Enchantment seizes us, all of us somehow. J. I. Packer calls it "that tang of the transcendent in the everyday." C. S. Lewis called it sehnsucht, the sweet haunting heart's desire, satisfied in the divine alone. It comes suddenly, unbidden—to Lewis, kindled by cobwebs in morning light and the smell of bonfires; to Packer, by locomotives and jazz.

For me it was Ray Bradbury, drilling me between the eyes when that spot was tenderest with Dandelion Wine and Something Wicked This Way Comes. Bradbury wrote of small-town Illinois in summer, of tree-lined avenues and lemonade stands. I hailed from such a place, same state even. He wrote of diabolical carnivals rolling in at midnight, bringing sheer hell. Me, I once got yelled at by a nasty-looking carnie when I was five, for no reason. Bradbury wrote of white things nestled in crawl spaces and attics. Well, my uncle had in his basement a huge, black multiarmed boiler that hadn't engulfed anything in its cold belly for decades. Except for sleepless little boys, I thought, lying wide awake upstairs just above it. Oh no oh no oh no …

He was my voice when I was too bashful or dim to speak for myself. It was Bradbury who assured me that those cornfields surrounding us weren't just cornfields; they were wonderland, midwestern magic. Just look closely, kid, just look closely. I did. He was right.

Later I would traverse those very cornfields, not to the college of magicians but to Moody Bible Institute in the spired city of Chicago, and it was there of all places that I discovered a whole new complement of fever dreams to pile atop the older ones.

Theological study was well and good, but some days it seemed much better instead to slip out and purchase a paperback. One, a science fantasy quest chosen primarily for its cover, was Lord Valentine's Castle, by Robert Silverberg. Here was young Valentine, exiled prince, battling vicious monsters. I too did that; mine were New Testament Greek and a smelly Canadian up the hall who showered intermittently at best. Valentine sought to re-establish his throne. Me too, every morning, dashing for the stall without the broken seat, trying to beat the other guys. Valentine voyaged through glistening cities and imposing castles. I peered out my twelfth-floor window and daily beheld marvels of reflective glass and steel. Valentine was constantly assaulted. I got dirty looks for reading Robert Silverberg.

Again I was seized, elevated to something beyond entertainment. I read more Silverberg, an uneasy friend, but somehow he never showed himself as Bradbury had. Like the Wizard of Oz, Silverberg stayed hidden behind a curtain, appropriately and tantalizingly mysterious.

There are many Silverbergs to discover, many planets and dimensions, from all the disparate epochs and developments of the field. "The cunning old confectioner," science fiction historian Brian Aldiss calls him, "a quiet, kindly, yet sinister presence."

In Reflections and Refractions: Thoughts on Science-Fiction, Science, and Other Matters (1997), a collection of ruminative, chatty essays, the veil is pulled, but not all the way. Here Silverberg offers "as close to a formal autobiography as I'll ever write, I suspect."

A bit from his 1985 novella Sailing to Byzantium serves as an apt placard to fasten above his career. A man named Phillips from our day has seemingly been abducted to the thirtieth century by enigmatic "citizens," aristocratic gadflies who idle their days touring fabricated cities reconstructed from Earth's past, populated by synthetic "temporaries."

Phillips is casually asked what he thinks of their Alexandria, and realizes

they did not seem to comprehend that … the Lighthouse and the Library [were] long lost and legendary by the time his twentieth century had been. To them, he suspected, all the places they had brought back into existence were more or less contemporary. Rome of the Caesars, Alexandria of the Ptolemies … Chang-an of the T'angs, Asgard of the Aesir, none any less real than the next nor any less unreal, each one simply a facet of … the fantastic immemorial past. … They had no context for separating one era from another.

"The cycle goes round and round," writes Silverberg, "we read, we absorb, we transmute." During his own New York City childhood, "painful … lonely and embittering," Silverberg absorbed the mainstream classics, but also esoteric things like The Complete Works of Lewis Carroll and Padraic Colum's retelling of Norse myth, The Children of Odin, and Walter de la Mare's lovely, little-known The Three Mulla-Mulgars, about three smart monkeys who set out across Africa to find the golden land of their royal uncle, a particular favorite that Silverberg would retell decades later in Lord of Darkness (1983). Another favorite was Olaf Stapledon's Odd John, about child prodigies who find community among themselves, a notion that spoke directly, writes Silverberg, to "maladjusted, high-I.Q., twelve-year-old me."

Saturated in what he calls enwonderment—"miraculous and magical visions of wondrous things"—Silverberg dreamt of crafting his own vistas and eventually did so, emerging from the penny-a-word primordial soup of the pulps. In 1955, at age 20, he published his first novel, Revolt on Alpha C. That year he received a special "Best New Writer" award from the Science Fiction Writers of America, the youngest recipient ever. After that he blasted off.

To support himself in New York City, Silverberg hammered out 50,000 words a month, composing not only science fiction but also, under various names, mysteries, westerns, and softcore pornography. "It was stupefyingly boring," he remembers, "and, as the money piled up, I invested it shrewdly and talked of retiring by the time I was thirty." Between 1957 and 1959 he wrote 11 more novels and published over 200 short stories, writing any length to suit the needs of any editor. Into the early 1960s he was producing a million words a year.

Understandably weary and often ill, Silverberg slowed down—for him, anyway—to write juveniles and historical nonfiction. Between 1967 and 1970 he would write 36 books. When he returned to the adult market, his vision had become intensely refined but darker. Thus began the second phase of his career, his exploration of isolation on a cold, black earth.

The result was a series of grim books, among them a somber masterpiece, Dying Inside (1972). David Selig, New York intellectual, is a telepath, able to read anyone's mind to its most savage essence. After a series of disastrous relationships sabotaged with the unearned intimacy of knowing every matter about every person, Selig realizes that his power is fading, and that he shall miss it. Finally his accursed gift evaporates.

It is very quiet now.
The world is white outside and gray within. I accept that. I think life will be more peaceful. Silence will become my mother tongue. There will be discoveries and revelations, but no upheavals. Perhaps some color will come back into the world for me, later on. Perhaps.

Living, we fret. Dying, we live. I'll keep that in mind. I'll be of good cheer. Twang. Twing. Twong. Until I die again, hello, hello, hello, hello.

Although his novels from this period were well received critically, Silverberg's fans thought otherwise. In 1975, fed up with readers' inability to savor what he felt was the "sheer ecstatic poetry" of these dark fables and "terminally tired of fooling around with androids, star ships, and bug-eyed monsters," he loudly announced his retirement, opting to putz around in his California garden, tending to "spiny, murderous, angular monstrosities," among other nonliterary activities.

Fortunately it didn't last. In 1980 Silverberg unretired himself spectacularly with Lord Valentine's Castle, embarking on the third phase of his career and the first tale of Majipoor, set on an unimaginably gargantuan planet laden with scheming magicians, uncrossed oceans, cranky extraterrestials, and every manner of otherworldly otherwise.

Silverberg had gone Homeric, back to the mother lode. No longer mapping the claustrophobic interiors of psychotic heads, he crafted in Majipoor a much happier dreamscape wherein to burst forth like spring, to breathe deep and sprint, freeing his passionate men and women to frolic also on those sweeping yards of beautifully sculpted prose.

Initially, Silverberg announced with a vehemence similar to that with which he had announced his retirement that he would never, ever write a sequel to Majipoor. He succumbed, however, with Majipoor Chronicles (1981). In an essay entitled "Why I Wrote a Sequel After All," he does not deny that a handsome advance figured in as temptation, but he leans more heavily to the purer truth that he just plain had more to tell. After asking himself if he will ever write another Majipoor, he replies, "I doubt it very much. But don't hold me to it, okay?" No one did, which is good because he has since written four more.

Again he portrayed the epic quest, the loose line of human growth in stumbling from here to there. Later came Valentine Pontifex (1983), then The Mountains of Majipoor (1995), and most recently the lengthy, elegant Sorcerers of Majipoor (1997). All of these feature young men riding the route of maturation, negotiating betrayed trusts and vile beasts, stepping away from callow youth and striking out to secure the tenuous throne or holy place that also signifies the solidification of manhood.

This stepping-forth-into-newness is evident also in the non-Majipoors, such as At Winter's End (1988) and The New Springtime (1990), telling of the People, humans who have been living beneath the ruined earth for 700,000 years. The ice age ends. They come up to the unknown above, forced to construct links between the old rituals and the challenges of a new life in sunlight.

Again, emergence sparkles in the brilliant short story "Enter a Soldier. Later: Enter Another." Scientists have fashioned the intricately programmed images of Socrates and Pizarro, the ruthless conquistador. To their creators' astonishment, the simulations discuss their predicament, reasoning that they are neither alive nor dead, but they are something. Presently they wander off together in the artificial sheen of the hologram, poignantly seeking to comprehend more of themselves.

And so Silverberg, in the evening of his life, seems to be finding himself, maybe recalling his own jaunt from indomitable novice to sour literateur to wily old wizard. Tolkien says that this sort of tale " … contains many things besides elves and fays, and besides dwarfs, witches, trolls, giants, or dragons: it hold the seas, the sun … the sky; and the earth, and all things that are in it: tree and bird … wine and bread, and ourselves, mortal men, when we are enchanted."

At age 63, having acquired the Prix Apollo, four Hugo awards, five Nebulas, one Jupiter award, and lots of nominations, having written over 100 novels and hundreds of short stories, Silverberg is the absolute hip high priest of speculative fiction. "I still respond to it as I did as a child," he writes, "for its capacity to open the gates of the universe, to show me the roots of time." He is a mediator of the marvelous, one hand in the sphere of common folk, the other reaching out to—somewhere else. Not even he knows where.

Silverberg the subcreator, the ruler of a thousand worlds, presents a daunting challenge to the burgeoning Christian fantasist, who must approach his mission a fortiori, the argument that pushes for the greater, the one-up.

His corpus, qualitatively and quantitatively richer in Phase Three alone than that of others in their collective careers, presents standards soaringly high. If he can spin species and realms like fine candy, if he can sing of strong princes and jeweled cities, how much greater could the believer, who has at least a foretaste of what lies beyond the ceiling of earthbound desire, who knows something grander of one glorious celestial city and a majestic Prince in Whose hand all things converge?

Silverberg is a humanist, and human fingertips reach only so high. His enwonderment of long ago is equal to Lewis's sehnsucht, but Silverberg's is dry prophetic proclamation without unction, however well-crafted. His questions are asked, the awe is piqued—what now? It is up to the believer to accept the offering of Silverberg's extended hand and give it name and destiny.

Though claiming no systematized faith, Silverberg at least doesn't seem to be dying inside any longer. In Sorcerers of Majipoor, his heroes are coming up from the abysmal labyrinth of the Pontifex, the residence of Majipoor's reclusive emperor. After a long ascent they arise, "finally, into the world of sunshine and air, and rain and wind, of trees and birds and rivers and hills."

Silverberg, finally, seems to have come up with them.

Keith Call is a writer for The Salvation Army's midwestern region.

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