I started reading a copy of the June 1978 Berkley edition of To Live Again by Robert Silverberg as was immediately intrigued by… the introduction. This may not be typical, but the story behind the story of To Live Again is a fascinating personal account of how an idea becomes a manuscript, and how a manuscript becomes a book—a flight to publication that wasn’t quite as nonstop as I would have thought for one of the most highly regarded authors in the SF field. So, cheeky monkey that I am, I sent Mr. Silverberg a short email seeking his permission to reprint that introduction, in its entirety, here. He was kind enough to agree and so without further ado, I turn Fantasy Author’s Handbook over to SF Grand Master Robert Silverberg, and…
To Live Again: Introduction
It was the spring of 1966, the Early Psychedelic Period, when Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert (not yet Baba Ram Dass) were first preaching the gospel of LSD and the initial great torrent of Eastern mysticism was beginning to gush through the minds of the rebellious young. I was already into my untrustworthy thirties then, and still wore my hair neatly cut short, but some of the doctrines being hawked in the marketplace were of more than passing interest to me; and, completely independent of Messrs. Leary and Alpert, I had discovered one of the key books of the era, the Evans-Wentz translation of the Tibetan Book of the Dead, in connection with my own researches into the history of China. (I had written a book on the Great Wall in the summer of 1964.) One thing connected neatly with another, and on April 15, 1966, I asked Lawrence Ashmead, Doubleday’s science-fiction editor, for a contract on a novel that I described in this fashion:
“The premise is a world-culture in which reincarnation is possible, not in any spiritual sense but through the incorporation of coded personality-factors of deceased individuals in living people through technological means. Thus you, say, could carry around with you the canned essence of Maxwell Perkins, and I could be toting H.G. Wells, provided that we could arrange the right to inherit. Of course, the guy who reincarnates R. Silverberg will be getting Silverberg-plus-Wells, which can lead to complexities, especially after this technique has been practiced for six or seven generations. My notes on this book sprawl in all directions and I think it could be something special.”
Ashmead responded with a contract, and later that year I roughed out the preliminary story line, which I could see was going to be intricate. In October I told Ashmead that the book had the working title of To Live Again, “although I’m toying with the idea of calling it To Die Again. So you see things are still somewhat tentative, but I’m hopeful. You’ll have the script in about five months.” But the work went faster than that. On January 21, 1967, I wrote him, “Nothing remains to do on To Live Again except to negotiate the climactic series of reversals, doublecrosses, and epiphanies. I’m a little frightened of what must be done, but a few more days should tell the tale. At this stage I’m not sure if I’ve written a classic or a catastrophe, but I doubt that it’ll be anything in between.” A few days later the book was done—the longest novel I had ever written, some 73,000 words, a manuscript of nearly 300 pages, a complex and carefully constructed story with half a dozen major protagonists and a supporting cast of thousands, some of them no longer living.
It evidently was not as carefully constructed as I thought, however, because a week or two later Ashmead replied, in much distress, that the book had some grave, even fatal, flaws. He complained that one major subplot did not seem at all integrated into the rest of the story, that too much of the rest depended on coincidence and contrivance, and that the whole thing showed “a lack of action or suspense.” Major revisions were in order, he indicated—and turning back a book of such ambitious scope obviously bothered him nearly as much as it did me. But he would not publish it as it stood.
I didn’t have the courage or the energy to re-enter the labyrinthine plot of To Live Again and reconstruct its flawed sections, nor did I, just then, agree with some of Ashmead’s assessments of flaws. So at the end of February, 1967, I notified him that I preferred not to revise the book just now, but would try it with other publishers. “If it’s impossible for me to arrange for its publication on satisfactory terms,” I said, “perhaps I’ll ask you to take a fresh look at it later on, when both of us are more distant from our first feelings.” He agreed to that, and to fulfill my contract I gave him the book version of my novella Hawksbill Station.
Off the book went to another house where I had lately had some success—New American Library. The NAL editor, Wendy Weil, responded to the book with delight. But when she went to get contract authorization, she was told by a senior editor that the manuscript would have to be cut by 23,000 words, because NAL science fiction novels were now going to be limited by editorial decree to 128 page books, no more than 50,000 words. That seemed crazy to me, and I refused the contract.
The next stop was Fawcett, and on July 21, 1967, the Fawcett editor, Knox Burger, replied to my agent, “We are of mixed minds about Robert Silverberg’s To Live Again. The extrapolations, the pseudo-science, are interesting, and the society he outlines seems intelligently and intricately realized on the whole. The individual characters, the human confrontations, seemed to us to be somewhat less successful; the people don’t come to life quite as realistically or as compellingly as they might. The lack of a ‘hero’ seems to me a drawback; it may be what gives the book a tendency toward numbness or monotone. The suspense-story aspects of it, the ploy and counterploy, don’t seem as sharply handled as they might have been, and I thought the Buddhist stuff was not as well-integrated into the book as it might have been… And yet, I’m taken with the book in lots of ways. If it could be cut, and if he could make an honest stab at fixing the problems I mention above, we might be able to use it.” Noting that Silverberg “is obviously an intelligent life species,” Burger offered to draw up a contract if I would agree to revise.
His was a sobering letter. It echoed in many ways Ashmead’s objections; if two such experienced editors raised the same issues, I had to concede that they were probably right. And now I was far enough away from the process of writing the book so I could take a more dispassionate look at it. I mulled the problem for a month or two and finally concluded that rather than continue to search for a publisher for the manuscript as is, I would embark on revisions. In that case, though, I would return to my primary publisher, Doubleday, rather than accept the Fawcett contract. At the end of September I wrote to Ashmead, “With some hesitation I want to reopen a sensitive subject: that of To Live Again .” Recounting my experiences at the other two houses, I asked him to take a second look at the manuscript and to propose a plan of revision. He agreed, and both he and I re-read the book, and then we met for an amiable dinner to discuss its problems, and sometime in the spring of 1968 I did the re-doing. My correspondence files for that period are full of gaps, because my house was destroyed by fire in February and the early months of 1968 became a chaotic blur; but I vaguely recall overhauling vast sections of the story, particularly rebuilding the Tandy-Claude-Risa subplot to eliminate some really woeful use of coincidence. Whatever I did, and I know I did a great deal, it served to solve the plotting difficulties that had marred the first version. Ashmead accepted the revised draft with pleasure and Doubleday published the book on September 26, 1969. Sales were brisk: two weeks later, Ashmead wrote me, “ To Live Again had a big jump in sales last week when we shipped 671 copies, bringing the total to 3,832. It’s interesting to note that your book sold three more copies last week than Jesus Rediscovered by Malcolm Muggeridge which was published on the same day.” Eventually there was a second Doubleday printing—a rarity back then—and a sale to the Science Fiction Book Club and a nice paperback sale, none of which would have happened if I had allowed some minor paperback house to do the unrevised version back in1967; and now here is To Live Again in a bright shiny new edition. I wonder how Muggeridge’s Jesus Rediscovered is doing these days.
—Robert Silverberg
Oakland, California
November 1977
Thank you, Robert Silverberg, and as for Silverberg-plus-Wells…? I’ll take it!
—Philip Athans
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Absolutely not one word of this post was in any way generated by any version of an “AI” or Large Language Model.
Editor and author Philip Athans offers hands on advice for authors of fantasy, science fiction, horror, and fiction in general in this collection of 58 revised and expanded essays from the first five years of his long-running weekly blog, Fantasy Author’s Handbook.
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