#robert silverberg

There is a history to be written about the idea of man-made societal collapse. In literature it seems to arise after we invented the tool to actually eradicate society: the nuke. Last year I reviewed Leigh Brackett’s 1955 The Long Tomorrow, one of the very first books that built an entire story on the possibility. Another road to collapse is overpopulation, and already in 1798 Malthus speculated…

Cover illustration by Don Punchatz

Robert Silverberg Downward to the Earth

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Aaaaand drumroll please, for the biggest disappointment of the year. Oh, how this book was hyped up to me for so long. "Silverberg's best," they all said in unison. To be fair, I can see how this might've been mind-blowing back in 1969, flying off the coattails of the Hippie Revolution when the concept of doing psychedelics and *gasp* having empathy for others was a radical new idea. In 2025, its peace and love kumbaya bullshit is simply outdated and shallow. That isn't to say that this novel doesn't have its merits, but before I go there, I just thought it was so funny how the edition of this novel I read included a foreword from Silverberg himself where he writes about how much he hated writing this novel and how he thought it sucked only until it gained a positive critical reception, and then he changed his mind about it. Feelings about your own work can change, I get it, but I think its positive reception had much more to do with its themes being culturally relevant at the time than it actually being like... a well-crafted story. All I'm saying is that perhaps Silverberg's original intuition about his own work was correct, but I digress.

The story takes place on a post-colonial planet of... uh... Elephant and Monkey people (a tone-deaf allegory for indigenous people even in the 70s)... and as our main character Edmund Gunderson returns to his old post to embark on a journey of spiritual atonement, he reflects upon the changes in the world and of his own guilt surrounding his implication in the former slavery and exploitation of the Nildoror species (who are actually highly intelligent and communicative, surprise!). Some of the sights and sounds he sees on his journey are actually beautiful, and I think Silverberg did a great job of allowing the moral depth of the main character's quest to reveal itself in tandem with the physical steps he takes along the way, but almost everything else about the book sucked. The prose is average at best; the characters are two-dimensional despite Silverberg's best attempt to portray them as flawed individuals; the whole thing really comes off with the same energy of a college-aged white boy who travels to Thailand to convert to Buddhism and then comes back to California as a spiritually enlightened grifter with a career in self-help courses and drop shipping plastic utensils. Silverberg's attempt to be culturally and spiritually profound, while ultimately good intentioned, was completely lacking in intersectional nuance and at times felt straight-up smug in its self-righteousness. I actually laughed out loud at the ending because it was so dumb.

Frank Frazetta Downward to the Earth by Robert Silverberg (1970)