Story Details
Categories Science Fiction Time Travel
"The Songs of Summer" intertwines the stories of Kennon and his community, the peaceful natives of a future Earth, and Chester Dugan, a man from 1956 who mysteriously finds himself transported to Kennon's time. The narrative follows the out-of-place Dugan as he travels with Kennon to a significant cultural event called the Singing. Dugan grapples with his sudden displacement through time and his determination to adapt and capitalize on his unexpected circumstances. For Kennon and his people, the man from the past is a terrifying reminder of things they had left behind: violence, covetousness, ego, and greed.
Author Details
In a career that goes back to 1954, Robert Silverberg has published hundreds of science fiction stories and more than a hundred novels. He has won five Nebula and five Hugo Awards and in 2004 was named a Grand Master by the Science Fiction Writers of America. Robert Silverberg is a recipient of the L. Ron Hubbard Lifetime Achievement Award for Outstanding Contributions to the Arts (2003). His best-known books include Lord Valentine’s Castle, Dying Inside and A Time of Changes. STORY NOTES FOR "THE SONGS OF SUMMER" This is yet another of the stories I wrote in June of 1955. As a Columbia undergraduate in 1954 I had read with some awe—staying up through the night and finishing it at dawn—Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying. The use not merely of multiple point of view but of multiple narrator seemed to me a startling and awesome technical device; and with the rashness of youth I tried it myself in “The Songs of Summer.” Having already achieved—so it seemed to me—some mastery of the conventional single-viewpoint short story, I was now ready, at the age of twenty, to begin experimenting with more ambitious fictional forms. (And also with some themes, like that of the group mind, that I would use again and again in later years.) “The Songs of Summer” was another product of June, 1955. The first dozen editors to whom my agent sent it were unimpressed—or, at any rate, didn’t care to print it. Whenever they felt like publishing this sort of experimentation, they had Theodore Sturgeon or James Blish to write it for them. But after it had been circulating for about a year, during which time I became well known to the New York editors and was starting to bring them the stories they had rejected the year before and have them buy them the second time around, it found a home with Robert Lowndes’ magazine Science Fiction Stories in the spring of 1956. My records indicate that I was paid 3/4 of a cent a word for it—$48.00. By then my name was becoming a familiar one on the contents pages of the s-f magazines, and I suppose Lowndes thought he could take the risk. (In fact, he ran it as the lead story in his September, 1956 issue—though it was Clifford D. Simak who got his name on the cover.) I didn’t send a copy to Faulkner to see what he thought of it.
The Songs of Summer, by Robert Silverberg
Author Details
In a career that goes back to 1954, Robert Silverberg has published hundreds of science fiction stories and more than a hundred novels. He has won five Nebula and five Hugo Awards and in 2004 was named a Grand Master by the Science Fiction Writers of America. Robert Silverberg is a recipient of the L. Ron Hubbard Lifetime Achievement Award for Outstanding Contributions to the Arts (2003). His best-known books include Lord Valentine’s Castle, Dying Inside and A Time of Changes. STORY NOTES FOR "THE SONGS OF SUMMER" This is yet another of the stories I wrote in June of 1955. As a Columbia undergraduate in 1954 I had read with some awe—staying up through the night and finishing it at dawn—Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying. The use not merely of multiple point of view but of multiple narrator seemed to me a startling and awesome technical device; and with the rashness of youth I tried it myself in “The Songs of Summer.” Having already achieved—so it seemed to me—some mastery of the conventional single-viewpoint short story, I was now ready, at the age of twenty, to begin experimenting with more ambitious fictional forms. (And also with some themes, like that of the group mind, that I would use again and again in later years.) “The Songs of Summer” was another product of June, 1955. The first dozen editors to whom my agent sent it were unimpressed—or, at any rate, didn’t care to print it. Whenever they felt like publishing this sort of experimentation, they had Theodore Sturgeon or James Blish to write it for them. But after it had been circulating for about a year, during which time I became well known to the New York editors and was starting to bring them the stories they had rejected the year before and have them buy them the second time around, it found a home with Robert Lowndes’ magazine Science Fiction Stories in the spring of 1956. My records indicate that I was paid 3/4 of a cent a word for it—$48.00. By then my name was becoming a familiar one on the contents pages of the s-f magazines, and I suppose Lowndes thought he could take the risk. (In fact, he ran it as the lead story in his September, 1956 issue—though it was Clifford D. Simak who got his name on the cover.) I didn’t send a copy to Faulkner to see what he thought of it.
