The Seed of Earth

INTRODUCTION

The science fiction world of the late 1950's was an odd place, a kind of fallen empire that had collapsed into eerie provincial decay. There had been a big publishing boom in s-f from about 1949 to 1953, with dozens of new magazines founded, the first rush of paperback science fiction, and even some activity on the part of large hardcover houses like Doubleday and Simon & Schuster. Then most of it fell apart. The magazines died in droves, because there simply weren't enough readers to go around.

(In 1953 alone there were 39 s-f magazines, which was about 35 too many.) The paperback houses, having madly overextended themselves in their first hectic period of expansion, sent hundreds of millions of unsold books to the pulping machines and cut back drastically. And the hardcover people who had dabbled in science fiction found that sales were trifling; Doubleday stayed in the business, but nearly all the others dropped out.

Against this background of retreat and retrenchment I began my career as a professional writer, circa 1955. I would much rather have been starting out during the Golden Age of 1949-53, when new writers were desperately needed to fill all those blank pages, and spectacular careers were launched overnight by such beginners as Philip K. Dick, Robert Sheckley, and Algis Budrys.

But I was too late for the gravy train, and I had to make do in the very much reduced circumstances of the next era.

Strange things went on during those pinched, dark years, and the publishing history of the book you now are holding provides a revealing look at how young writers coped with the situation that existed then.

THE SEED OF EARTH began as a short story, some 9000 words long, called 'The Winds of Siros.' I wrote it in March of 1957 for a magazine called Venture, published by the same house that published Fantasy & Science Fiction and edited by Robert P. Mills. Venture, which had come into existence late in 1956, was an interesting project that deserved a better fate than it met.

Its aim was to publish strong, hard stories, intense and robust; unlike all the rest of the science fiction magazines of the time, it was unafraid of the erotic forces, indeed wanted its writers to acknowledge that human beings did other things beside pilot spaceships and invent time machines. And yet it was not just a magazine of sexy slam-bang pulp adventure fiction. It demanded literacy of its contributors, grace of style, intelligence of story construction. Since it was free of the taboos against sex and forthright characterization that afflicted its competitors, many writers who felt constricted by the timidity of the other magazines gladly offered outstanding work to Venture for a very modest fee. During its lifetime of only ten issues it ran such splendid fare as Theodore Sturgeon's 'Affair with a Green Monkey' and 'The Comedian's Children,' C. M. Kornbluth's 'Two Dooms,' Walter Miller's 'Vengeance for Nikolai,' Algis Budrys' 'The Edge of the Sea.'

Venture was very much to my taste, for even as a fledgling writer I was concerned with such things as narrative intensity and emotional depth. In 'The Winds of Siros' I did a story that combined a standard s-f theme - the struggles of a bunch of human colonists against hostile and bewildering alien beings - with something that was a bit new to the field, a study of human psychosexual interactions under circumstances of stress. The original story began at a point in what is now Chapter Eleven of the novel THE SEED OF EARTH, and took place entirely in the cave where the four captive humans are penned. I liked the story and so did editor Bob Mills, who used it in Venture's fifth issue.

And then I set out to make a novel out of it.

By the summer of 1958, when I began seriously thinking of expanding my short story to book length, I had already written eight or nine novels, though I was still in my early twenties. Nearly all of those books had been Ace Double Novels - a publishing curiosity in which two novels were bound in one cover, upside down relative to one another, so that whichever way you turned the book you were at the front of somebody's story. Donald A. Wollheim, the progenitor of the Ace Double Novel, had seen some promise in me and had encouraged me to the extent of a book contract every three or four months all through 1957 and 1958. But I was growing restless with Ace. I was tired of having my books published with someone else's book tacked to them. And Ace, valuable market though it was for a hungry young writer, offered little prestige compared to Doubleday, or to Ballantine, the only other paperback house doing science fiction at the time. Doubleday and Ballantine published books by Asimov, Heinlein, Sturgeon, Bradbury, Clarke. Ace generally published books by - well, kids like Silverberg, Phil Dick, Alan Nourse. Ace also published books by Asimov, van Vogt, Simak, de Camp, and others of that rank, but nevertheless there was something vaguely minor-league about the whole operation then. I wanted to get into the big leagues.

I remember taking a long walk before dinner through upper Manhattan one amazingly humid evening in July or August, 1958, wrestling with the unfocused ambitions and yearnings that were troubling me; and by the time I returned home from the restless stroll I knew what I would do. I would turn 'The Winds of Siros' into a novel and sell it to Doubleday. Although when dealing with Don Wollheim at Ace it had been sufficient to turn in three chapters and an outline in order to get the next contract, I would take the risk of writing the entire novel before I showed it to any publisher. I felt that the bigtime publishers would scorn to deal with the likes of me on the basis of a portion and outline.

(About this time, I wrote a short story entirely unrelated to 'The Winds of Siros' called 'Journey's End,' and sold it to another of the short-lived magazines of the day, Super-Science Fiction. When it came out in the April 1958 issue, the editor had changed its title to 'The Seed of Earth.' I liked the new title so much that I appropriated it for my expansion of 'The Winds of Siros.')

I wrote THE SEED OF EARTH in October, 1958. It differed from my previous novels in its greater concentration on the exploration of character. You may not notice all the searching, probing details of character revelation that I thought I was putting into the book, because there really aren't a lot of those things in it, but I thought there were, and certainly my characters were a lot more real than any I had created before. I took the book downtown to my agent, told him it was going to be my breakthrough novel, and instructed him to sell it to Doubleday.

Doubleday turned it down.

That hurt. But they were publishing only one book a month of science fiction at Doubleday, and I decided they were just too busy doing Heinlein and Asimov to have room on the list for me. Well, there was always Ballantine. This time, instead of relying on my agent, I took the manuscript to Ballantine myself. I had a long and amiable chat with Betty Ballantine, told her all about my ambitions and yearnings, and gave her the book.

She turned it down, too.

I still thought it was a pretty good book - but obviously the big-league publishing companies were simply so preoccupied with the outputs of their big-league writers that I wasn't going to break into that charmed circle.

Okay, I resigned myself to seeing THE SEED OF EARTH appear as one more Ace Double Novel.

But just then one of the outstanding s-f magazines, Galaxy, inaugurated a companion line of paperback novels that was designed to follow the old Venture policy: strong s-f adventure with a generous component of sex. THE SEED OF EARTH fit their needs exactly, and so my agent let them have the book. The advance was the same as Ace would have paid - $1000 - but the big difference, to me, was that Galaxy's edition wouldn't be a double novel. I'd have a whole paperback all to myself. I had never had that privilege.

I collected a down payment of $500 in February, 1960, and waited for the other half, which was due on publication. And waited and waited, and never got it, because the Galaxy paperback series sputtered to a halt and terminated without ever publishing my book. Eventually Galaxy, with my permission, recouped its $500 investment by running THE SEED OF EARTH in the issue for June, 1962.

There are a lot of oddities about that. For one thing, stories in Galaxy are supposed to be previously unpublished, but a good chunk of THE SEED OF EARTH had been used in Venture only five years before. For another, there had already been one 'Seed of Earth' by Robert Silverberg in a science-fiction magazine, the unrelated story in Super-Science; this one confused all the indexers. And, too, when Galaxy had bought the novel for its paperback series I had been asked to add a few graphic sex scenes to the original manuscript. This I did; but when the magazine ran the story, it had to be cut for reasons of space from 50,000 words to 35,000. The 15,000 words that went out did not include the inserts I had been asked to supply, which meant that Galaxy had first asked me to expand and then drastically to cut the same story, and had ended up publishing an abridged but unexpurgated version!

Amid such confusions did my novel finally see print - some of it, anyway. With Galaxy's ownership of the book discharged through the magazine release, I was again free to seek a book publisher, and shortly my agent found one: Ace. Don Wollheim, who probably would have bought the book willingly enough in 1958, gathered it in finally, after all these adventures, late in 1961, and in the summer of 1962 it reached the newsstands. Yes, as part of an Ace Double Book, but there was one consolation for me: the flip side of the volume was also a Silverberg title, a story collection called NEXT STOP THE STARS. At least I didn't have to complain that some other guy's book was riding with mine.

And here, fifteen years later, is THE SEED OF EARTH again, at last published in solitary splendor. I realize now that it's not the profound mixture of adventure and human insight that I thought it was in 1958, but I still think it's an okay book. And it's interesting to see how many of my later literary themes and obsessions turn up in it - notably the aliens who place human beings in a condition of stress for hidden purposes of their own, which shows up again in Thorns, Man in the Maze, and a good many other works of mine. I enjoyed reading it again and I'm not overly embarrassed at loosing this very early novel of mine on the newsstands. I hope you'll find pleasure in it not merely as an historical artifact.

Robert Silverberg Oakland, California April, 1976