Rating: 5

The Masks of Time by Robert Silverberg

I had long thought that Philip K. Dick‘s 1964-’66 period was the most intensely productive and prolific streak that any sci-fi author of note has ever enjoyed, with nine major novels produced during those three years. But as it turns out, Robert Silverberg, seven years P.K.’s junior, has got him beat by a mile. During the three-year period 1967-’69, Silverberg somehow managed the superhuman feat of releasing no less than 15 novels — six in ’67, three in ’68 and six again in ’69 — and all of them,

The Stochastic Man by Robert Silverberg

Although his previous output had for several decades been nothing short of prodigious, by the mid-’70s, sci-fi great Robert Silverberg was finally beginning to slow down. The author had released no fewer than 23 sci-fi novels during his initial, “pulpy” phase (1954-1965), and a full 23 more from 1967-1972, his second, more mature, more literate period. And following 1972’s Dying Inside — whose central conceit of a telepath losing his powers has often been seen as corresponding to Silverberg’s self-professed, supposed diminution of his own writing abilities (not that any reader would ever be aware of it) — for the first time in the author’s career,