''Gilgamesh in the Outback'' is a science fiction novella by American writer Robert Silverberg, a sequel to his historical novel ''

Gilgamesh the King ''Gilgamesh the King'' is a 1984 historical novel by American writer Robert Silverberg, presenting the ''Epic of Gilgamesh'' as a novel. In the afterword the author wrote "at all times I have attempted to interpret the fanciful and fantastic even ...

'' as well as a story in the shared universe series ''

Heroes in Hell ''Heroes in Hell'' is a series of shared world fantasy books, within the genre Bangsian fantasy, created and edited by Janet Morris and written by her, Chris Morris, C. J. Cherryh and others. The first 12 books in the series were published b ...

''. It won the Hugo Award for Best Novella in 1987 and was also nominated for the Nebula Award for Best Novella in 1986. Originally published in '' Asimov's Science Fiction'',''The Supernatural Index: A Listing of Fantasy, Supernatural, Occult, Weird, and Horror Anthologies'', Mike Ashley & William G. Contento,

Greenwood Press Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc. (GPG), also known as ABC-Clio/Greenwood (stylized ABC-CLIO/Greenwood), is an educational and academic publisher (middle school through university level) which is today part of ABC-Clio. Established in 1967 as Gr ...

, 1995, p.507 it was then printed in ''

Rebels in Hell ''Heroes in Hell'' is a series of shared world fantasy books, within the genre Bangsian fantasy, created and edited by Janet Morris and written by her, Chris Morris, C. J. Cherryh and others. The first 12 books in the series were published b ...

'' before being incorporated into Silverberg's novel ''To the Land of the Living''. Real-life writers

Robert E. Howard Robert Ervin Howard (January 22, 1906June 11, 1936) was an American writer. He wrote pulp fiction in a diverse range of genres. He is well known for his character Conan the Barbarian and is regarded as the father of the sword and sorcery subge ...

and H. P. Lovecraft feature as characters in the novella. Robert Silverberg wrote that he was "drawn into" writing a story for the "

" 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's Riverworld 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