"How It Was When the Past Went Away"
by Robert Silverberg
Form: Novella
Year: 1969
ID: 472
Publication history:
- 1969: Three for Tomorrow, Meredith Hard cover book
- 1970: Three for Tomorrow, Dell Mass market paperback, 188 pp.
- 1973: Earth's Other Shadow, Signet Mass market paperback, 207 pp.
- 1975: Earth's Other Shadow, Signet Mass market paperback
- 1977: Earth's Other Shadow, Millington Hard cover book
- 1978: Earth's Other Shadow, Panther Mass market paperback, 222 pp.
- 1981: Catastrophes!, Fawcett Mass market paperback
- 1982: World of a Thousand Colors, Arbor House Hard cover book, ISBN 0877954178, 329 pp.
- 1983: World of a Thousand Colors, Priam Trade paperback, 329 pp.
- 1984: World of a Thousand Colors, Bantam Mass market paperback, ISBN 0-553-24059-5, 331 pp.
- 1986: Terrorists of Tomorrow, Critic's Choice Mass market paperback
- 1991: The Mammoth Book of Fantastic Science Fiction - Short Novels of the 1960s, Robinson Trade paperback
- 1997: Ringing the Changes (The Collected Stories of Robert Silverberg Volume 5), HarperCollins UK Trade paperback, ISBN 0-586-21373-2, 359 pp.
- 2002: Le Chemin de la nuit: Nouvelles au fil du temps, tome 1, 1953-1970, Flammarion Trade paperback, ISBN 2080682350, 727 pp., in French as Le jour où le passé a disparu
Other resources:
[None on record]
Comments:
A loony with a bunch of nifty drugs puts amnesifacients in San Francisco's water supply. The city starts to fall apart as people forget who they are, who they're married to, where they work. The drug effects everyone a little differently, with different memories lost to differing degrees. The story is told in true disaster-movie tradition, with a multitude of characters from different walks of life followed through the crisis. There's the artist so in debt he can't afford the tools of his trade, but doesn't remember his monetary problems or that his wife left him. There's the crooked stock broker with millions worth of illicit transactions kept only in his head. There's the grieving man who lost his family in a plane crash. There's the nightclub performer whose act is that he remembers everything. Quite a fun story, and if some of the practical aspects of such a social catastrophe are glossed over, many of the personal and emotional aspects are handled very well.