A collection of six critically acclaimed novellas by science fiction Grand Master Robert Silverberg—including the Nebula Award–winning “Sailing to Byzantium” and “Born with the Dead”Robert Silverberg’s novellas open the door to new worlds: In “Born with the Dead,” a woman wills her body to be “rekindled” after death, allowing her to walk among the living, while her husband is left in the impossible position of accepting her death when he can still see her. In the Nebula Award­–nominated story “Homefaring,” the time-traveling narrator finds himself trapped in the consciousness of a lobsterlike creature of the far future, leading him to reflect on what it means to be human. And in the collection’s Nebula Award­–winning title story, the Earth of the fiftieth century is a place where time is elusive and fluid, and young citizens live as tourists in ancient cities. Together, the stories in Sailing to Byzantium form an engrossing exploration of the short-novel form by one of science fiction’s greatest writers. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Robert Silverberg including rare images and never-before-seen documents from the author’s personal collection.

Three thrilling adventures from Science Fiction Grand Master Robert Silverberg As a young man, Robert Silverberg was a science fiction prodigy, turning out top-flight stories in the blink of an eye. Though written quickly, Silverberg's early prose already showed evidence of the literary and imaginative qualities that would make him a giant in the field—as this trio of space adventures attests. In The Chalice of Death, Hallam Navarre is tasked by his alien master to seek out a fabled weapon on the homeworld of a once-mighty, but long-fallen, empire that is all but forgotten: a planet called Earth. In Starhaven, Johnny Mantell is a fugitive who finds sanctuary on an artificial world run by criminals, only to discover that every haven has its price. And in Shadow on the Stars, Baird Ewing travels to distant Earth on a desperate mission to save his colony from rapacious aliens, but becomes swept up in a bigger war—a...

Somehow, for all my outward pretense of cold-eyed professionalism, all my insistence that writing is simply a job like any other, I've discovered to my surprise and chagrin that there's more than that going on around here, that I write as much out of karmic necessity and some inescapable inner need to rededicate my own skills constantly to my--what? My craft? My art? My profession? I wrote these stories because the only way of earning a living I have ever had has been by writing, but mainly, I have to admit, I wrote these stories because I couldn't not write them. Well, so be it. They involved me in a lot of hard work, but for me, at least, the results justify the toil. I'm glad I wrote them. Writing them, it turns out, was important for me, and even pleasurable, in a curiously complex after-the-fact kind of way. May they give you pleasure now too. --Robert Silverberg, from his Introduction

Here’s an elegant and darkly ironic look at the proposition that some things in life are better not to know…

Won the Nebula Award for Best Short Story in 1969. Nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Short Story in 1970.

The novel concerns a trio of alien explorers, each one surgically altered so that they outwardly appear human, who find themselves separated, and permanently stranded on Earth, after their ship explodes while hovering in low orbit. Each of the aliens is injured during the accident, and all are taken in and nursed back to health by kindly human beings.

The sf Grandmaster's follow up to the career retrospective Phases of the Moon is a glance back to the earliest days of his career. Included with pulp stories not reprinted in decades will be more of the commentary that made Phases so much more than just a collection."I have to confess, right up front here, that you will not find a great deal in the way of poetic vision in these stories, or singing prose, or deep insight into character. Nor are these stories that will tell you much that is new to you about the human condition. These are stories in what is now pretty much a lost tradition in science fiction, the simple and unselfconsciously fast-paced adventure story of the pulp-magazine era. They are stories from the dawn of my career, which began in the closing years of that era, and are straightforward tales of action, in the main, that were written partly for fun and partly for money."--Robert Silverberg, from the Introduction

Majipoor is a magical planet that has existed pretty much unchanged for fourteen thousand years. Eight thousand years ago, Lord Staimont and his army defeated the shapeshifters in a bloody war and penned them in the area of Piurifayne on the continent of Zimroel. Now with a Coronal in charge who speaks of love, the shapeshifters again make war on Majipoor. This story is about that war and how Valentine Pontifex and Lord Hissune win over the shapeshifters with the power of thought and the help of the sea dragons.

"By the time this present group of stories was written I had passed through the cultural turbulence that engulfed nearly everyone s life in the wild, stormy period we know as 'the Sixties,' which for me had actually lasted from 1968 to 1974 or 1975. I had come through my own angry four-year-long retirement from writing in the middle 1970s, and was working again at a steady pace, though not with the frenetic prolificacy of the pre-retirement years. At the beginning of this period my personal life was still pretty chaotic, a carryover from all that Sixties madness, and plenty of new chaos was going to descend on me while some of these stories were written, but I was tiptoeing toward an escape from the various messes that were complicating my life, and by the time the last five stories of this volume were being written I was heading into the stability of my second marriage." -Robert Silverberg, from his Introduction

A collection of six critically acclaimed novellas by science fiction Grand Master Robert Silverberg—including the Nebula Award–winning Sailing to Byzantium and Born with the Dead.Robert Silverberg's novellas open the door to new worlds: In Born with the Dead, a woman wills her body to be rekindled after death, allowing her to walk among the living, while her husband is left in the impossible position of accepting her death when he can still see her. In the Nebula Award­–nominated story Homefaring, the time-traveling narrator finds himself trapped in the consciousness of a lobsterlike creature of the far future, leading him to reflect on what it means to be human. And in the collection's Nebula Award­–winning title story, the Earth of the fiftieth century is a place where time is elusive and fluid, and young citizens live as tourists in ancient cities. Together, the stories in Sailing to Byzantium form an engrossing exploration of the short-novel...

Nominated for the Hugo and Nebula awards for Best Short Story in 1973.