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Robert Silverberg's Trips offers a rather strange and perhaps skewed look at his writing. Covering two years at the beginning of the 70s, when the New Wave was still aiming for relevancy and the "old guard" was trying to find its place in the brave new world created by the New Wave authors, Silverberg found himself writing against his own style, often, as he explains in his introductions, producing efforts which didn't quite feel right to him.

However, while some of the stories in Trips don't stand up to the test of time, many of them do. "Born with the Dead," which went on to win a Nebula Award for Silverberg, is perhaps the most successful of the stories included, but others, such as the titular "Trips" or "The Dybbuk of Mazel Tov IV" stand the test of time. These stories show that no matter how much Silverberg was feeling that times were changing around him, he could still tell a good story.

Silverberg portrays the period as a time of rampant narrative experimentation, and his stories do demonstrate the sort of thing that was happening. "Breckenridge and the Continuum," for instance, is a less than successful trying to be too many things and almost consciously trying to set itself apart from the other stories in Silverberg's canon.

Generally, Silverberg's concerns about his writing are less in evidence within the text of his stories, and only come to light in the introductions which in some ways give a better indication of the times than the stories themselves. In these pieces, Silverberg talks about personal issues he was having and relates them to the way the world was changing in the early 70s. They provide a context for the stories which can stand on their own, but which are stronger for having a background against which to read them.

While the introductions add quite a bit to the collection, the strength is in the stories, nearly all of which, even when Silverberg is at his most experimental, manage to stand up to the passage of nearly four decades. The few stories that show their age, like the anthropological tale "Schwartz Between the Galaxies," can be seen as indicative of the period in which they were written. They remind the reader that all authors can have weak outings, perhaps especially when trying to shoehorn themselves into a newer style of writing than they are used to.

For the most part, Trips is a good introduction to Silverberg's writing. There are a few very strong pieces and a few which haven't aged well, most of the stories demonstrate Silverberg's creative quality and show a journeyman's ability to both entertain and make the reader think about the situation he has proposed.

Steven H Silver is a seven-time Hugo Nominee for Best Fan Writer and the editor of the anthologies Wondrous Beginnings, Magical Beginnings, and Horrible Beginnings. He is the publisher of ISFiC Press. In addition to maintaining several bibliographies and the Harry Turtledove website, Steven is heavily involved in convention running and publishes the fanzine Argentus.