Cheap The World Inside. (Book) (Robert Silverberg) Price

Related Products

Customer Reviews of The World Inside.

His best. Stunning work.
I loved this book. Everything by Silverberg I've read since this one has been a let down because of how good this book was. Not quite a novel, this is actually just a collection of short stories focused on specific characters living in a huge apartment building set in an overpopulated future. The characters lives sometimes interconnect and the whole thing works as a complete unit but you could easily just read one random chapter out of the book and enjoy it as a story in and of itself. Beautifully developed characters. Silverberg has a very emotional style that can really grab you. The last chapter was incredibly painful to read because it seemed so real. If you read only one Silverberg novel read this one!

---

Silverberg's Dystopia Reaches for the Sky
Imagine the Earth in the year 2381. Imagine a society in which sexual frustration and jealousy and psychological hang-ups have all been eliminated by happiness drugs and universal sexual availability. Imagine that everyone sees all life as God's blessing and success is judged by how many children you've produced. Welcome to Robert Silverberg's Urban Monolith, a thousand-story building that houses 800,000 of Earth's 75 billion people.

Silverberg presents his ostensibly utopian future through the Faulknerian technique of dramatizing just a few seemingly random episodes in the lives of a small, but representative grouping of loosely interwoven characters. The story opens as a social scientist revels in the joy of a perfectly ordinary morning. The young man who slept with his wife is still there, an immediate indication of the sexual freedom that compensates residents for the total lack of privacy they must accept as part of the overcrowding. The young man is Siegmund Klumer, an up and coming 14 year old, who seems destined to become one of the Urbmon's leaders, and the novel is essentially his story, told indirectly by people who know, or respect, or at least share sexual partners, with him. But the real star of this show is the society itself, and the insidious way it provides for the needs of thousands of people, even while robbing them of their essential humanity.

As the story moves from one character to another, we are introduced to such marvels as automated child-care, futuristic rock concerts, and pleasure-giving drugs, but we also gradually begin to see the cracks in the façade of utopian perfection, and the terrible price the residents sometimes pay. Universal sexual availability helps drain off frustrations and aggression, but sex quickly becomes monotonous, meaningless, and emotionally unfulfilling. The drug-induced highs lead to inevitable comedowns, marital fidelity is socially unacceptable, and personal freedom has more limits than at first appears. People mature early, in their early teens, and begin working, having sex, and producing children as soon as possible. Of course such a close-knit society must have order, and since no one is ever alone, it follows that someone is always watching. Variation from accepted behavior is viewed by the authorities as threatening, and the punishment is always either re-education or death. And as with any controlled society, all social institutions are geared toward convincing people that they are happy, even though there are many more unhappy people than is commonly admitted.

This is a finely crafted book, with its subtle characterization, carefully integrated social milieu, and bold yet understated technique. The late 60's influence of hedonistic sexuality and drug taking makes this book unsuitable for younger readers, but it is not so shocking as to be offensive to most adults. Most of all, Silverberg sends a potent warning that over-population, short sighted thinking, and rampant pleasure seeking all make a populace vulnerable to authoritarianism - a warning that looms just as tall today as it did 30 years ago.

---

The quallity of life in a box inside a box inside a box
In Robet Silverberg's novel "The World Inside" humanity attains utopia in the year 2381 when the population of the planet has grown to 75 billion people. War, starvation, crime and also birth control have been eliminated. Life is now totally fulfilled and sustained within Urbmons, mammoth skyscrapers a thousand stories high. This is also a world of total sexual freedom where men and women are expected to engage in "night walking"; refusing an invention for sex makes you a rude host. In this world it is a blessing to have children: most people are married at 12 and parents at 14. In fact, just thinking of controlling families is deemed heretical and something for which people can be put to death. Because the need to be outdoors and to travel has been eliminated thoughts of wanderlust are considered sick as well and speaking of them is another heresy. After all, these citizens live in a utopia.

The assumption of the system is that only those who are insane would have thoughts about things like privacy, faithfulness, and trust. But in Urbmon 116 there are those who want to have some individuality in their lives. Charles Mattern is a minor functionary who is disappointed that he and his wife, Principessa, had to stop at only four children. Siegmund Kluver sees the perfectly patterned existence of the Urbmons as being flawed even though he is destined to one of the omnipotent leaders of the Urbmon. So he searches throughout the vast complex of Urbmon 116 trying to find some answer to the doubts and fears that drive him, knowing that his entire future is being put in jeopardy by his actions.

"The World Inside" started out as a series of short stories about a grossly overpopulated Earth. There is Aureau Holston, a childless woman who is afraid her lowly status will force her family to emigrate to a newly constructed building, away from the only home they have ever known. The other two key characters in the novel are Jason Quevedo, a historian whose study of the ancient past is changing his views about the Utopia in which he lives, and Michael Statler, who actually escapes to the world outside Urbmon 116 only to learn that such freedom is problematic as well. Through these characters Silverberg addresses some of the world's most important issues and takes them to the sort of logical but extreme conclusion that tales of science fiction are so capable of creating. The question is whether the gift of life is more precious that the quality of the individual.

As is the tradition in utopian and dystopian novels, we are introduced to this brave new world through the eyes of a visitor from a colony on Venus, who is being guided by Mattern. This is a minor flaw in the novel, because why this gives us the requisite neophyte to be educated, it points to colonies off world where things might not only be different, but better. However, Silverberg does manage to do all of this in a more concise novel than is often the case with dystopian stories. You can also tell that this is a novel written around the time of the Sixties since one character achieves their true understanding of the Ubrmon's hivelike existence by taking a drug, although that same key moment of insight is achieved by a key character without such artificial inducement. Reading this today the great irony is that the population of the Earth has increased alarmingly, yet overpopulation is not the pressing concern it was when Silverberg wrote this book and Frank Brunner did "Stand on Zanzibar."