Gene Szafran’s cover for 1971 edition
3.25/5 (Above Average)
A preliminary note: I’m something of a Robert Silverberg completionist, especially work from his glory years of 1967-1975. I’ve reviewed forty-seven of Silverberg’s short stories and thirteen of his novels–I’ve also read but never reviewed A Time of Changes (1971), The Masks of Time (1968), Tower of Glass (1970), and the stories in Capricorn Games (1976).
While a middling Silverberg novel at best, Those Who Watch (1967) almost succeeds as a revisionist take on UFO panic. The aliens do not seek to experiment on, exterminate, or manipulate humans. Instead, this is a book about the lost and lonely, and how their love and care for the injured interstellar visitors that appear on their doorsteps transform their lives. It’s a problematic work that simultaneously pulses with kindness.
The General Shape of Things Across the New Mexico Sky
The year is 1982. Two metamorphic alien races, engaged in a seemingly perpetual galactic cold war, watch Earth. Each worries for the day when humanity reaches the stars. A Dirnan watcher spaceship crashes in the New Mexico desert separating and stranding its three crew, members of a sexual group (male, male, female). Each injured survivor is found by a kind person in need. All three humans see beyond the humanoid alien exteriors yet still provide assistance and protection.
Charley Estancia, an eleven-year-old Native American, does not feel at home on his reservation. His family “thought [him] to be a little crazy in the head, a skinny boy full of dreams and white man’s ideas” (6). He wants to attend an interracial high school in Albuquerque and become an astronaut. In one of Silverberg’s many problematic moments, Charley grows frustrated with his own people–“crazy, all of them. Crazy with fear, crazy with religion” (6). He sees tribal practice as entirely pandering to the desires of white tourists rather than meaningful belief and tradition. One day discovers Mirtin, the eldest of the Dirnan sexual group, horrifically injured. He brings Mirtin tortillas and ascertains the alien providence of his visitor. They enjoy each others company. Mirtin represents the vast world that exists beyond his pueblo. And Mirtin sees the opportunity to encourage a precocious young mind.
Colonel Tom Falkner struggles with his recent divorce and a job he adamantly does not believe in. Ever since his earliest memories reading UFO stories and science fiction, Falkner wanted to be an astronaut. A night in 1970 looms in his memory, the beginning of the end, in which a fellow trainee drunkenly told him that his lack of “a couple of clean-cut kids waiting for him to come home” spoils the “TV part” of being an American hero (14). Six months later, Falkner’s cut after a routine physical for an ailment of his inner ear that demonstrated, as of yet, “no overt tendencies” (14). The Air Force lined him up with a soul-destroying job in the Atmospheric Objects Survey, the lead man investigating claims of UFO contact in Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, and Colorado (15). He comes across the injured Glair, the female member of the Dirnan sexual group, and he decides not to report his discovery to his superiors. She seems to be a plastic recreation of his dream woman. Cue Silverberg’s breast fetish. Glair loves both of her partners and initially sees her sexual relationship with Falkner more as a means of survival. But due to his kindness and deep pain, she finds room “to love someone else, too” (88). Their shared loved helps guide him out of his haze.
Kathryn walls herself and her child up in a new suburban house, replete with mechanical childcare device, at the edge of the desert. She mourns the death of her husband. Numb from the pain, she stumbles upon Vorneen (the male heartthrob of the alien group). She impulsively decides to not turn in the strangely alien man. She wonders if her husband, who died in a crash in Syria in an anti-Communist “peace” intervention, waited for assistance that never came. As she nurses Vorneen back to health, she attempts to understand whether the local Contact Cult tells the truth about stories of humanity’s interaction with aliens. Kathryn concludes the Contact Cult is a shame and decides to keep the secret of her alien patient to herself. Silverberg includes a sustained attack on an organized religion based on alien contact which, I assume, doubles as an attack on Scientology. He ridicules its moneymaking aim: “Kathyrn was startled [at the charge for religious materials]. Proselytizers didn’t usually dive for profits so early in the conversion process” (80). And also points out the crafty intersection of “ancient ritual and modern scientific gadgetry” that deludes its followers (78). The self-presentation of Contact Cult’s founder Frederic Storm elicits parallels to fascist imagery (79). Vorneen’s love drags Kathryn out of her numb pain. And like Glair, Vorneen feels true connection to his human caretaker.
UFO Panic as Rumination on Loss and Loneliness
Those Who Watch overtly engages with the growing 60s obsession with UFO paranoia.1 Silverberg suggests that Americans project their fears into the skies in periods of great stress–“just after the Second World War, in the new atomic tensions of the U.S.-Russian rivalry” and after Kennedy’s assassination (27). In the years before Silverberg wrote his novel, the case of Barney and Betty Hilly garnered substantial press and a best-selling book The Interrupted Journey (1966).2 The couple claimed they were abducted by humanoid extraterrestrials in spaceship with flashing red lights in rural New Hampshire. At first glance, Silverberg feeds into the narrative of gross government coverup and sinister galactic plans, the Earth is indeed watched by two alien factions.
The galactic details remain in the background. Silverberg avoids the standard UFO plot points. Instead, the focus remains on the peaceful and kind interaction between the three humans and the alien sexual group they encounter. This is a quiet novel distant that reworks the moment of paranoia that spawned it. Despite Silverberg’s frustrating tendencies (a fixation on breasts and a condescending treatment of Native American ritual), Those Who Watch reads as a sex-positive novel–dare I say “free love”–with space for non-heteronormative relationships (although, only between aliens).
Somewhat recommended for Silverberg fans.
Tim White’s cover for the 1977 edition
Notes
- For historical analysis of the late 50s and 60s growth of the UFO obsession, check out Nigel Watson’s Captured by Aliens? A History and Analysis of American Abduction Claims (2020) and Greg Eghigian’s After the Flying Saucers Came: A Global History of the UFO Phenomenon (2024). ↩︎
- See the Wikipedia article. ↩︎
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Science Fiction and Other Suspect Ruminations 
This is definitely a case of enjoying reading the review over reading the novel. Silverberg’s problematic writing of women characters was very evident. However, I do (in hindsight) agree with your “sex-positive” comment. The relationships between the humans and aliens were what got me through the book (although not necessarily getting me to like the book).
Silverberg’s best moments are those personal interactions vs. the almost comical ideocracy of the non-Dirnan aliens trying to track down the trio. I found the novel almost emblematic of the two worlds that Silverberg found himself in the mid-1960s — his shift away from workmanlike pulp adventure to more introspective genre-bending works.
The novel would have been far more sex-positive if one of the aliens paired off in a sexual relationship with a human of the same sex. One gets the sense that Silverberg is super open to bisexuality in the story as it’s a feature of both alien societies. Unfortunately, he does not provide space for its existence among humans. In that way, the novel treads dangerous ground by suggesting non-heteronormative relationships are alien. But then again, both Falkner and Kathryn are not bothered by the sexual groups of the aliens — which both Glair and Vorneen clearly explain to them.
Such a beautiful Tim White cover. For me, composing and AI just don’t have the same flair, the same class. But maybe I’m just being sentimental.
Yeah, it’s one of his better ones.
You are correct. My view on AI art: I find myself reacting strongly and negatively. I tend to believe that only people who don’t understand or value creativity think it is actual art. Art is so much more than simply what it looks like at first glance. It’s the thought that goes into making it, the time, the labor of love, the expression of creativity, the struggle, the historical context, the theory, the interactions in a community of creators, etc. I block social media accounts that promote AI art. The creative process is under threat. It’s a terrifying time. I also unfollowed blogs, youtube channels, and websites that used it. Few things make me as frustrated and pissed off as people believing that “creativity” vs. parroting other people’s creative acts actually happens with a computer program. That’s my impulsive, from the gut, poorly thought through take.
I understand your impulsive reaction. It’s certainly a reaction that many of us had spontaneously and that still depresses many of us. It actually took me a while to develop a somewhat differentiated position.
It would be going too far to write a long essay here, which I would probably not be up to.
So just a few thoughts.
But of course – not to contradict myself – I miss the “hand-painted” SF covers. Many publishers will close the door on illustrators. But at some point there will be publishers who will open these doors again. It took color film to turn black-and-white film into an art form.
Yeah, I tend to be a bit more draconian than you. I’m a teacher. I see how my students use AI. Rather than ask me questions about a text, they use a paraphrase program to summarize it — as if that helps understand its connection to my class material and the questions I am asking. It’s an apparatus of laziness. In that moment they might get an answer “right” — or at least, until the exam comes around and they have no idea what they are looking at even if they supposedly already read it and answered an almost identical question. The youtuber, as youtubers have in the past, should create some other way to present their material if they can’t create what they need themselves or afford to pay someone. There are inexpensive classes one can take for all types of basic design. Create a project that is actually yours vs. skimmed from other people’s work by a machine. I can’t speak to a niche that you are mentioning in particular but I do see value in AI (again, not the art angle as much) as an analytical tool. But the “tool” element is interpreted as “creativity” be that artistic or argumentative or analytical. And there’s a big difference.
But, back to the subject at hand (AI art just makes me angry friend, haha), read any Silverberg? If so, what are your thoughts?
I share your completist tendencies with Silverberg’s peak era and this is one of the few novels I haven’t read yet, so this review is very welcome. It’s fascinating how much he packs into these novels that, if you just went by the back cover blurb, seem on the surface like they are just another pulp/exploitation exercise so common in the genre (oh this one’s about time travel, that one’s about UFOs, this other one is about nuclear apocalypse etc.) He does have his faults and things don’t always click but his intellectual audacity to try and grapple with serious, contemporary, “adult” themes led to such a varied body of work, I find it very rewarding. He still surprises me. And his prose and plotting is usually solid enough to carry everything along. His more sexualized material is often off-putting but there’s enough in your review to pique my interest. I mean, it sounds quite a bit more digestible than “Up the Line”, for example.
At the very least, Those Who Watch is quite short — almost a novella. You’ll finish it in a few hours. I haven’t read Up the Line, yet. For me it’s hard not to compare Those Who Watch with his far better works of 1967.
I’d place it as the third best novel that appeared in 1967 (he wrote so much in those years!): 1) Thorns (1967), 2) To Open the Sky (1967), 3) Those Who Watch (1967), 4) The Time Hoppers (1967)
I haven’t read anything by Silverberg for a while, but a lot before that. For me, he’s one of the greatest SF authors of all time, and if I had to choose, perhaps even the greatest.
“Downward to Earth” is one of the best SF novels I know. Just like “Time of Changes” , “The Man in the Maze”, “The Book of Skulls” or “Dying Inside”. He really is a giant of the genre. And “Sailing to Byzantium” is truly the most flawless, perfect genre short story I know.
(I always found him sensationally likeable and approachable at SF conventions. I’ll never forget standing behind him in the registration queue in London and asking for a selfie with him. He said: Wow, that’s my first selfie ever! So I can say I took the first selfie with Silverberg :))
Yeah, Dying Inside, Downward to the Earth, and The Man in the Maze are all favorites of mine — I’d also add The World Inside and the novel version of Hawksbill Station.
My only interaction with Silverberg is in the comment section of this site — he was angry at a commenter years back who mixed him up with Ellison and threatened to sue him. As of now in my life, I don’t attend conventions. But who knows!
Being mistaken for Harlan Ellison is unlikely to be taken as a compliment by most SF creators of the time … from what you read, he was, well … difficult 😉
Maybe you really should visit a Worldcon. Next chance this year in Glasgow. For me, it’s one of the greatest events I know. There’s something for everyone. Definitely a lot of great people and great conversations.
It’s not for me. I am far more interested in the history of science fiction (history is my field) than anything connected to the contemporary scene and fandom more generally.
Indeed! As Ellison’s curmudgeonly comment years back on my site showed as well…
haha wait where is this. He was such a jerk, his ego massively outweighed his talent (which he did have, but man did he overrate it)
In the comments of this review: https://sciencefictionruminations.com/2013/08/03/book-review-approaching-oblivion-harlan-ellison-1974/
It was directed at another commenter who called out some of his behavior.