''Gilgamesh in the Outback'' is a

science fiction Science fiction (sometimes shortened to Sci-Fi or SF) is a genre of speculative fiction which typically deals with imaginative and futuristic concepts such as advanced science and technology, space exploration, time travel, parallel uni ...

novella by American writer

Robert Silverberg Robert Silverberg (born January 15, 1935) is an American author and editor, best known for writing science fiction. He is a multiple winner of both Hugo and Nebula Awards, a member of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame, and a Gr ...

, a sequel to his historical novel '' Gilgamesh the King'' as well as a story in the

shared universe A shared universe or shared world is a fictional universe from a set of creative works where more than one writer (or other artist) independently contributes a work that can stand alone but fits into the joint development of the storyline, chara ...

series '' Heroes in Hell''. It won the

Hugo Award for Best Novella The Hugo Award for Best Novella is one of the Hugo Awards given each year for science fiction or fantasy stories published or translated into English during the previous calendar year. The novella award is available for works of fiction of between ...

in 1987 and was also nominated for the

Nebula Award for Best Novella The Nebula Award for Best Novella is given each year by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA) for science fiction or fantasy novellas. A work of fiction is defined by the organization as a novella if it is between 17,500 and 4 ...

in 1986. Originally published in ''

Asimov's Science Fiction ''Asimov's Science Fiction'' is an American science fiction magazine which publishes science fiction and fantasy named after science fiction author Isaac Asimov. It is currently published by Penny Publications. From January 2017, the publicatio ...

'',''The Supernatural Index: A Listing of Fantasy, Supernatural, Occult, Weird, and Horror Anthologies'', Mike Ashley & William G. Contento, Greenwood Press, 1995, p.507 it was then printed in '' Rebels in Hell'' before being incorporated into Silverberg's novel ''To the Land of the Living''. Real-life writers Robert E. Howard and H. P. Lovecraft feature as characters in the novella. Robert Silverberg wrote that he was "drawn into" writing a story for the " Heroes in Hell" project. While he remembered that the central concept of the series was "never clearly explained" to him, he noted the similarity of "Heroes in Hell" to

Philip José Farmer Philip José Farmer (January 26, 1918 – February 25, 2009) was an American author known for his science fiction and fantasy novels and short stories. Obituary. Farmer is best known for his sequences of novels, especially the ''World of Tiers ...

Riverworld Riverworld is a fictional planet and the setting for a series of science fiction books written by Philip José Farmer (1918–2009). Riverworld is an artificial "Super-Earth" environment where all humans (and pre-humans) are reconstructed. The ...

works, and decided "to run my own variant on what Farmer had done a couple of decades earlier." After writing "Gilgamesh in the Outback", he decided that, since the story "was all so much fun," to write two sequels, "The Fascination of the Abomination" and "Gilgamesh in Uruk". In writing those stories, as Silverberg recalled, he "never read many of the other 'Heroes in Hell' stories", and had "no idea" of how consistent his work was with that of his "putative collaborators"; instead, he had "gone his own way . . . with only the most tangential links to what others had invented." Silverberg compiled the three stories as ''To the Land of the Living'', revising the stories to remove any references to other writers' contributions to "Heroes in Hell" to avoid copyright issues. ''To the Land of the Living'' was published in the British market in 1989 and reprinted in an American edition in 1990.

References

External links

* 1986 short stories Short stories by Robert Silverberg Hugo Award for Best Novella winning works Works originally published in Asimov's Science Fiction Cultural depictions of Gilgamesh {{1980s-sf-story-stub