Shrouded Planet

AFTERWORD

By Robert Silverberg June, 1980

In the summer of 1955 Randall Garrett, a 28-year-old writer with about a dozen published science-fiction stories, moved to New York City, and, through a complicated series of events, settled in the residential hotel where I lived. I was eight years younger, a junior at Columbia University, and was just beginning my own career as a writer. I had been writing seriously for a couple years, and had sold one novel and five short stories—a decent enough showing for a teenager, perhaps, although my total income thus far had been under $400—including the novel. Nevertheless, I was undeniably a professional writer, and so (although he was vastly more proficient) was Garrett. It wasn't long before we were talking about collaborating.

There was logic to such a collaboration, for we complemented each other admirably. Garrett had a keen sense of plot structure and a solid grounding in the physical sciences—which were two of my weaknesses as a writer. On the other hand, his style was rough and choppy, his ability to create complex characters was limited, and—most critical—he was going through a bad phase in his life in which his writing disciplines had broken down and he found it almost impossible to finish the stories he began. And there was I, ambitious, productive, already phenomenally prolific and disciplined, with a liberal-arts literary background, a good sense of character, and a smoothly flowing style. If we worked together, we saw, we would balance one another's flaws and produce work superior to what either of us was doing individually. The alternative was to go on as we had been—Garrett writing almost nothing, and I writing a great deal but selling only a fraction of it.

So we went into business together. Garrett took me downtown to visit the New York science fiction editor—Howard Browne of Amazing, Bob Lowndes of Future, Leo Margulies of Fantastic Universe, and John W. Campbell of Astounding. He introduced me as a bright young star and announced that we planned to stand the science-fiction world upside-down with a series of spectacular stories. And, very quickly, all of those editors were buying stories from us—perhaps not so spectacular, but publishable enough so that whatever we wrote found a market at once.

The editor who was the center of our attention was Campbell. Not only did he pay the highest rates in the field—30 a word, triple what most of the others offered—but he was the pivotal figure of modern science fiction, an editor of almost legendary reputation who had discovered and developed such writers as Robert A. Heinlein, Theodore Sturgeon, Isaac Asimov, A.E. van Vogt, L. Sprague de Camp, and L. Ron Hubbard. Garrett, who had written several excellent stories for Campbell's magazine, revered him. And to me he was an awesome, titantic entity, the editor of editors; though I had been published in a number of minor magazines, I felt I would not truly be a professional science-fiction writer until I had appeared in Campbell's Astounding.

In one of our visits to Campbell's office he mentioned that he was having difficulties just then finding novels to run as serials. The hint was clear; we were young men of talent, ambition, and hybris; we went home that hot summer afternoon determined to concoct a novel for Campbell.

"Concoct" is the right word. Neither of us happened to have, at the moment, an idea suitable for a major story. So we began the process from the back end, drawing on our knowledge of the sort of novel John Campbell liked to publish, then attempting to invent a story that would be similar to the usual Astounding serial but different enough to merit publication. This is not the recipe for great science fiction. In devising our prototypical Campbell novel we had to filter out all those serials with sparks of real individuality, stories like Van Vogt's World of Null-A or Williamson's ... and Searching Mind or Kuttner's Fury. We wanted to play it safe, to make the big sale. And what we came up with was this:

Earthmen are superior to alien life-forms. Earthmen ^therefore may meddle with alien cultures at will, provided they are serving some higher goal. An acceptable higher goal is to meddle with an alien culture for its own good, especially if the meddling will also serve to enhance the quality of Earth culture.

Campbell seemed to have an insatiable appetite for that theme. It was, one might say, the basic CIA story: agents of Earth (meaning the United States of America) tamper with the politics of other planets (countries) for the alleged good of everybody. Of course, we knew very little if anything about the CIA in those distant days; but the blueprint for every slick trick that agency carried out in the postwar era can be found in the crumbling pulp pages of Astounding Science Fiction, I'm certain.

All one sweltering weekend we constructed an outline for a three-part serial to our theme. The plot was intricate, the action fast and furious. Our protagonist was a Scot named Murdoch or McTavish or something like that—another example of our cunning sense of market savvy, for Campbell, of Scots ancestry himself, was known to believe that the highest forms of terrestrial intelligence had evolved somewhere north of Edinburgh. Down to his office we hurried, and with passionate intensity we told him our tale. He listened in dour silence, pausing occasionally to stuff a new cigarette in his cigarette-holder or to squirt his awesome nose with nasal spray. And when we were done he leaned back, studied our tense and earnest faces carefully , and said."Not bad. But you' ve got it all wrong.''

He proceeded to turn our story inside out—getting rid of McTavish entirely and making the aliens the protagonists, something we had rejected as too un-Campbellian an approach. He invented the technique for cultural tampering on the spot—a school of theology. He took the solar system we had invented and rearranged it to serve the theme more effectively. We gaped as in five minutes he reconstructed, and vastly improved, all that we had done.

"Now go home and write it," he said. "Oh— don't do it as a serial. I want a series of novelets."

We staggered out, hurried to the subway, and by the time we were home had the outline of our story,

"The Chosen People," what is now the section titled "Kiv" in The Shrouded Planet. I worked out the plot of the story, Garrett most of the background, and he set to work on the first draft. Which of us wrote what is now, after twenty-five years, difficult for me to say; but I have no doubt at all that the opening paragraphs, with their sly spoof of pulp magazine narrative-hook technique, was his work, and that the final page of the story, with its hint at moral ambiguities, was mine. Beyond that I'm unable to assign responsibility for individual aspects of the story.

We finished it in a few days—11,000 words—and took it to Campbell one morning in August, 1955, stopping off en route at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine so that Garrett, a devout Anglican, could improve our luck with a bit of Holy Communion. Then we delivered the story, and, twenty-four fidgety hours later, got our verdict; Campbell was sending out a check for $330 and would we please get going on the sequel? Oh, and also, didn't we think "By Randall Garrett and Robert Silverberg" was an awfully cumbersome line for the table of contents? What about a pseudonym? "Robert Randall, perhaps," Campbell suggested.

I was mildly miffed at having my name disappear from the pages of Astounding so soon after it had arrived there—but, no matter, I was bound to sell something non-collaborative to Campbell sooner or later. The important thing was that he had taken the story. I was a Campbell writer at last! (And I lay awake all that night, mulling the awesomeness of it all.)

Excited or not, we had other stories to do for other editors, and two months went by before we delivered the second "Robert Randall" story to Campbell— "The Promised Land," we called it, now the "Sindi" section of The Shrouded Planet. To my horror,

Campbell insisted on reading it while we waited at his desk—all 15,000 words of it—but though he scowled and clenched his teeth from time to time, we knew we were safe when he made a small pencilled editorial change midway through the story, and he accepted it on the spot without requiring, as he had for the first story, any minor revisions.

Three months later we brought him "False Prophet"—the "Norvis" section of The Shrouded Planet. Campbell bought that too; but when we told him that we thought one more novelet of about 15,000 words would conclude the series, that diabolical editor sprang on us a surprise that I think he had been saving all along. He had seen what we could do at shorter lengths, and the three stories on hand would build reader interest nicely when he began publishing them a few months hence. Now, he said, we should end the series with a novel—a three-part serial, as we had originally intended!

I was now in my senior year at Columbia, and, though I was still managing to write short stories both on my own and with Garrett at a rate of three or four a month, a novel meant sustained effort of the sort I could not then find time to do. So we had to wait until the summer, after my graduation; and in August of 1956, in nine days of the most concentrated and exhausting work imaginable, we produced the 67,000-word novel The Dawning Light, writing in relays round the clock, sleeping when we could, one of us pounding out the first draft and the other revising it to final copy. We lurched down to Campbell with the manuscript, he read it with his usual promptness, and the check—my share was an enormous $904.50—arrived a few days later, just in time to pay for my honeymoon and the first month's rent on the apartment my bride and I had found on Manhattan's Upper*West Side. I was 21 years old then, and, I think, the youngest writer ever to have a novel published in Campbell's magazine.

By then the first stories in the series had been published. They were popular with the magazine's readers, and shortly we had an offer from a book publisher—Gnome Press, a semi-professional outfit that by dint of its early arrival in the field had managed to acquire rights to the best works of Asimov, Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke, Simak, Leiber, and other major writers. Gnome offered only a pittance, but that hardly mattered, considering the company we'd be keeping and the royalties we imagined would arrive over the years. We assembled the three novelets, along with some introductory and connective matter, into The Shrouded Planet, which was published in 1957; The Dawning Light, almost unchanged from its magazine version, followed in 1959. For a time we thought we would continue the series into a third volume, and we actually wrote one lengthy section, "All The King's Horses," in 1957, but for various reasons we never went beyond that point.

The Gnome Press books went out of print after a few years and are now rarities, and neither of the Robert Randall novels has been published again until this time. I confess that I was not very eager to see them come back into print, for I remember how cynically we went about the business of cooking up a story that would appeal to John Campbell, and how quickly the books were written, and how young and unseasoned we both were as writers. But as I look at them now I can see not only their obvious faults but also their virtues, virtues which made the stories popular in their own time and which justify editor Hank Stine's faith in reprinting them now. The books are not in the same class with Garrett's fine later works—his Lord Darcy stories, for example—or, say, my own Dying Inside or Night-wings. But why should they be? Those are the products of skilled writers long at their trade; The Shrouded Planet and The Dawning Light are the less assured, less accomplished work of young men. That much allowance must be made for them. But, taken on their own terms, the books are fun. I think cagey old John W. Campbell knew what he was doing, when he turned our wily outline topsy-turvy and told us to go home and write a series of novelets from the viewpoint of the aliens.

—Robert Silverberg