ilk reviewed The World Inside by Robert Silverberg
The World Inside
2380-something. 75 billion souls live productive, contented lives. Utopia is almost in sight. But the Taj Mahal isn't. Nor is Paris or the Pyramids. Urban monads have replaced all human settlement: constellations of three kilometer-high residential complexes each with 1000 floors and capacity for a million inhabitants. Horizontal sprawl becomes vertical. Almost no one ever leaves their monad. There's no need or desire to.
To keep us from killing each other, radical social reorganization has done away with most notions of privacy and private ownership; sex is as transactional as shaking hands, and the custom is to welcome anyone who solicits it, regardless of marital status. Parenthood is glorified. Adulthood starts at 13, by which time couples are having the first of many children. Each 20 floors in a monad forms a distinct group, known as a city, and named after historical examples. Cities serve as bases for various …
2380-something. 75 billion souls live productive, contented lives. Utopia is almost in sight. But the Taj Mahal isn't. Nor is Paris or the Pyramids. Urban monads have replaced all human settlement: constellations of three kilometer-high residential complexes each with 1000 floors and capacity for a million inhabitants. Horizontal sprawl becomes vertical. Almost no one ever leaves their monad. There's no need or desire to.
To keep us from killing each other, radical social reorganization has done away with most notions of privacy and private ownership; sex is as transactional as shaking hands, and the custom is to welcome anyone who solicits it, regardless of marital status. Parenthood is glorified. Adulthood starts at 13, by which time couples are having the first of many children. Each 20 floors in a monad forms a distinct group, known as a city, and named after historical examples. Cities serve as bases for various human labor categories - Reykjavik at the bottom, the closest thing to a monad ghetto. Rome with its mid-level bureaucrats, Shanghai and Toledo with programmers and engineers. Louisville is the zenith and houses the monad's administration. Travel is permitted to any city regardless of which floor one occupies.
Our story follows several residents. A touring musician; an ambitious rising star in the senior admin ranks; an anthropologist who posits that humans have progressed from homo sapiens to something new; a man curious about the world outside.
Sex is a huge part of this book. Silverberg is constantly describing coitus and body parts. 'Nightwalking' is the custom of entering another apartment, waking strangers and screwing them. Everyone on the monads is entitled to a good time. Sexual exclusivity doesn't exist. Drug use is encouraged too, with the end being (like the attitudes toward sex), elimination of social friction.
While some darker aspects of monad society are hinted at, it escapes easy pigeonholding as dystopian. Silverberg's residents are at pains to point out why this mode of living is great. They've got so many problems solved. The economy is genuinely circular, there's ample social mobility to exploit, and recreation opportunities are state of the art. The novel ends with two deaths.
My second Silverberg read (after Thorns) and it really impressed me. At 160 pages on the ereader, there's no fat. Will definitely continue reading him.
