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The World Inside, by Robert Silverberg
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Welcome to Urban Monad 116. Reaching nearly two miles into the sky, the one thousand stories of this building are home to over eight hundred thousand people living in peace and harmony. In the year 2381 with a world population of over seventy-five billion souls, the massive Urbmon system is humanity's salvation.
Life in Urbmon 116 is highly regulated, life is cherished, and the culture of procreation is seen as the highest pinnacle of god's plan. Conflict is abhorred, and any who disturb the peace face harsh punishment―even being sent "down the chute" to be recycled as fertilizer.
Jason Quevedo, a historian, searches records of the twentieth century hoping to find the root of his discontent with the perfection of Urbmon life.
Siegmund Kluver, a young and ambitious administrator, strives to reach the top levels of the Urbmon's government and discovers the civilization's dark truths.
Michael Statler, a computer engineer, harbors a forbidden desire. He dreams of leaving the building―of walking in the open air and visiting the far-off sea. This is a dream he must keep secret. If anyone were to find out, he'd face the worst punishment imaginable.
The World Inside is a fascinating exploration of society and what makes us human, told by a master of speculative fiction.
The World Inside is a 1971 Hugo Award Nominee for Best Novella.
- Sales Rank: #1062236 in Books
- Brand: Brand: Orb Books
- Published on: 2010-03-02
- Released on: 2010-03-02
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.50" h x .58" w x 5.50" l,
- Binding: Paperback
- 256 pages
Features
- Used Book in Good Condition
From Publishers Weekly
In the 1960s, professional population alarmist Paul Ehrlich made hilariously inaccurate prognostications of imminent Malthusian doom. While these predictions inspired some SF authors to depict crowded future worlds, Silverberg's 1971 quasi-utopian tale—less a novel than a collection of closely linked vignettes—presents a 24th-century Earth populated by 75 billion fanatically pro-natalist conformists. The product of centuries of artificial selection and social pressures, rewarded with (or forced to endure) frequent, meaningless sex, the citizens of the three–kilometer–high Urbmons are for the most part incapable of imagining other ways of life. Those few deviants who rebel are either forcibly cured or summarily executed. By modern standards this is a lean book, but Silverberg can bring a world to life with a few carefully chosen words, and a recent HBO option suggests it will appeal to present-day audiences. (Mar.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
About the Author
Winner of four Hugo Awards and five Nebula Awards, Robert Silverberg is one of the giants of science fiction and fantasy. A Science Fiction Writers of America Grand Master, he has written countless short stories, nonfiction books, and novels, including Dying Inside, A Time of Changes, and the bestselling Lord Valentine's Castle. Silverberg lives in Oakland, California, with his wife, writer Karen Haber.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Here begins a happy day in 2381. The morning sun is high enough to touch the uppermost fifty stories of Urban Monad 116. Soon the building’s entire eastern face will glitter like the bosom of the sea at daybreak. Charles Mattern’s window, activated by the dawn’s early photons, deopaques. He stirs. God bless, he thinks. His wife yawns and stretches. His four children, who have been awake for hours, now can officially start their day. They rise and parade around the bedroom, singing:
God bless, god bless, god bless!
God bless us every one!
God bless Daddo, god bless Mommo, god bless you and me!
God bless us all, the short and tall,
Give us fer- til- i-tee!
They rush toward their parents’ sleeping platform. Mattern rises and embraces them. Indra is eight, Sandor is seven, Marx is five, Cleo is three. It is Charles Mattern’s secret shame that his family is so small. Can a man with only four children truly be said to have reverence for life? But Principessa’s womb no longer flowers. The medics have declared that she will not bear again. At twenty-seven she is sterile. Mattern is thinking of taking in a second woman. He longs to hear the yowls of an infant again; in any case, a man must do his duty to god.
Sandor says, “Daddo, Siegmund is still here.”
The child points. Mattern sees. On Principessa’s side of the sleeping platform, curled against the inflation pedal, lies fourteen-year-old Siegmund Kluver, who had entered the Mattern home several hours after midnight to exercise his rights of propinquity. Siegmund is fond of older women. He has become quite notorious in the past few months. Now he snores; he has had a good workout. Mattern nudges him. “Siegmund? Siegmund, it’s morning!” The young man’s eyes open. He smiles at Mattern, sits up, reaches for his wrap. He is quite handsome. He lives on the 787th floor and already has one child and another on the way.
“Sorry,” says Siegmund. “I overslept Principessa really drains me. A savage, she is!”
“Yes, she’s quite passionate,” Mattern agrees. So is Siegmund’s wife, Mamelon, according to what Mattern has heard. When she is a little older, Mattern plans to try her. Next spring, perhaps.
Siegmund sticks his head under the molecular cleanser. Principessa now has left the bed. Nodding faintly to her husband, she kicks the pedal and the platform deflates swiftly. She begins to program breakfast. Indra, reaching forth a pale, almost transparent little hand, switches on the screen. The wall blossoms with light and color. “Good morning,” says the screen heartily. “The external temperature, if anybody’s interested, is 28°. Today’s population figure at Urbmon 116 is 881,115, which is +102 since yesterday and +14,187 since the first of the year. God bless, but we’re slowing down! Across the way at Urbmon 117 they’ve added 131 since yesterday, including quads for Mrs. Hula Jabotinsky. She’s eigh teen and has had seven previous. A servant of god, isn’t she? The time is now 0620. In exactly forty minutes Urbmon 116 will be honored by the presence of Nicanor Gortman, the visiting sociocomputator from Hell, who can be recognized by his distinctive outbuilding costume in crimson and ultra violet. Dr. Gortman will be the guest of the Charles Mat-terns of the 799th floor. Of course we’ll treat him with the same friendly blessmanship we show one another. God bless Nicanor Gortman! Turning now to news from the lower levels of Urbmon 116—”
Principessa says, “Hear that, children? We’ll have a guest, and we must be blessworthy toward him. Come and eat.”
When he has cleansed himself, dressed, and breakfasted, Charles Mattern goes to the thousandth- .oor landing stage to meet Nicanor Gortman. As he rises through the building to the summit, Mattern passes the .oors on which his brothers and sisters and their families live. Three brothers, three sisters. Four of them younger than he, two older. All quite successful. One brother died, unpleasantly, young. Jeffrey. Mattern rarely thinks of Jeffrey. Now he is passing through the .oors that make up Louisville, the administrative sector. In a moment he will meet his guest. Gortman has been touring the tropics and is about to visit a typical urban monad in the temperate zone. Mattern is honored to have been named the of.cial host. He steps out on the landing stage, which is at the very tip of Urbmon 116. A force- .eld shields him from the .erce winds that sweep the lofty spire. He looks to his left and sees the western face of Urban Monad 115 still in darkness. To his right, Urbmon 117’s eastern windows sparkle. Bless Mrs. Hula Jabotinsky and her eleven littles, Mattern thinks. Mattern can see other urbmons in the row, stretching on and on toward the horizon, towers of superstressed concrete three kilometers high, tapering ever so gracefully. It is a thrilling sight. God bless, he thinks. God bless, god bless, god bless!
He hears a cheerful hum of rotors. A quickboat is landing. Out steps a tall, sturdy man dressed in high- spectrum garb. He must surely be the visiting sociocomputator from Hell.
“Nicanor Gortman?” Mattern asks.
“Bless god. Charles Mattern?”
“God bless, yes. Come.”
Hell is one of the eleven cities of Venus, which man has reshaped to suit himself. Gortman has never been on Earth before. He speaks in a slow, stolid way, no lilt in his voice at all; the in.ection reminds Mattern of the way they talk in Urbmon 84, which Mattern once visited on a .eld trip. He has read Gortman’s papers: solid stuff, closely reasoned. “I particularly liked ‘Dynamics of the Hunting Ethic,’ ” Mattern tells him while they are in the dropshaft. “Remarkable. A revelation.”
“You really mean that?” Gortman asks, flattered.
“Of course. I try to keep up with the better Venusian journals. It’s so fascinating to read about alien customs. Such as hunting wild animals.”
“There are none on Earth?”
“God bless, no,” Mattern says. “We couldn’t allow that! But I love gaining insight into different ways of life.”
“My essays are escape literature for you?” asks Gortman.
Mattern looks at him strangely. “I don’t understand the reference.”
“Escape literature. What you read to make life on Earth more bearable for yourself.”
“Oh, no. Life on Earth is quite bearable, let me assure you. There’s no need for escape literature. I study offworld journals for amusement. And to obtain a necessary parallax, you know, for my own work,” says Mattern. They have reached the 799th level. “Let me show you my home .rst.” He steps from the drop- shaft and beckons to Gortman. “This is Shanghai. I mean, that’s what we call this block of forty .oors, from 761 to 800. I’m in the next- to- top level of Shanghai, which is a mark of my professional status. We’ve got twenty- .ve cities altogether in Urbmon 116. Reykjavik’s on the bottom and Louisville’s on the top.”
“What determines the names?”
“Citizen vote. Shanghai used to be Calcutta, which I personally prefer, but a little bunch of malcontents on the 778th floor rammed through a referendum in ’75.”
“I thought you had no malcontents in the urban monads,” Gortman says.
Mattern smiles. “Not in the usual sense. But we allow certain conflicts to exist. Man wouldn’t be man without conflicts, eh? Even here. Eh?”
They are walking down the eastbound corridor toward Mattern’s home. It is now 0710, and children are streaming from their apartments in groups of three and four, rushing to get to school Mattern waves to them. They sing as they run along. Mattern says, “We average 6.2 children per family on this .oor. It’s one of the lowest figures in the building, I have to admit. High-status people don’t seem to breed well. They’ve got a floor in Prague—I think it’s 117— that averages 9.9 per family! Isn’t that glorious?”
“You are speaking with irony?” Gortman asks.
“Not at all.” Mattern feels an uptake of tension. “We like children. We approve of breeding. Surely you realized that before you set out on this tour of—”
“Yes, yes,” says Gortman, hastily. “I was aware of the general cultural dynamic. But I thought perhaps your own attitude—”
“Ran counter to norm? Just because I have a scholar’s detachment, you shouldn’t assume that I disapprove in any way of my cultural matrix. Perhaps you’re guilty of projecting your own disapproval, eh?”
“I regret the implication. And please don’t think I feel the slightest negative attitudes in relation to your matrix, although I admit your world seems quite strange to me. Bless god, let us not have strife, Charles.”
“God bless, Nicanor. I didn’t mean to seem touchy.”
They smile. Mattern is dismayed by his show of irritability.
Gortman says, “What is the population of the 799th floor?”
“805, last I heard.”
“And of Shanghai?”
“About 33,000.”
“And of Urbmon 116?”
“881,000.”
“And there are fifty urban monads in this constellation of houses?”
“Yes.”
“Making some 40,000,000 people,” Gortman says. &ldquo...
Most helpful customer reviews
26 of 26 people found the following review helpful.
Silverberg's Dystopia Reaches for the Sky
By Dave Deubler
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.
20 of 22 people found the following review helpful.
The World Inside -- 30 years later we are becoming this
By Mr. Roger H. Geyer
As the "spotlight reviews" state, this is one of Silverberg's best, and handled in an unusual and engaging plot style.
Silverberg has invented a future "utopian" society where the earth supports 75 billion people "comfortably" in terms of physical resources -- and the society sees expanding that population rapidly as its main reason for existing. A clever balance of technology, energy efficiency, and agricultural balance all makes this seem possible.
What is so great about this to me is how Silverberg gradually brings to light the true horror of living in this society, by having us share the thoughts and experiences of a series of its members as the novel progresses.
In each case you see that on the surface, all seems well, yet ALL of these people are terribly unhappy and have no true sense of purpose or connectedness.
Why? Well, handling the population has required huge sacrifices. Absolute conformation to the norms is an absolute requirement. Failure to adhere to such norms is met with brainwashing, or for more aggregious cases (or where the brainwashing fails) summary execution by being dumped into the nearest matter-to-energy converter -- where your atoms "serve" society without causing any pollution. There is still a heavy class structure to society, with all the ill emotional effects that holds today, and the lucky few chosen for the top reap all the benefits -- NOT for the good of themselves more than for "the people".
The results, which Silverberg gradually makes us realize is a society which: allows no personal property, pays virtually no attention to the emotional needs of its children, demands total conformity and obedience upon pain of death or being stripped of all personality, gives no choice over where or how one lives, gives no choice over career, interests, mates, and has most of its members taking hallucinogens as a socially accepted psychological crutch. Also, religion is a pre-packaged standardized psychological crutch, thrust on anyone feeling unhappy with essentially the "you have to have faith" mantra. Finally, nearly everyone feels like a failure for not LIKING their role in the SHAM that society is full of happy members.
Now, about 30 years after this novel was written when we look around at the first world -- the parallels are eerie. As the global population continues to mount rapidly and our technologies allow us to live more and more in isolated boxes and consume prepackaged "goods" in ever more standardized forms by our leaders, our media, our corporations, our religions, and our own wants -- one has to wonder if Silverberg was forecasting the inevitable psychological state of man, or if he just got lucky.
Either way, the result was brilliantly insightful. This book is easily a peer to such classics as "Brave New World", "1984", and "Animal Farm" in terms of the clarity of its vision.
8 of 9 people found the following review helpful.
Top quality Science Fiction!
By David Rasquinha
The World Inside is one of Silverberg's best works, where he extrapolates into the future and then looks at human behavior. Picture Earth in the year 2381, specifically present day USA. The inexorable growth of population, driven by a quasi-religious fertility ethic has so pressured the available surface area, that new urban units have developed. Instead of cities, there are huge apartment complexes, many towers (grouped in a "constellation"), with each tower rising miles into the air, accommodating as many as 1000 levels, each with hundreds of apartments. In effect, each such "urban monad" or "urbmon" is a mini-city in itself and like any city has its own schools, medical facilities, waste management, technicians, office professionals and administrators. With this background, Silverberg writes a series of short stories that explore social interaction. With so many people in close proximity, conflict management becomes critical so the urbmon "eliminates" causes of conflict. Sexual attraction for instance is kept free of jealousy by making sexual relationships independent of marital links. Men and women can "nightwalk" into other's apartments for sex as casually as borrowing a cup of sugar. Families of 2 parents and 6-10 children occupy one apartment which is just one large room so children are taught from an early age to share toys and possessions. Privacy is unheard of and consequently nudity is free of taboo. The individual is socialized into subordinating his or her behavior and aspirations to the good of the urbmon society. And yet, since the urbmon inevitably requires maintenance, police and janitorial services, a clear stratification of society develops, with the lowly seeking to rise to the ranks of the Administrators on the top levels. Each story explores one facet of life in the urbmon and in doing so unfolds the big picture. With all needs met, what happens to striving for something better? How is the occasional rebel to be dealt with? With all material needs taken care of, why go out of the urbmon into a frightening open space at all? This is a book that in turns shakes up the reader, makes one think of the power of society and even scares! Science fiction at its best: the focus is less on pseudo-technological bells and whistles and more on how humans behave in a vision of the future that is both attractive and frightening at the same time. Highly recommended.
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