The stories in this volume are not hard to find. All are available in other sources. What makes this volume special is the intimacy, humor, and honesty of Silverberg’s notes. He’s arranged the stories in the order they were written and comments on each.

There’s no casting of a jaundiced eye by Silverberg on the chaos of his world, but there’s a fair amount of wry satire.

It's techno-orgy time “In the Group”. Its members use electricity and chemicals to share all the sensations of whichever of its two members happen to be having sex in all the old meaty configurations. Its pervy protagonist has monogamous intent towards a fellow member. As Silverberg says, it’s a glossy, fast, inventive, and bleak story.

The idea that doesn’t pass Silverberg’s muster in “Ms. Found in an Abandoned Machine” is the idea that science fiction can change the world. There are Amerindian tribes fomenting revolution, a time traveler out to “de-assassinate Lincoln” in the cause of race relations, and a covert appearance by Richard Nixon. Silverberg was and is thoroughly unconvinced about putting science fiction to missionary ends.

“The Science Fiction Hall of Fame” (not to be confused with the similarly titled anthologies Silverberg edited) is ambivalent about science fiction itself. Terry Carr, who asked for the story from his friend Silverberg, said it’s a story for people who hate science fiction. I agree with Silverberg that it’s ambivalent towards science fiction, but I can understand Carr’s reaction. I liked it, though. It is about a man who loves science fiction but wonders why he likes it. Is it the gaudy surface wonders that will never happen while the wonders of his own time do nothing for him? There is a memorable scene where he has sex with a woman while watching the first Apollo landing – and feels no thrill at either experience.

“Schwartz Between the Galaxies” is another look at the strange fascination science fiction holds for some of us. Schwartz is a big time, world famous anthropologist who travels about giving speeches, but finds himself escaping from his glitzy, rich, but homogenized, future into day dreams of travel aboard an alien-packed interstellar liner.

Another Jewish hero shows up in the shockingly traditional, in terms of plot and structure, story “The Dybbuk of Mazel Tov IV”. The settlers of Mazel Tov IV have to decide if the soul of a dead Jew really has come back to possess the body of one of the intelligent, but primitive, local aliens.

Silverberg’s view of 1960s politics was ambivalent: sympathy for some of the diagnosis of social ills but suspicious of the offered solution. Combine that with his concern about overpopulation and you get “Getting Across”. The earth is covered by a giant megapolis. But it’s not a state of harmony or efficiency. Every little section of this huge city is its own polity, and the hero goes on a quest to find the one remaining backup copy of a computer program that manages his section of the city. He encounters marauders and cannibals, thuggish street preachers, and police ‘bots. To top it off, it’s his ex-wife that has the backup. As hellish as his future city is, Silverberg says he would rather live in it than his birthplace, New York City.

Silverberg set out to do the ultimate alternate history story with “Trips”. It has a man, with no real mechanism given, traveling to twelve versions of the area around San Francisco. Those versions include the favorite “Hitler Wins” variant and the Mongols coming to North America.

One of those fragmentary and elliptical stories Silverberg was writing around this time was “A Sea of Faces”. It, like Roger Zelazny’s “The Dream Master” (which Silverberg acknowledges was first and better), is a tale of psychotherapist entering into the dreamscape of a patient, and, by manipulating the landscape of symbols, effect a cure. It was my least favorite story. I indeed thought it too elliptic and too long.

“Breckenridge and the Continuum” is another elliptical effort, but one I liked much better. Its hero is a bored young stockbroker who has bouts where his consciousness slips into another dimension, seemingly in the far future. There he is on a pilgrimage through a desert, with four other men, to find a lost city. At night, he tells them greatly reworked and often conflated myths of Earth. The whole story is built around the structuralist theory of myth developed by anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss.

“Ship-Sister, Star-Sister” is also sort of an experimental effort. The bored Silverberg of those years has a lot about the game of Go in the story, a story he describes as Stapledonian. It involves a starship in contact with Earth via the telepathy of twin women … and then the telepathic channel starts to go dead. Another Silverberg story of social isolation. This one eventually was expanded into Starborne.

“Capricorn Games” is one of Silverberg’s favorite stories because he met his future wife Karen Haber through it. This story, set during the night of January 7, 1999 (the future, of course, when the story was written), has a fantasy feel to it and the smell and glitter of an expensive 1960s party with drugs, astrology, sex, telepathy, and an immortal. It’s another of Silverberg story about the dangers of getting what you wished for.

“This Is the Road” is one of my favorite Silverberg stories. It’s hard not to see this tale of a motley band of future human subspecies, fleeing before the barbarian invasion of yet another, as a metaphor for life and the chaos in Silverberg’s own life at the time. Some adopt to the new circumstances. Some refuse to.

“Born with the Dead” is Silverberg’s nova story, Silverberg at the height of his power. It is justly regarded a masterpiece. In a near future where the dead are “rekindled” and form a separate society of their own, a man obsessively seeks to understand and know his dead wife’s new existence. A story of such precisely controlled tone and so lacking in rationalizing technology or science babble that it has as much the flavor of a weird story as of science fiction.

“In the House of the Double Mind” looks at the consequences of the then trendy notion of split-brain research. (This is also the basis of Philip K. Dick’s masterpiece, A Scanner Darkly, from about the same time.) The charges of its heroines are all potential oracles. The promising ones will have the tissues connecting the hemispheres of their brains severed. The ones who don’t make the cut will get “culled”.

All stories worth reading except “A Sea of Faces”. ( )