect of a revival of its ancient galactic hegemony. Shaw ran it under a pseudonym I had already been using elsewhere, “Calvin M. Knox,” since there had been novellas under my own name in the previous two issues. After taking time out to do a couple of unrelated pieces for
SFA
, I wrote the sequel to “Chalice,” called “Earth Shall Live Again!”, in March, 1957, and Shaw published it in the December, 1957
SFA
. (Which also contained the lead novella, “Valley Beyond Time,” under my own name, so that I was responsible for about three-quarters of that issue's fiction content.) I finished the trilogy in June, 1957 with a novella that bore the gloriously pulpy title of “Vengeance of the Space Armadas,” which ran in the March, 1958 issue and saw Earth properly restored to its preeminent place in galactic affairs.

By no coincidence at all, the three novellas added up exactly to the right length for an Ace Double Novel, and in October, 1957 I gathered up a set of carbon copies and sold it to Don Wollheim, my fourth Ace sale, right on the heels of my sale to him of
Invaders from Earth
. He published
Invaders
in April, 1958 under the Silverberg byline and brought out the “Chalice” stories just a month later as by “Calvin M. Knox.” I had called the book
The Chalice of Death
, but Wollheim did his customary title-changing thing and released it under the title,
Lest We Forget Thee, Earth
, a name which I never admired and which I have replaced, for this new edition, with my original one.

By then, steaming right along in my wildly prolific ways, I had helped Larry Shaw with a couple of further experiments in editorial policy at
Science Fiction Adventures
. He wanted to vary the three-novella format that he had been using since the beginning, and asked me to write an extra-long work that he could hype as a “Book-Length Novel,” to be backed up by a few shorter stories. In May, 1957, I obliged with “Thunder Over Starhaven,” a 28,000-worder that Shaw ran in the October, 1957 issue. Because both Silverberg and “Knox” were appearing all over the place in the magazine, Shaw rang in yet a third pseudonym for me and put out “Starhaven” under the name of “Ivar Jorgenson.”

A word or two about that “Jorgenson” byline is necessary here. My use of it wasn't entirely kosher. “Ivar Jorgensen”—note the spelling—had made his debut in 1951 in a pulp magazine called
Fantastic Adventures
with a rather nice Viking fantasy called “Whom the Gods Would Slay.” Other “Jorgensen” stories followed, and gradually word leaked out that they were the work, not of a swaggering Scandinavian bard, as claimed, but of Paul W. Fairman, a mild-mannered staff writer for
Fantastic Adventures
and its companion magazine,
Amazing Stories
. When Fairman moved along to become the first editor of a magazine called
If
, he took “Jorgensen” along with him, and still later, in 1955, he wrote still more “Jorgensen” stories for William L. Hamling's
Imagination
.

The bibliographical problems began in 1957 when Hamling decided that “Jorgensen” was a house pseudonym that could be applied to the work of any of his authors. I had become part of Hamling's writing staff by then, along with my collaborator of the time, Randall Garrett, and Hamling hung the name on some stories that Garrett and I turned in. Which of them I wrote and which Garrett did and which we did together is something I no longer can tell, but it is certain, at any rate, that those stories, eight or nine of them, weren't written by Paul Fairman!

The next move came when Larry Shaw of
Science Fiction Adventures
chose to capitalize on what he imagined to be the popularity of the Jorgensen name by having me write three long stories for him under that name. The first was “This World Must Die!”, which became
The Planet Killers
. I followed it two months later with
Thunder Over Starhaven
, which took up almost an entire issue and shortly thereafter appeared in book form as
Starhaven
. The third, “Hunt the Space-Witch!”, came out in his other magazine,
Infinity
, a couple of months after that.

Either through my carelessness or Larry's, though, the byline on those three was spelled “Ivar Jorgenson,” with an “o” in the last syllable. Collectors of my work would be entitled to think that although Fairman wrote most but not all of the “-sen” stories, I was the author of all the “-son” ones, except for the ugly fact that in 1953, in his own magazine,
If
, Fairman had used the “-son” ending on a story that he had written for himself. There is also the nasty case of a little story called “A Pause in Battle,” published in the May, 1957 issue of Hamling's
Imaginative Tales
, that gets the “Jorgensen” spelling on the contents page and the “Jorgenson” spelling with the story itself. I don't know who wrote it: perhaps Garrett, or maybe Fairman. I didn't. Nor did I write any of the paperback novels by “Ivar Jorgensen” that I am sometimes asked to autograph. My one and only “Jorgenson” novel is
Starhaven
. It was only after it was published that I learned that Fairman was annoyed at the appropriation of what had once been his personal pseudonym by other writers, and I stopped using it.

With “Thunder Over Starhaven” standing at 28,000 words, I needed to add only fifty pages or so of copy to have a manuscript the length of an Ace book, and I lost no time doing the expansion and turning it in to Wollheim, calling it, simply,
Starhaven
. To my amazement and dismay, he rejected it—the first rejection I had ever had from him. I'm not sure why he turned it down, but my best guess, as subsequent events would seem to confirm, is that he simply had too many of my books in his inventory and wanted to slow things down a little.

My reason for thinking that is that I salvaged the rejected manuscript on my hands by selling it in January, 1958 to Avalon Books, a small hardcover house that distributed its product mainly through lending libraries. Avalon paid very little for its books, but that pittance—$350—was better than nothing, I figured. Imagine my surprise when, some months later, Avalon turned around and sold paperback reprint rights to
Starhaven
to Don Wollheim of Ace Books! I suppose he had used up his Silverberg inventory by then and was ready for a new one, even one that he had rejected not long before. His reprint edition came out in the spring of 1959. (It was the sixth book of mine that Ace had published.) Wollheim's odd maneuver cost me $150, no small sum in those days: had he bought the book when I submitted it to be an Ace original, I would have earned $1000 for it, but instead I got $350 from Avalon and $500 from Ace, because Avalon was contractually entitled to keep fifty percent of the proceeds from any paperback reprint sale.

Having successfully experimented with a longer lead novella, Larry Shaw now wanted to try another innovation: filling virtually an entire issue of
Science Fiction Adventures
with
one
novel. Again he turned to me, and again I was quick to comply.

This time it was agreed that the story would appear under my own byline, since it was by now a better-known name than any of the pseudonyms I had been using in the magazine. And, since the story would bear my own name, I was a trifle less flamboyant about making use of the pulp-magazine tropes that the magazine's readers so cherished. There would be no hissing villains and basilisk-eyed princesses in this one, no desperate duels with dagger and mace, no feudal overlords swaggering about the stars. Rather, I would write a straightforward science-fiction novel, strongly plotted but not unduly weighted toward breathless adventure.

“Shadow on the Stars” is what I called it, and that was the name it appeared under in the April, 1958 issue of
Science Fiction Adventures
. The cover announced in big yellow letters, “A COMPLETE NEW BOOK—35 cents” and indeed it did take up most of the issue, spanning 112 of the 130 pages and leaving room only for two tiny short stories and the feature columns. Mainly it was a time-paradox novel—a theme that has always fascinated me—but there was at least one concession to the magazine's traditional policy, a vast space battle involving an “unstoppable armada” of “seven hundred seventy-five dreadnoughts.” I chose to handle the big battle scene, though, in a very untraditional underplayed manner, as you will see, and I did a bit of playful stuff with the ending, too, providing two endings, in fact, and two final chapters that had the same chapter number.

The readers loved it. The next issue was full of letters of praise, including one that said, “Silverberg is becoming a really disciplined artist,” and asserted that “Shadow on the Stars” seemed somehow to synthesize the previously antithetical traditions of Robert A. Heinlein and E. E. Smith. I have never been one to spurn the praise of my readers, but I confess I did have my doubts about calling the author of “Shadow on the Stars” an “artist,” and the Heinlein/Smith comparison struck me as a bit grandiose. (Actually, I thought the novel owed more to A. E. van Vogt.)