Trips
Silverberg’s introduction to “Trip” in the collection
Trips, vol. 4
of the Collected Stories of Robert Silverberg (Subterranean Press,
2009),
states that he wrote the story with the goal of being the ultimate alternative universes
story, and he lived up to that goal, devising nearly a dozen alternative Bay Area
universes for his hero Cameron to express his wanderlust. Admittedly, there’s no actual
time travel because the story was part of an anthology of ultimate sf, and Silverberg
left the time travelin’ to
Philip K. Dick’s “
A Little Something for Us Tempunauts.” But there is a world that
Cameron thinks is a 1950s San Francisco (it isn’t) and there’s a chance that Cameron
experiences the passage of time at
rates that differ from world to
world.
Warning: The first publication of the story in that ultimate anthology
(Final Stage: The Ultimate Science Fiction Anthology) was “cut to shreds” by
a ham-handed editor at Charterhouse, so your best bet is to read it in one of
Silverberg’s later collections.
— Michael Main
There’s an infinity of worlds, Elizabeth, side by side, worlds in which all possible
variations of every possible event take place. Worlds in which you and I are happily
married, in which you and I have been married and divorced, in which you and I don’t
exist, in which you exist and I don’t, in which we meet and loathe one another, in
which—in which—do you see, Elizabeth, there's a world for everything, and I’ve been
traveling from world to world.
