Showing results by author "Robert Silverberg" in All Categories

Their hotel was beautifully situated, high on the northern slope of the huge artificial mound known as the paneium that was sacred to the goat-footed god. From here they had a total view of the city: the wide noble boulevards, the soaring obelisks and monuments, the palace of Hadrian just below the hill, the stately and awesome Library, the temple of Poseidon, the teeming marketplace, the royal lodge that Mark Antony had built after his defeat at Actium.

This anthology, with an introduction by Robert Silverberg, offers a sweeping survey of robots as depicted throughout literature. Since the Iliad—in which we are shown golden statues built by Hephaestus “with minds and wisdoms”—humans have been fascinated by the idea of artificial life. From the Argonautica to the medieval Jewish legend of the Golem and Ambrose Bierce’s tale of a chess-playing robot, the idea of what robots are—and who creates them—can be drastically different.

From Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, here are the best stories of 2002, written by four of the most respected writers of our day: Robert Silverberg, James Patrick Kelly, Ian Watson, and Gregory Benford.

Yakoub was once the legendary king of the Rom, the Gypsy race that has evolved from the days of caravans into lords of the spaceways - the only pilots capable of steering ships safely between the many worlds of the galaxy. Weary and proud, Yakoub has relinquished his power and lives in exile on a distant, icy world. In his absence, chaos fills the vacuum of power. The fate of the entire galactic empire hangs in the balance.

It is the 50th century on Earth, and ancient historical cities such as Byzantine Constantinople can now be created on a whim for visiting tourists. Charles Philip, a man from the 20th century struggling to find his way home, finds himself fascinated with this strange new world. But beneath the surface fantasies, things are not as they seem.

The 5th volume of Great Sci-Fi Stories includes stories by Lester Del Ray, Robert Silverberg, Harry Harrison, and others.

It was a legendary island, a fantastic island. Atlantis. Or as its prince called it, Athilan. Roy had traveled through time with his partner, Lora, to find it - and now he was tantalizingly close to its shore. Time travel allowed Roy's consciousness to enter the mind of the heir to Atlantis' throne, and what he found disturbed him. Strange dreams. Impossibly futuristic inventions and machines. How could such an advanced city exist at this time? The rest of the world was, as Lora witnessed in her travels, a dark, barbaric land still thawing from the ice age. Roy had been preparing for the odd isolation of time travel, but nothing had prepared him for his final arrival on Atlantis - a shimmering city far beyond his imagination! Roy knew this island's fate. According to legend, it would vanish into the sea. Roy also knew he had a limited amount of time to decipher the strange message in the Prince's mind - visions of cataclysmic events, mysterious rites to a faraway star. If Roy was in an Atlantis unlike anything the researchers had predicted, then what were its secrets? And when would it be destroyed?

This collection of unabridged, unforgettable tales, written by some of science fiction's most esteemed authors, pays homage to one of the genre's most cherished story types. Whether time travel stories leap forward in time or slip into the past, they remain popular with fans.

Duncan Chalk is a monstrous media mogul with a vast appetite for other people's pain. He feeds off it and carefully nurtures it in order to feed it to the public. It is inevitable that Chalk should hone in on Minner Burris, a space traveler whose body was taken apart by alien surgeons and then put back together again - differently. Burris' pain is constant. And so is that of Lona Kelvin, used by scientists to supply eggs for 100 children and then ruthlessly discarded.

After a misguided test run, a time traveler becomes trapped 20,000 years in the past. Unequipped for survival, his future is uncertain. What's worse, he's surrounded by people so primitive they don't even have a written language. So primitive they take in his unworthy and skill-less self and accept him into their society. This glimpse of what life might have been like for Cro-Magnon man in the late Pleistocene epoch shows us precisely why we can't judge a society by its lack of tool based technology.

This new Mars adventure is a gripping story of danger and exploration that is as timely as tomorrow's headlines and as scientifically accurate and up-to-date as anyone can make it. "Mount Olympus" is a part of Ben Bova's most recent novel, Return to Mars.

Join the last vestiges of Humanity and their alien allies (the reptilian Thrynn, the insectoid Velox, and the plant-based Elowan) as they attempt to carve out their own territory in a sector of space filled with wondrous opportunity and deadly threats. Brave explorers seek out new worlds to colonize while merchants cruise from starport to starport, their holds laden with exotic goods. Not all in this futuristic setting have noble intent. For every prospector and trader attempting to make a difference, a dozen pirates, smugglers, and mobsters engage in all manner of criminal enterprise.

The story of the American mining frontier can be traced in the ghost towns - from the camps of California's forty-niners to the 20th-century ruins in the Nevada desert. They mark an epoch of high adventure, of quick wealth and quicker poverty, of gambling and gun-slinging and hell-raising. We who have seen too many Western movies sometimes think that the legends of the Wild West were invented by scriptwriters - but the ghost towns remain.

Dive into the tantalizing depths of desire and betrayal in "The Deadly Call Girl," a gripping short story by acclaimed author Robert Silverberg, brought to life through the captivating narration of Mike Vendetti.

Richly infused with the spirit of the era, "Beatnik Wife" is a poignant reflection on love, identity, and the quest for personal freedom amid a changing landscape. Perfect for those yearning for a compelling narrative that captures both the personal and the societal shifts of a defining decade.

En 1348, totalement ravagée par la peste, l'Europe a été conquise par l'Empire ottoman qui y règne en maître absolu. La Renaissance et les Grandes Découvertes n'ont pas eu lieu. Et les Aztèques dominent le Nouveau Monde. Dans les années 1960, Dan Beauchamps, jeune Anglais fougueux en quête de gloire et de reconnaissance, quitte l'Angleterre pour les Hespérides. Il s'embarque alors pour une extraordinaire aventure autour d'une planète devenue le miroir inversé de l'ordre mondial actuel.

Abner Harris came to Earth on a mission of extreme urgency. A subject of the Spirit had no right to question his orders. And his orders said that the universe was in danger of enslavement by the pebble-skinned Medlins. And that the fight against their evil scheming called for him to assume the guise of a flesh-and-blood Earthman. But once in that new synthetic body, he made a mind-bending discovery: the real villains of space were neither the Medlins nor the people of Earth, but his own kind!

Galaxy's Edge is a Hugo-nominated bi-monthly magazine published by Phoenix Pick, the science fiction and fantasy imprint of Arc Manor, an award winning independent press based in Maryland. Each issue of the magazine has a mix of new and old stories, a serialization of a novel, columns by Barry Malzberg and Gregory Benford, book recommendations by Jody Lynn Nye and Bill Fawcett and an interview conducted by Joy Ward.

The year is 2232. Earth is grossly overpopulated. The nations of the world, working through the United Nations, have authorized a global bureau known as the Bureau of Population Equalization (Popeek), whose goal it is to relocate people from overcrowded areas to the less densely populated parts of the planet. A highly unpopular euthanasia program weeds out newborns who have may have defective genes and accelerates the death of the incurable.

Galaxy's Edge is a Hugo-nominated, bi-monthly magazine published by Phoenix Pick, the science fiction and fantasy imprint of Arc Manor, an award-winning independent press based in Maryland. Each issue of the magazine has a mix of new and old stories, a serialization of a novel, columns by Barry Malzberg and Gregory Benford, book reviews by Jody Lynn Nye and Bill Fawcett and an interview conducted by Joy Ward.