Review: Up the Line, by Robert Silverberg

Review: Up the Line, by Robert Silverberg

by Rich Horton

SFWA Grandmaster Robert Silverberg had a career of a rather interesting shape. He broke into the field as a teenager in 1954, with his first two stories appearing that year, one in the UK magazine Nebula, and one in the US magazine Future. His first novel, a juvenile called Revolt on Alpha C, appeared in 1955, and over the next decade he published a couple of dozen SF novels and many dozen stories. (He also published widely in other genres: crime, Westerns, erotica, but SF was always his prime focus.) By the early '60s, however, the magazine market had greatly shrunk, and Silverberg mostly left the field, concentrating for a few years on popular science. SF novels kept appearing at a slower rate, but some of these were expansion of earlier stories, or YA. Famously he was lured back to SF by editor Frederik Pohl, who urged him to do more ambitious work, and beginning in 1963 some increasingly impressive short fiction started appearing, with a return to novels in 1967. Over the next five years (though a couple more novels appeared in 1975 and 1976) he published another couple of dozen novels, and the best of these are outstanding work. He publicly "retired" again by about 1975, only to be lured back to the field by a very high advance for his novel Lord Valentine's Castle, which came out in 1980, and over the next couple of decades another couple of dozen novels appeared, about eight in the Majipoor series but many unconnected. He produced some more short fiction through the first decade of the new millennium before, to all intents and purposes, finally retiring from fiction writing.

I've been making a somewhat desultory effort to read through all his early SF novels, and all his mid period novels. (I've read a good sampling of his later work, put I'm not sure I have the energy to attack all of Majipoor.) The middle period novels really do include some remarkable work -- I'd mention Thorns, Downward to the Earth, Dying Inside, A Time of Changes, and The Stochastic Man as particular favorites. There are still I few from this period I hadn't get gotten to, and one of these is Up the Line. This was serialized in two parts in Amazing Stories, July and September 1969, and more or less simultaneously appeared as a paperback original from Ballantine Books.

Up the Line is a time travel novel. Judson Elliot III is a young man in a the middle of the 21st century, bored with his pre-ordained role as a law clerk (his father is a judge), so he runs away to New Orleans, where he somewhat fortuitously runs into a somewhat older black man named Sam, who suggests he apply for a job with the Time Service once he runs out of money. It seems time travel has been around for a couple of decades, and people in the Time Service work essentially as tour guides, taking groups of ten or so people "up the line" to historical times (it's impossible to go to the future of wherever your own life has taken you.) 

Jud actually has a decent education in Byzantine history, and in addition some of his ancestors were from Greece and Turkey back in those times, so he decides to concentrate on that period. We get a good look at the rules the Time Service operates under -- avoidance of paradoxes, trying never to meet another of your "selves" when you go back in time, etc. We also realize pretty quickly that the Time Service treats these rules a bit loosely, though with care -- and there is a certain amount of smuggling of relics from the past, as well as some other theoretically forbidden activity. Still, there is the risk of the other branch of the Time bureaucracy, the Time Patrol, discovering your shenanigans, which can lead to suspension, to a trip back in time to fix whatever problems you caused, or even in extreme cases to erasure from history.

We see a number of trips in time -- first back just over a century to witness Huey Long's assassination, then a number of different trips to Byzantium/Constantinople. These trips go back all the way to Constantine's time, and forward through Justinian's era, Belisarius, the Iconoclasts, and finally the last couple of centuries as Islam and the Crusaders variously despoil the Byzantines. There is a fair bit of depiction of the real history behind all this, and there is also a lot of depiction of sex -- at first with members of the tour groups, but eventually, inevitably, with the "locals", including the Empress Theodosia. (For this novel, Silverberg accepts Procopius' slanders of Theodosia as the truth, though it's my understanding that historians now regard those stories as sheer political smears.) There is a scary episode with one of the tourists setting up a criminal enterprise of his own, made worse by his interest in barely pubescent girls, and, of course, Jud is eventually tempted to try a sort of distant incest with his many greats grandmother -- only to fall desperately in love.

In the end, I think this is pretty minor Silverberg. It's professionally done -- a slick and engaging read. The manipulation of time paradoxes is well handled, and the history seems pretty solid. Some aspects are a bit queasy making to contemporary eyes -- the characterization of Sam, Jud's black friend, while positive, does make some political points that maybe seem a bit off coming from a white writer. And the sex is -- well, let's just say the male gaze gets some play, and the sexual morés are perhaps unconvincing -- thought partly intended, I think, as a satire on a future hedonistic culture. On the whole its a decent read, but it's not one of the books on which Silverberg's reputation is based.