Conceptual Fiction is a regular feature, contributed by Ted Gioia, focusing on major works of fantasy, science fiction, magical realism and alternate history. These books are celebrated in recognition that literary experimentation with ways of conceptualizing reality has been as important as experimentation with language in creating fiction of lasting value. Dismissing these books as genre or escapist works has created a blind-spot in literary studies that this feature aims, in some small part, to rectify.

The circumstances that led to the writing of Robert Silverberg’s Nightwings were hardly conducive to creating a masterpiece. A fire had destroyed most of the author’s house, and he was living out of crates and cartons in makeshift quarters. He desperately needed money to pay bills and cover the cost of rebuilding. He was exhausted and stressed out from dealing with insurance company bureaucrats, putting his life back together, and the general craziness of that turbulent year 1968.

In this unpropitious environment, Silverberg wrote a 19,000 word novella called Nightwings in “something like five days,” as he later recalled. Frederik Pohl, editor of Galaxy magazine, paid him $500 - which was a considerable sum for the time, the equivalent of several thousand dollars of purchasing power today. Silverberg immediately began hatching plans for two more related stories of approximately the same length, with the plan to combine all three of them in a single novel.

The complexity of this structure was sharpened by the dictates of pulp fiction sci-fi. Each of the three parts needed to stand as a self-sufficient story in a magazine, with a strong ending that would provide resolution to the tale - yet not so much closure that the three novellas wouldn’t flow together smoothly into a single over-arching narrative. Working under these constraints, Silverberg created an exceptional work of fiction, by almost any measure. The original Nightwings won the Hugo for best novella the following year, and was nominated for a Nebula. The resulting book holds up well today, both for its imaginative conception but also — and even rarer for 1960s-era sci-fi — the quality of its writing.

From the opening paragraph, Silverberg delights us with his provocative combination of the familiar and the mysterious. “Roum is a city built on seven hills,” he writes. “They say it was a capital of man in one of the earlier cycles. I knew nothing of that, for my guild was Watching not Remembering.”

The writing is crisp and intelligent throughout Nightwings, and often quite poetic. Silverberg allows his story to unfold without any of the pulp fiction clumsiness that so often mars Asimov and Dick. Above all, he has a sure instinct for the quasi-mythic — indeed, almost medieval, at times — tone that also characterizes some of the most stylized works of conceptual fiction from this era, such as Dune and A Canticle for Leibowitz.

Article Author: Ted Gioia

Ted Gioia is a writer and musician. He is the author of Delta Blues, The History of Jazz and, most recently, The Birth (and Death) of the Cool.

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