The Collected Stories of Robert Silverberg Volume Five: The Palace at Midnight

Somehow, for all my outward pretence 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

Contents:

• Introduction
• Our Lady of the Sauropods
• Waiting for the Earthquake
• The Regulars
• The Far Side of the Bell-Shaped Curve
• A Thousand Paces Along the Via Dolorosa
• How They Pass the Time in Pelpel
• The Palace at Midnight
• The Man Who Floated in Time
• Gianni
• The Pope of the Chimps
• Thesme and the Ghayrog
• At the Conglomeroid Cocktail Party
• The Trouble with Sempoanga
• Jennifer’s Lover
• Not Our Brother
• Gate of Horn, Gate of Ivory
• Dancers in the Time-Flux
• Needle in a Timestack
• Amanda and the Alien
• Snake and Ocean, Ocean and Snake
• The Changeling
• Basileus
• Homefaring