y the year 2381, Earth's population has ballooned to 75 billion people, almost all of whom live in crowded 1,000-story skyscrapers called Urbmons. The residents, who live in close quarters with minimal privacy, spend their nights exchanging sexual partners and their lives churning out as many additional children as possible. Most people are married by 12 and parents by 14. Despite the cramped conditions, most people are content with this hedonistic lifestyle. The few dissenters are either subjected to forcible personality modification, or dropped down "the chute" and recycled like any other waste products.
Our look at this strange new world takes the form of visits with several of its inhabitants. We first encounter Charles Mattern, a minor functionary who believes that the Urbmon lifestyle is a utopia. He is disappointed that he and his wife, Principessa, had to stop after four children. He is undisturbed when he awakes to find his wife's latest lover, the 15-year-old up-and-coming administrator Siegmund Kluver, lying beside her in their bed; nightwalking is a venerable Urbmon tradition, and no polite host or hostess ever refuses a request for sex.
Meanwhile, as Urbmon 116 fills up, the childless Aurea Holston lives in fear that her low status will result in her family being chosen for emigration to a newly constructed building. She has never been anywhere else and threatens to rebel if the authorities make her leave. A little treatment with the moral engineers fixes her up, making her contented and obedient and happy.
Jason Quevedo is a historian working on his theory that centuries in the Urbmons have bred a humanity uniquely adapted to the lifestyle. But the friction between himself and his wife, Micaela, seems to argue that throwbacks still exist. Meanwhile, Micaela's twin brother, Michael, plots a forbidden expedition outside the building to visit all the legendary places he's dreamed about all his life ... and Siegmund Kluver finds himself lost in increasing despair as perceived setbacks in his career leave him unable to find any meaning in a life that, for as long as he lives, will always mean more of the same.
A masterful tour of a world that wasn't
The World Inside takes the form of a series of short stories, each of which examines Silverberg's world from the viewpoint of a different character. It's a form uniquely suited to the exploration of a science-fictional universe, one Silverberg was to use again in a collection set in his Majipoor universe. The device may eliminate any possibility of a sympathetic hero lasting from first page to last, but by addressing its milieu from different angles it focuses full attention on the created world itself. And the world Silverberg creates here is a vivid one, cherished by many of its characters but subtly hellish in the way it leeches their lives of purpose and meaning.
The people crammed in the Urbmons live lives of single-minded fertility, finding virtue in population growth for its own sake, but never once voicing the possibility that even their method of warehousing humanity will sooner or later reach the point of diminishing returns. The character Charles Mattern, whose story begins the novel, is a model of placid complacency; guiding a visitor from a colony on Venus, he not only orients the reader but extols the Urbmon communities as the ideal form of life. Mattern shows no signs of introspection, no awareness that increasing population growth will inevitably cause this "perfect" system to someday break down. Silverberg could devote the rest of his novel to such a disastrous scenario, but instead demonstrates through the eyes of his characters that, for some, the lifestyle already inflicts a ruinous human cost.
It's a masterful performance: one of the highlights of Silverberg's long career. It almost seems churlish to point out the flaws. The nature of Mattern's guest, the Venusian colonist Nicanor Gortman, is one of them. To be sure, he's there only to provide a sounding board for Mattern's exposition, and to react like any outsider to the strange behavior he witnesses; but though that's a bit clumsy, the real problem is the revelation that there are off-world colonies, and that not all of humanity is chained to an Earth that's been reduced to faceless masses in Urbmons. This fact bleeds off some of the book's necessary relentlessness—not much, but some.
Another notable problem is a common Silverberg staple that becomes increasingly annoying to readers who have encountered the same device in many of his novels from the '60s and '70s: the vividly sensual hallucination, often drug-induced, that provides his characters with a deep personal revelation. Scenes like this, an unmistakable product of their time, take place in A Time of Changes, Dying Inside, Downward to the Earth and here, among other places. They even fill Son of Man, though that thoroughly hallucinogenic book is a special case. In any event, the "Magic Drug" scene is impressive the first time readers encounter it, familiar and almost lazy four times later. In The World Inside, entertainer Dillon Chrimes takes one such drug and is floored by the emotional impact of his first real understanding of the Urbmon's hivelike nature. It's a decent piece of writing, but, really, the last chapter, where Siegmund Kluver makes more or less the same psychological journey without any special chemical assist, works better as fiction and as tragedy. It is that chapter that brings home the lesson that, for some, the society Charles Mattern sees as a utopia is the cruelest and emptiest form of personal damnation.
