Tag: Robert Silverberg

July 8th, 2025

Charlie had phoned to ask if we could bring Frank Robinson to the party. We left at aboiut 6:00 to pick him up, fighting our way to the Castro, which was gearing up for Sunday’s Gay Day parade. The usual summertime evening fog was already creeping over the hills and making everything slightly hazy.

For a party at Locus it was a small crowd, only about fifteen people, including staff past and present, Bob Silverberg, Dan Chow and his wife and children, Bill Contento, Paul Preuss… Charlie was in a good mood. He loves being the host, and he was especially bucked by Quina playing hostess. The fog had made it too cold for the deck, so we ate inside. Delicious barbecue, tough corn, interesting conversation. Bob Silverberg seemed more outgoing than usual at Locus parties, perhaps because it was a smaller, less fannish crowd.

Dan’s boys got bored and went into the back to play with one of Charlie’s toys, a mechanical chicken that cheeped and laid eggs.

After opening his presents (most of them toys). Charlie presented Silverberg with his Locus award, a water-powered rocket Bob was afraid to set off indoors. Before we all left we each accepted a jar of the plum jam Quina had made, “Locus Jam” with labels designed and printed by Shelly’s artist husband. My own jar read “Chthulu Saves. Locus preserves.”

The jam was delicious.

Locus parties always had at least one celebrity, usually Robert Silverberg, whom I remember as a tall hipster with dark gray hair and a neatly trimmed beard, always dressed in a turtleneck and holding a drink as he gazed shyly over everyone’s heads. Paul Preuss was affable, tanned, and clean-shaven with frat-boy good looks.

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January 1st, 2024

Sun threw a dinner that night in Chinatown so we went. We stopped at home so I could change to my little black dress, then we walked to the Powell Street trolly and rode it to Clay.

It feels smug to ride something people consider a tourist attraction. The Powell Street cable car goes past many hotels — the Francis Drake, the St. Francis-Westin (where I stayed in 1973). We found our seats in the middle of a trio of funny, loud tourists from Little Rock Arkansas. They were right out of Designing Woman, two pretty young things with carefully hot-ironed hair and a plump, blonde good old girl. They all giggled a lot, and exclaimed over the cable cars. The conductor assumed a long-suffering air when he learned that their tickets had expired and just stood there intoning, “you need to pay me, ladies” while the good old girl ruffled through her singles in an obvious attempt to pay him.

The dinner was at the Celadon on the corner of Stockton and Clay. Pretty ritzy. There were about ten of us, Jennifer, with bouffanted hair, Lisa, the office manager with dark hair, two French guests, an Italian man, a hard-of-hearing man and his wife, (they wore hearing aids and had barely perceptible accents, a slight slurring of consonants) and a husband and wife with their little girl. We all sat at a huge wheel of a table and the courses were placed on a lazy Susan in the middle. White wine, Szechuan beef, sweet and sour chicken, crispy duck. I had no idea I could eat so much.

The topic of the conversation tonight was the fact that Tim has — at last! — frozen the code on Tops Terminal. I know only that this means at least one stage of the product is finished. It was hard not to feel proud of him, listening to everyone discuss the product, and know he is relieved to have so much behind him.

The party broke up at about nine and we rode another cable car back. This time there weren’t any obvious tourists. The car was almost empty, and the conductor scolded every passenger as they got on except for Tim and me. He said he liked the way we signaled.

Tops Terminal, where Tim worked at that time, was a division of Sun. It was, I think, through Tim’s acquaintance with John Gilmore (whose employee number at Sun was five) that we’d moved to the Bay Area.

Silicon Valley culture was still new, and I was simply an onlooker by way of my relationship with Tim. I wish I could remember more about what the conversation was like at the Celadon. A weird evangelism permeated hi-tech at that time. “But there’s an opening at (fill in start-up here)“ was the most frequent response when one of Tim’s cronies discovered I worked at LOCUS, followed by a troubled silence when I revealed my undergraduate degree was in English and I had no interest in learning to write code.

I recall nothing like that at the Celadon, only that I felt very adult in my little black dress and heels and proud of the fuss they were making over Tim. I looked across the table at the little girl with her parents and wondered what she would remember about it.

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December 29th, 2023

This morning I did not get up in time. I kept having such fascinating dreams that I would go back to sleep to see how they ended. Never returned to the same one, though. I only barely remember a couple of them. One was about a burglar in an attic and another had me talking to Alice Walker while she lay in a hospital bed.

It was one of those vague, gray days at work that are common in between issues. Since the next issue is Locus’ 20th anniversary, Charlie wants to publish a list of the original subscribers when Locus came out in 1968. I typed the names in from the card catalogue Charlie (or his wife) had put together two decades ago. Quite a distinguished list — Robert Silverberg, of course, A.C. Clarke, Robert Heinlein, George Scithers, Chelsea Yarbro…

He wants the rest divided up into those who still have subs, those who have died, those who are still active in fandom, and those who aren’t much of anything. I spent most of my time working on this and his CD file. Charlie wasn’t there much of the day because he and Shelly had to go to Sacramento to check the issue.

How long ago “two decades ago” seemed to me back then, and how short a time it seems now.

Perhaps this was when I found the photos of Charlie and his first wife in Locus’ “morgue,” — black and white shots of them picnicing with friends, lounging on the grass in a Boston park. She was pretty and slender, Charlie stout, crew-cut, clean-shaven and serious. I looked at these with the slightly disbelieving curiousity of a twenty-something examining a youthful photo of an “old person.” (Charlie was fifty-one in 1988.)

1968? That was a lifetime ago! I was TEN that year.

I wish I could remember what I was typing these lists into — Wordstar? More likely it was Dbase, the first database I ever used, or tried to use. I remember it as nightnarishly clunky and non-intuititve.

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December 13th, 2023

Egad. Only about $275 in the checking account. At least we know the rent check went through.

Charlie’s plum tree is beginning to bloom. Last year he had a party to celebrate it but I’m not sure he will this year. Since they built the house next door and spoiled his view, bitterness has filled his soul. He keeps the drapes on that side of his house closed, and last week I saw him leaning on the rail of his porch and staring gloomily down at the construction. It’s a big, handsome house, painted gray with white trim, and it’s pretty seen through the branches of the plum tree.

Still, it’s a pity. When I was still doing paste-up, I used to watch for deer, which would walk into the empty lot where the house is now standing and look for windfall plums. I will miss them.

When I began at Locus in 1986, we were still using old-fashioned paste-up, and I worked mainly at a table in the living room, against the broad picture windows looking out onto the deck and the plum tree and the woodsy East Bay Hills. Charlie would sit at his desk against the same window on the other side of the room, usually on the phone. There was a tone he used when he said people’s first name to notify anyone listening he was speaking to someone important. “Bob!” said in a certain way was not any old “Bob” but Robert Silverberg.

“Poul!” (Anderson) “Greg!” (Benford), “Pat!” (Murphy) , ” Chip!” (Delaney), and I could swear, on one amazing occasion, “Stephen!”

My own table typically had a paste-up board, a hot roller and wax, carefully cropped word-processed paragraphs I’d typed up and run out in the back office, red tape for where photos went, and an open magazine (usually VOGUE) to use as a base when waxing the little paragraphs before affixing them to the board. I enjoyed my job. If Charlie wasn’t conversing with someone interesting on the phone — or better yet, in person — he played good music on his stereo, and the view from the window into the plum tree was relaxing. I remember watching several deer, three does and two fawns, browsing below in the shade, nuzzling the grass for fallen fruit. If you walked out onto the deck they would not run away, but look up with interest and move forward hopefully, in case you dropped something edible.

By this entry, we had abandoned paste-up for Aldus Pagemaker, I was permanently at the computer in the back office, and Shelly was at my old desk by the window.

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December 10th, 2023

Charlie wants us to get the issue out, the first part that is, by Friday, which means I’ll probably be putting in some late hours this week. He has “promoted” me from Editorial Assistant to Production Assistant, mainly so he can list Shelly as Editorial Assistant on the colophon. Trevin is now “librarian.” He was listed as Editorial Trainee for months and he’s leaving in a few weeks to go back to school.

Today, Tim went through all the papers piled on the coffee table and “organized” then into various places in the apartment. I would never have had the courage. There are articles of correspondence, like IRS forms, that I can’t handle without building up to a heart-pounding anxiety attack. There are others, (like the letter from our last landlord about the cleaning bill) that I don’t even read. I just note there is writing on the paper, have Tim relay to me whether we need to send money or not. I’ve tried reasoning out these nervous seizures of mine and what it comes down to is that I am afraid of being yelled at by my father, an IRS agent, my tax filer, my landlord, Tim and/or my bank. (I’m not afraid of Charlie yelling at me. That’s what he does.) I don’t envision poverty, prison, or public disgrace — just the horrible prospect of having to explain myself. Maybe it has something to do with all those years in Catholic schools.

“Charlie” was Charlie Brown, editor of Locus Magazine, the science fiction trade magazine where I was working at the time. He was a round, bearded, wall-eyed professional fan, a bully to his small, mostly female staff, but a good friend to writers he respected. The magazine, which is still around, and started as a single page promotional flyer in 1968, was published back then out of his house up in the Montclair Hills. Charlie grossly underpaid us, but we had free access to all the Stouffer’s frozen dinners in his freezer for lunch, and working at Locus could mean meeting in person science fiction luminaries like Robert Silverberg, Fritz Leiber, Lucius Shepard, Lisa Goldstein, and Marion Zimmer Bradley. Brushes with greatness over the phone included Arthur C. Clarke , Robert Heinlein and Ursula Le Guin. Harlan Ellison hung up on me at least once.

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Tag: Robert Silverberg