The author’s introduction to The Conglomeroid Cocktail Party begins: “I had given up writing short stories, for one thing.”I can sympathise with all the reasons Silverberg goes on to give, from the financial (which certainly hasn’t got any better in the years since), to the rod we make for our own backs in making them so damned sparse that anything, a misplaced word, a loose sentence, that doesn’t quite fit has to be ruthlessly exorcised.

Thankfully, Silverberg gave up on giving up, though he also had his novels to fall back on, something which alarms me even more than the thought of not writing. This piece is one of his weirder inventions, more so when I read it as a tender-ish youth. Now, you can see in it elements of the gene editing debate, coupled with the distortion of obscene wealth, god-like technologies restricted to the plaything of the ultra-privileged. The narrator is so sophisticated that they have become effectively alien, whatever form they take. And yet, are they happy? Like other stories I read in my late teens that I still vividly remember, it has inevitably inspired me to attempt my own, rather less impressive versions.

First published in Playboy, August 1928, and collected in The Conglomeroid Cocktail Party, Victor Gollanz SF, 1985)