Really enjoyed this one, my first Robert Silverberg book. A wildly different response to The Population Bomb, which also inspired Make Room! Make Room! and Stand on Zanzibar and many others I'm forgetting, I'm sure. I thought it was a novel, but really it's a collection of seven short stories he wrote in the same setting: Urbmon 116, one of several thousand-story towers in the Chipitts sector of future earth.

Rather than strictly limiting population, the Urbmon's take 'be fruitful and multiply' seriously. Couples marry at very early ages and are encouraged to have many, many children. When the building is full, they build another.

I think Silverberg did a good job of remaining neutral on the world he was describing. So many of the other overpopulation sci-fi novels present a dystopian hellhole. It's logical and easy to do. But Silverberg shows life in the tower as quite pleasurable. The ugly side of life there (no privacy, rebellious people are unceremoniously dumped down the chute to be recycled, people are expected to provide sex on demand to anyone who asks) are shown, but not belabored. The reader is left to draw their own conclusions.

I want to point out: I had no idea my fellow sci-fi fans are so prudish. Reading other reviews of this book, you'd think it's going to be one of those old pornographic Greenleaf Classics. That is not at all the case. Sex is a big part of Urbmon life. They practice something called Nightwalking where men roam from floor-to-floor, apartment to apartment to sleep with others (men or women). This is a part of the world presented, but if you are expecting pages and pages of explicitly described intercourse, you are going to be disappointed. I didn't feel it detracted from the story.

Though Silverberg shows some latent sexism as it's the men who wander and the women who stay home. And though homo and hetero sex are equally accepted, only hetero is ever shown. It's a product of its' time.

There isn't really a plot. As mentioned, each chapter was originally a stand alone story, though all together they present a richly detailed future world. Characters mentioned in one story may star in another story, giving some continuity.

So a very good book. I'm glad I read it. My only real complaint is that I wish when compiling these, they had kept the original story titles attached. ( )

The World Inside (TWI) somehow reminds me of another architecture-based science fiction: the cyberpunk manga by Tsutomu Nihei called Blame! Both are really good in using space to create an alien atmosphere and setting. There is a sense of largeness in both that paradoxically engenders claustrophobia. I have finished the manga series Blame! and I am writing this while I am half-way through TWI. Whereas TWI teems with people in its corridors and rooms, the world Killy inhabits is a vast and mostly empty space. But enough with the comparison.

There's a lot of sex in TWI. It was written in the 60s and so we have to consider the social setting of the novel's writing. There's also drugs and rock and roll in the novel, also things that are very 60s.

The prose is good. The characters are well-constructed. The world is revealed slowly and methodically. Overall, this is a solid work of science fiction.

EDIT:

I have just recently finished the book. Wow. There are several scenes that would require a little openmindedness. Is it a dystopia? Part of the appeal is that after reading so much of the lives of the people in the urbmon and how it is the only world that they know, the line blurs a bit. Has that whole 'Plato's Allegory of the Cave' vibe to it. I highly recommend this novel. ( )

Silverberg posits a future world where people live in enormously tall buildings so that the rest of the planet can be used to grow food. People with the least important jobs live in communities on the lowest floors while the leaders live at the top. Procreation is the most important priority, and people go nightwalking (where they are welcome to bed whom they want although it is expected that you stay local.) Flippos are the ones who freak, and are thinned from society. We meet a few characters living on the edge. Concept better than execution. ( )

This is a somewhat fascinating, excellently written porn set in an extremely overpopulated, but relatively comfortable utopian paradise with buildings a thousand stories high.

Odd? Nah, it's the second Hugo nom of Silverberg in '72, being one prolific and focused writer, with too many ideas to cram into any single book, instead just exploring a few here and a few there, but doing it so excellently that the rest of the New Wave crowd just stares and stares at the grotesque sexual display.

Society has gotten very permissive now that all the problems of scarcity whether in food or space or power has been solved. And why not? Genetically, culturally, and, apparently, realistically, no one has an issue with staying inside these damn huge apartment complexes. :) J. G. Ballard has a great number of short stories that explore this whole idea, too, but we're not talking about him. We're talking about Silverberg, who takes it all the way down the sexual rabbithole.

Oh my, that sounds weird, doesn't it? No no rabbits were harmed in the writing of this book.

But where's the conflict, you ask? Oh, it's all in the 20th century deviancy, of course. Jealousy, desire to set foot outside, and the meeting of the throwback farmers that actually provide for all these permissive non-proletariats. :) What could go wrong? Oh, don't worry, no spoilers!

But like most of Silverberg's works, he's talking about us. Often harshly.

At least he always makes sure that the story is solid and interesting, too! :)
( )

(Original Review, 1980-10-27)

Gee, Danny, I don't recall saying you don't enjoy sex, but, "please don't squeeze the Charmin!" More to the point, I found you missed the point of the "boring sexual encounters." [2018 EDIT: Daniel L. Weinreb, Danny for his friends, my American friend died on the 7th of September of 2012; so many talks through the wires, he in the US and me in Portugal, that would fill many posts if one day I’m willing to put them on "paper"…the first time I started doing stuff in Lisp in college he was there to help me out; RIP My Friend.]

To Wit:

"His sexual encounters are SO boring and SO devoid of any semblance of warmth or caring that I find them not just a waste of time but positively DISTURBING."

You see, that is precisely the point! "The Tower of Glass," and "The World Inside," both describe a FUTURE devoid of any really personal caring, and, consequently, sexual encounters are simply for the sake of sexual satisfaction - between consenting adults – and given the empty existence of the characters in the environment in which Bob portrays, "boring sex" just might not be so boring for THEM. It goes without saying, that one might find this POSSIBLE future very disturbing, and, if so, the "boring sexual" episodes have indeed succeeded doing exactly what they were intended to do.

And, of course, if Greg prefers to use as TP pages covered with detailed descriptions of boring sexual encounters, and apparently, shredded in flaming rage from the innards of a COVERLESS paperback no less, well, who am I to deny him such delights...shred on!

The careless sexual encounters in "The World Inside" (I have not read "The Tower of Glass" yet) would make a valid point about that society, if that were what Silverberg had in mind. But consider "The Stochastic Man". We are told how much the main character loves and treasures his wife, and so on, but the encounters are STILL the same. You might say this is to tell us something about the main character; could be, but as far as I can tell, Silverberg is ALWAYS like that. So it is my suspicion that he isn't doing it to make points; he just always writes them that way. I could be wrong, of course.

[2018 EDIT: This review was written at the time as I was running my own personal BBS server. Much of the language of this and other reviews written in 1980 reflect a very particular kind of language: what I call now in retrospect a “BBS language”.] ( )