I

The World Inside (1971) is an engrossing novel. The extraordinary setting is compelling throughout. Characters are vividly drawn and sharply individualized, facing problems familiar enough to arouse sympathy yet fascinating in their twenty-fourth-century context. Cleverly interrelated plot elements sustain dramatic interest from beginning to end. For sheer readability, The World Inside ranks among the best utopian novels, even though rather less than a masterpiece is necessary to join that particular company.

At the same time, it is a description in detail of a futuristic society which clearly belongs somewhere in the utopian/dystopian spectrum. Characters in the book talk about the society's utopian qualities, and in the course of the narrative the author provides numerous commentaries of his own. Through ingenious devices, such as the research into the past by a member who happens to be a trained historian, the nature of society in A.D. 2381 is observed through a variety of perspectives and temperaments. Concern with the basic utopian dilemma of the individual's relationship to society is always present behind plot developments.

Furthermore, this close integration of idea with story is achieved within an unambiguously science-fictional context. Several of the works surveyed in this volume [No Place Else] can be classified as science fiction, but The World Inside is the only one that first appeared in a science fiction magazine (Galaxy) in the hallowed serial form, and Robert Silverberg has described it (along with his Tower of Glass) as “closer to pure science fiction, the exhaustive investigation of an extrapolative idea, than anything else I have written.”¹ As an exploration of an arguably utopian society, written by one of the best known names in the science fiction field and directed in the first instance toward precisely that audience, The World Inside has exceptional significance for students of utopian literature and thought.

The failure of science fiction novels to break into the ranks of widely studied utopian visions is interesting. Of course Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 and Ursula K. Le Guin's The Dispossessed have gained extensive recognition, but considering the natural proclivity of science fiction writers to deal with exotic civilizations at various removes of time and space, it is clear that connoisseurs of utopia dismiss the overwhelming proportion of science fiction output. This deserves some explanation, the better to understand how Silverberg avoids falling victim to it.

The bedrock of science fiction, as of mysteries, westerns and other genres, is action rather than reflection. The story is the sine qua non, not to be interfered with or slowed down by ideas. Serious utopian literature, however, reverses the relationship: ideas are what count, and the story is meant to lend point to the ideas and not to distract from them. “The distinction,” explained I. F. Clarke in a related context, “is that in Brave New World science is the situation; but in admirable stories like The Day of the Triffids science merely provides the opportunity for tales of action that are not very different from the adventures of Sinbad or Robinson Crusoe.”² The near-absence of overlap between science fiction and utopian literature is attributable not to writers' skills or profundity, but to their priorities.

A case in point is Isaac Asimov's The Caves of Steel, a renowned novel which takes place in a future setting rather akin to Silverberg's world of 2381. Both societies occupy entirely enclosed spaces (a roofed-over New York City in The Caves of Steel) and have made elaborate technological adjustments to deal with population pressure. But there the similarity ends, because whereas Silverberg is seriously concerned with the nature of individual and group life under such constraints, Asimov uses the futuristic environment only as a prop for his detective story. He has written about so many different things during his career that he could no doubt write about utopia as well, but, appearances notwithstanding, serious utopian insights or commentary are almost entirely absent from this novel.

The rationale for and operation of the supercities in The Caves of Steel receive only two pages of summary and conventional treatment, concerned entirely with outward aspects. No perceptible psychological change can be detected in the inhabitants, whose conversations, relationships and daily rounds seem remarkably like those of non-luxury apartment dwellers in a crowded late-twentieth-century metropolis. Even when novel mores or customs are described—“By strong custom men disregarded one another's presence entirely within or just outside the Personals [centralized lavatory-laundry chambers]. … The situation was quite different at Women's Personals”³—they prove to be solely for plot purposes and lack significant connections with the distinctive nature of the society. When a character speculates on the consequences of a potential technique for beaming energy to earth from space stations, the range of considerations is, in terms of utopian thinking, pitifully narrow:

Baley had the picture of an Earth of unlimited energy. Population could continue to increase. The yeast farms could expand, hydroponic culture intensify. Energy was the only thing indispensable. …

Earth's population could reach a trillion or two. Why not? … But they would be dependent on imported air and water and upon an energy supply from complicated storehouses fifty million miles away. How incredibly unstable that would be. Earth would be, and remain, a feather's weight away from complete catastrophe at the slightest failure of any part of the System-wide mechanism.⁴

Not a word about social instability, or the consequences of failure in the organizational mechanism. To be sure, such matters were less in evidence in the science fiction mainstream when Asimov wrote the book (1953) than they are now, but Silverberg's achievement in providing an absorbing plot and high level of action while remaining reflective and sophisticated about ideas is still an uncommon one.⁵ A summary of the world of 2381 will show the breadth of his treatment and how its science/technology features, while important, are kept subordinate to human aspects.

In 2381 the earth supports seventy-five billion people, of whom the overwhelming majority live in “urbmons,” self-contained (except for food) one-thousand-floor skyscrapers. A minute portion of the population lives in food-growing communes. Urbmons and communes are dependent on each other, but avoid direct contact and share no common culture, not even language.

Each urbmon is divided horizontally into “cities” of between twenty and forty floors, with about eight hundred people on each floor. The cities (which are further broken down into villages) have strong occupational identities and an undefined degree of control over their own affairs. In the center of the urbmon is the service core, including innumerable connections with a central computer, and underneath are facilities for “turning mass into energy”—recycling wastes, trash, the dead and, in the case of dangerous or persistent deviants, the living.

No one is allowed to leave the urbmon except to populate new urbmons or for professional requirements which cannot be satisfied by the gigantic data bank which is available to all. Maintenance outside the urbmons and the conveyance of products to and from the communes are carried out by robots.

Within the urbmon is a wide range of intellectual, recreational and spectator activities. Although formal religion still exists in attenuated forms, the dominant spiritual concept is the “blessworthiness” of maximizing human fertility. Most criteria of virtue, obscenity, etc., are related to this. Sexual activity is at the forefront of social interest, partly because of the pressures toward procreation and partly because urbmon society has, in consequence of population density, developed “post-privacy” norms which eliminate privacy in dress and behavior. All inhabitants agree that “the total accessibility of all persons to all other persons is the only rule by which the civilization of the urbmon can survive.”⁶

The urbmon in which the novel takes place is administered by a privileged ruling class which co-opts fresh talent wherever it appears. There does not seem to be any political process involving the population at large. Police exist, with no apparent duty except throwing deviants from urbmon ideals “down the chute” into the recycling process. Less serious cases are referred by “consolers”—first-line therapists—to “moral engineers” whose techniques, although gentle, permanently change personality. “Blessmen” offer superficial assurances of oneness with the universe to those who undergo moments of alienation.

Everyone in the urbmon works, although for the less intellectual classes there is a good deal of makework. Outside of working hours, one's time is one's own, and family life and the pursuit of individual entertainment are similar to twentieth-century counterparts except for the sexual mores which result from the rule that no one can refuse a reasonable sexual request. Sexual activity, which is engaged in with spouses, friends and total strangers alike, is at a phenomenal level of frequency. Since jealousy is incompatible with a post-privacy culture, liaisons are not meant to be taken “personally,” and traditional feelings of love and affection seem to play as full a role between husband and wife as in twentieth-century marriages. No mention is made of divorce or separation; almost all marriage partners are happy with each other and their family situations.

This information and a great many supporting details and statistics emerge without the use of much overt exposition in what is quite a short book—under two hundred pages. Silverberg manages this through a device rarely met with in utopian novels. Traditionally, a utopian plot line follows one character, usually a visitor or dissident, through a series of adventures which touch upon those features of the society important to the author. This can be unfortunate if the character is personally uninteresting (Julian West in Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward), the adventures are not very adventurous (a long list, on which such worthies as William Morris's News from Nowhere must be included), or the emphasized features are presented in rigidly schematic form (the “journalistic” sections of Ernest Callenbach's otherwise skillfully constructed Ecotopia). The World Inside, in contrast, consists of seven distinct episodes, each focusing on different combinations of characters, most of whom are in more than one episode but none of whom are in all of them. This arrangement permits Silverberg to portray a great variety of aspects of urbmon life as elements in the lives of nicely assorted inhabitants who become familiar to the reader.

Chapter 1

The convenient device of an outsider being introduced to the society is employed in this one chapter, in the form of a sociocomputator from a settlement on Venus (still underpopulated) who is shown around an urbmon by a fellow professional, Charles Mattern.

Chapter 2

A young woman and her husband are selected to be among the initial population of a newly-built urbmon. She resists leaving the urbmon she has always lived in, is sent to the moral engineers, and is then able to leave without regrets.

Chapter 3

A musician, Dillon Chrimes, participates in a spectacular concert, then takes a pill which gives him the sensation of merging with everyone in the urbmon. It is a fantastic high, followed by a dreadful low.

Chapter 4

A married couple find themselves trying to arouse jealousy and acting generally “unblessworthy” toward each other. Just before they become likely candidates for going down the chute, he (a historian) realizes they are emotional throwbacks to pre-urbmon society. They conspire to camouflage their feelings, and find themselves deeply in love.

Chapter 5

Siegmund Kluver, a rising specialist in the theory of urban administration, discovers that the urbmon's leaders are debauched, self-aggrandizing and utterly cynical. At their orgy, to which his invitation is a major step toward joining their ranks, Siegmund hesitates to show these qualities in adequate measure and his prospects immediately fade.

Chapter 6

A computer primer, Michael Statler, becomes obsessed with the desire to see the outside world and forges an exit pass. He comes to a commune where he is charged with spying for the urbmon and almost sacrificed to a harvest god by the puritanical, superstitious farmers. He escapes back to the urbmon where he is immediately executed as a social danger.

Chapter 7

Siegmund Kluver tries to regain his sense of purpose by visiting a blessman, a consoler and various friends and strangers throughout the urbmon. When nothing succeeds, he climbs to the roof and in a moment of mystic exaltation jumps off trying to reach the sky.

The World Inside seems on first reading to have both the breadth and depth, the drama and insight, of a major utopian novel. A study of antecedents, internal consistency and implications will help determine if this work, most of which originally appeared in science fiction magazines, indeed belongs among the key visions in utopian literature.

II

The World Inside is certainly a “hive” society, but it is not so certain what a hive society should be. The only indisuputable characteristic seems to be extreme crowding. But “hive” also implies an enclosed space, and even though the dictionary definition does not require this, the hive concept is not easily kept distinct from mere crowdedness without it. The concept's source in insect societies also suggests that hives should manifest a high degree of organization, especially a drastic and wondrously efficient differentiation of functions between members of the society, who are programmed or conditioned to keep as busy as bees or as industrious as ants (or any other suitable metaphor).

However, few fictional societies have met the criteria of crowding, an enclosed space and organization along the lines of insect societies. H. G. Wells came close in The First Men in the Moon, where the huge numbers of Selenites inside the moon are biologically specialized beyond the dreams of the most fanatical Director of Hatcheries and Conditioning in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. But since the Selenites actually are insects (or more insect than anything else), calling them a hive society doesn't quite come to grips with the issue. The Caves of Steel meets the physical critieria of a hive, but the lives of its characters bear no resemblance at all to those of ants or bees. They live instead like familiar human types who have had to make numerous piecemeal adjustments to overburdened space facilities. Both Wells and later commentators refer to When the Sleeper Wakes as a hive or anthill society, but rather than envisioning distinctive hive characteristics it describes a late-nineteenth-century society, with some features exaggerated, in a technologically visionary environment.

Silverberg's urbmons are completely enclosed and crowded to the limit the society's standards of civilized living will allow. This is of course a prescription for severe population pressure, which would seem an inescapable fact of life (so to speak) in a hive yet plays no part in Wells's novels mentioned above and is assumed to be under rational control in The Caves of Steel (“their I.Q. rating, Genetic Values status, and his position in the Department entitled him to two children, of which the first might be conceived during the first year”). Silverberg recognizes that population pressure in a hive environment will necessarily lead to social patterns unlikely in any but a hive society, and accordingly goes much further than Wells or Asimov in exploring not merely how a hive operates, but the effects of such operation on the way of life and the psychology of the inhabitants.

On the other hand, there is nothing of bee- or ant-like regimentation in the urbmon. Organization is pervasive and unchallengeable, yet no one seems to feel any urgency about their role in it. What little is said about the atmosphere and relationships in daily work makes them sound relaxed and even informal. No one has problems on the job (except poor Siegmund Kluver), working hours are apparently quite flexible, and specialization is no more intense than in any advanced twentieth-century industrial society. Insect hives were never like this.

Since The World Inside is a unique blend of some elements appropriate to a hive and others which are not, it cannot be expected to owe much to previous hive stories. Curiously, its chief debt is to a Wells story about a society which is neither fully enclosed nor rigidly organized and in fact can be considered a hive only in the elementary sense of crowdedness. But “A Story of the Days to Come” anticipates key environmental features of The World Inside, and makes some of its points about human consequences with plot developments very similar to those in the later novel.

Wells describes England in the twenty-second century, with the entire population concentrated in four huge cities.⁷ Thirty-three million people live in London and no one in the countryside, which is devoted exclusively to food production. The vertical orientation of the city is as emphatic as in an urbmon: “The towering buildings of the new age, the mechanical ways, the electric and water mains, all came to an end together, like a wall, like a cliff, near four hundred feet in height, abrupt and sheer.”⁸ And within the city, verticality provides the scale along which class is measured, just as in The World Inside: “The prosperous people lived in a vast series of sumptuous hotels in the upper storeys and halls of the city fabric; the industrial population dwelt beneath in the tremendous ground-floor and basement, so to speak, of the place.”⁹ Farming is done by a distinct social group, but instead of commune dwellers they are an enormous agricultural proletariat which the Food Company conveys out of the city each day. Production is so efficiently organized that weeds have almost disappeared, and fertilizer is supplied by fountains sprinkling deodorized urban sewage—a concept closely akin to the urbmon's distillation of urine into pure water for the inhabitants and chemicals to be sold to the communes. Moving roadways and widespread use of powered vehicles have made walking “a rare exercise,” and when Denton and Elizabeth, Wells's hero and heroine, walk from the city they soon find themselves footsore, just as Michael Statler, the obsessed computer primer in The World Inside, finds when he leaves the urbmon on foot that “short horizontal walks along the corridors have not prepared him for this.”

Denton and Elizabeth, who have decided to live in the uninhabited countryside in order to marry without means, are, like Michael, full of romantic imaginings about an outside world for which they are wholly unprepared. The newlyweds are besieged by savage dogs, and Michael narrowly escapes being sacrificed to the harvest god by the commune people. All three are likable, eager and courageous, but do not know how to live off the land or defend themselves against the dangers there. “Ours is the age of cities,” says Denton after the encounter with the dogs; “More of this will kill us. … To each generation, the life of its time. … In the city—that is the life to which we were born.”¹⁰ “His conditioning asserting itself after all,” writes Silverberg of Michael's flight back to the urbmon, “Environment conquering genetics” (p. 156). Denton, Elizabeth and Michael return to their cities defeated, the former to the harsh necessity of finding “means,” the latter to execution.

Later, in a moment of profound despair after becoming serfs of the Labor Company to avoid starvation, Denton and Elizabeth go to a high flying-machine landing stage on the outskirts of London and look at the stars. Denton has a mystical experience he can scarcely express:

Down there it would seem impossible almost to go on living if one were horribly disfigured, horribly crippled, disgraced. Up here—under these stars—none of those things would matter. They don't matter. … They are a part of something. One seems just to touch that something—under the stars.¹¹

Siegmund Kluver, disgraced in fact and not merely in imagination, climbs to the top of the urbmon and has a similar experience.

Stepping out on the flat breeze-swept platform. Night, now. The stars glittering fiercely. Up there is god, immanent and all-enduring, floating serenely amidst the celestial mechanics. … Siegmund smiles. He stretches forth his arms. If he could only embrace the stars, he might find god. (Pp. 182-83.)

Denton, thwarted in his middle-class ambitions, subsides into the grim life of the lowest class; Siegmund, who had aimed much higher, leaps off the urbmon.

The points of resemblance do not extend past these matters of environment and plot into the natures of the two societies. Urbmon inhabitants sincerely contend that they are living in utopia, but no one could make such a claim for the society in Wells's story, where class differences have been hardened by technological advance and their effects compounded by the inequities of the economic system. Even considered as a dystopia, “A Story of the Days to Come” is confusing to analyze, since Wells provides little hard information about its economics and none at all about its politics. (These gaps are filled in When the Sleeper Wakes, which is a much more significant futuristic vision but, in the absence of the adventures of Denton and Elizabeth, less closely related to The World Inside..)

In contrast to “A Story of the Days to Come,” The World Inside is crammed with details and statistics about urbmon society. Information about its economic life is plentiful, and its politics are seen through the eyes of a rising administrator who proffers convenient insights and analyses. The initial impression made by the two works considered together is that in this case Wells fell into the occupational hazard of simply telling a story, whereas Silverberg retrieved Wells's hints and fragments and constructed a genuine utopian vision around them. The question to be explored is the validity of that vision.

III

Utopian novels have traditionally been more specific about institutions (or lack of them) than about the corresponding individual and mass psychologies. In Utopia, More imparts all kinds of information about how Utopian society operates and its prevailing religious and philosophical beliefs, but little sense of the Utopians themselves aside from their relentless commitment to propriety and keen conviction of superiority to all other peoples. Looking Backward is notorious for the shallowness of its portrayal of personal and social life in A.D. 2000, in sharp contrast to the depth and passion of Bellamy's vision of a new economic and class order. No doubt this emphasis on how a society works is an occupational hazard of utopian novelists in the same way as science fiction writers give priority to narrative action, and it is a measure of Silverberg's skill that in The World Inside he avoids these particular tendencies of both types of writers.

Avoiding a tendency, however, is not the same as striking a balance, and Silverberg's penetrating exploration of the psychological consequences of urbmon society is accompanied by a strangely inadequate approach to institutions. This may sound like an unreasonable criticism, since The World Inside is replete with descriptions and explanations of the urbmon's operation, backed up with numerous statistics.¹² Yet from all this information no clear picture emerges of how the politics and economics of urbmon society actually work. The vagueness about politics is especially puzzling, since the character most in evidence throughout the novel is Siegmund Kluver, who is well on his way to becoming one of the ruling elite and lets the reader in on privileged information about how the urbmon is governed. But what his insights boil down to is that the leading men (apparently all the top administrators are male) are power-hungry, self-serving and cynical, and delegate all work except decision-making. Nissim Shawke, the thoroughly unpleasant possessor of vast administrative power, does, as far as Siegmund can tell, “nothing at all. He refers all governmental matters to his subordinates. … Shawke need not do but only be. Now he marks time and enjoys the comforts of his position. Sitting there like a Renaissance prince. … A single memorandum from him might be able to reverse some of the urbmon's most deeply cherished policies. Yet he originates no programs, he vetoes no proposals, he ducks all challenges” (p. 97). He also makes cruel fun of Siegmund's idealism and particularly any suggestions that urbmon life should live up to its utopian professions even if administratively inconvenient.

The other leading administrators are more amiable than Shawke but equally lacking in commitment and dynamism. Even the orgy at which Siegmund loses his nerve deserves no better than his disdain: “So common, so vulgar, the cheap hedonism of a ruling class.” Yet Silverberg would have us believe that these decadent citizens and indifferent administrators, who in fact in his portrayal do not have a single redeeming quality among the lot of them, are allowed to possess power and privilege without a whisper of opposition, not even from the ambitious “rung-grabbers” rising in the official hierarchy. And this in a society where political standards are neither reinforced by the prevailing ideology nor imposed by formal conditioning!

Such an incongruity is possible because the book makes no effort to analyse the fundamental nature of urbmon politics. Siegmund cannot figure out which of the leaders is most important: “At the top level, power becomes an abstraction; in one sense everybody in Louisville [the topmost floors] has absolute authority over the entire building, and in another sense no one has” (p. 96). In the absence of further explanation, the “inside information” air of this statement merely disguises a complete lack of content. And what about the governmental level among or above the urbmons? One must exist, since decisions are made to build new urbmons and allocate resources for them, but it is never mentioned.

The nature of urbmon economics is even vaguer. No one buys things, gets salaries, handles money or is needy, so it is logical to assume that distribution is organized on communistic principles. However, there are occasional references to expense, and at one point Siegmund “authorizes a credit transfer to the blessman's account.” The vast economic and social implications of “credit transfer” are so studiously ignored that the phrase seems to have wandered in from another book. Silverberg seems no more concerned with the economic than with the political functioning of urbmon society.

Of course the utopian writer gives unequal emphasis to different aspects of his or her imagined society. The areas perceived as most significant—in all likelihood the ones in which contemporary disharmonies stimulated the author to construct a utopia in the first place—will receive the most serious and detailed attention. Other elements will be treated less fully (or even, as in the case of the common people in Plato's Republic, ignored altogether) or simply settled arbitrarily. The outstanding example of the latter is the reaction of the hero of News from Nowhere to the “force vehicles” which convey heavy loads on land or water without noise, pollution or visible machinery: “I took good care not to ask any questions about them, as I knew well enough … that I should never be able to understand how they were worked.”¹³

Just as Morris's “Nowhere” required an ideal form of mechanical power but his real interest was in entirely different aspects of the society, urbmons must have politics and economics but Silverberg's primary concerns lie elsewhere. The illusion he gives of having provided many answers obscures the fact that, like Morris's hero confronting the force vehicles, he takes care (but much more skillfully) to avoid asking serious questions about the less favored subjects. The social relations of urbmon society are what really interest him, and it is in that area, where he is most specific and consistent, that the essential utopian/dystopian quality is to be found. Sexual mores, of course, dominate urbmon sociology, but class considerations are surprisingly prominent. Although there is some relationship between material goods and class, the main indicator of status is vertical location in the urbmon, just as in “A Story of the Days To Come.” Location is determined generally by occupation, with a ranking of rulers, professionals, minor officials, technical workers and manual workers similar to twentieth-century evaluations. Education, sophistication and even per capita living space decline as one descends in the urbmon, and classes have little contact with each other, which is not a surprise to the reader after the information that inhabitants of the upper floors label those of the lower with the term “grubbos.”

If these attitudes toward class are reminiscent of Silverberg's own twentieth century, class characteristics are even more so. Top administrators and their families display arrogance and “cool” and are in no doubt of their superiority. In our only glimpse of them, industrial workers are described as “slumped and sullen human handlers.” Artists live in San Francisco, rather low in the building but a tolerant place where “we don't push hard.” The description by musician Dillon Chrimes of the inhabitants of Rome, which is located in the middling 500s, will be familiar to readers of modern European fiction.

The people here are mostly minor bureaucrats, a middle echelon of failed functionaries. … Here they will stay in this good gray city, frozen in hallowed stasis, doing dehumanized jobs that any computer could handle forty times as well. Dillon feels a cosmic pity for everyone who is not an artist, but he pities the people of Rome most of all, sometimes. Because they are nothing. Because they can use neither their brains nor their muscles. Crippled souls; walking zeros; better off down the chute. (p. 44.)

Unlike class considerations, sexual mores have undergone drastic change, and this is Silverberg's real focus of interest in terms of pages devoted to it and depth of analysis. Mattern explains to his visitor from Venus that “each of us has access at any time to any other adult member of the community,” and that means exactly what it says. Access is institutionalized in the practice of nightwalking, whereby anyone (but almost always the male) can enter any room in the entire urbmon (but as a matter of good form people are expected to stick to their own cities) for any sexual purpose within reason. Nightwalking is at the core of “post-privacy culture,” guaranteeing—so urbmon theory runs—that frustration, which would be explosive in a hive, will be forestalled. Since no one can withhold anything from anyone else, there is nothing to get frustrated about on the interpersonal level. The devaluation of the emotional intensity of sex in favor of sheer physical expertise reduces the danger of social strain that much further.

The World Inside's description of a stable and unregimented post-privacy culture is an original contribution to futuristic thought, a refreshing change from the usual population-pressure scenario of desperate social measures and totalitarian politics. However, imposing a radical new sexual code to enable people to live in hives, when hardly anyone would choose to live in a hive, seems a bit perverse. Wouldn't it make more sense to simply stop living in hives? But that cannot be done in the world of 2381, because the core of religion, morality and social planning is the absolute priority of unlimited fertility. Nightwalking is not only a mechanism for controlling frustration, but a tribute to the sacred duty to procreate. Sexual training and deliberate stimulation are not only aspects of society in which sex is fully open, but social aids toward the fulfillment of the most profound ethical obligation. The proliferation of human life in 2381 is perceived not as a population “problem” but as an exalted condition of things to which men and women, in their essential humanity, have discovered how to adjust their attitudes, behavior and institutions.

When the Venusian visitor happens to mention fertility control, Mattern, although a sophisticated sociologist, “clutches his genitals in shock at the unexpected obscenity. … ‘Please don't use that phrase again. Particularly if you're near children.’” He then provides as provocative a formulation of utopian criteria as any ever written:

“We hold that life is sacred. Making new life is blessed. One does one's duty to god by reproducing. … To be human is to meet challenges through the exercise of intelligence, right? And one challenge is the multiplication of inhabitants in a world that has seen the conquest of disease and the elimination of war. We could limit births, I suppose, but that would be sick, a cheap, anti-human way out. Instead we've met the challenge of overpopulation triumphantly, wouldn't you say? And so we go on and on, multiplying joyously, our numbers increasing by three billion a year, and we find room for everyone, and food for everyone. Few die, and many are born, and the world fills up, and god is blessed, and life is rich and pleasant, and as you see we are all quite happy. We have matured beyond the infantile need to place layers of insulation between man and man.” (pp. 12-13.)

The power of this statement lies (as is the case with all significant utopian statements) in its self-sufficient quality, its invulnerability to refutation on its own ground. If life is better than death, if encouragement and support of new lives is better than prevention or suppression, if human ingenuity can find room and food for everyone, where is the opening for dispute? When Mattern says, “Can you deny that we are happy here?” his use of “happy” may not be the same as someone else's, but that is a different argument, as John Savage finds out in attempting to grapple with Mustapha Mond's self-sufficient argument in Brave New World. In any event, the Venusian does not even try to answer his host, and Silverberg's own response, while effective enough in literary terms, is deeply flawed in its character as serious utopian commentary.

IV

Silverberg's reaction to Mattern's claim of utopia is not in doubt. Every chapter in the novel ends on an ironic or negative note pointing up the diminished human quality of urbmon life. This gets rather heavyhanded toward the end. After alert, eager Michael Statler, whose expressions of initiative and curiosity closely reflect most twentieth-century readers' professed values, has been speedily executed upon his return from “the world outside,” the chapter concludes: “The journey is over. The source of peril has been eradicated. The urbmon has taken the necessary protective steps, and an enemy of civilization has been removed.” Siegmund's soul-tormented leap off the urbmon is immediately followed by the novel's final paragraph, in which dawn breaks over the urbmon and “God Bless! Here begins another happy day.”

Michael and Siegmund have plenty of company in their disenchantment—namely, all the main characters in the book. Perhaps the most obvious evidence for Silverberg's determination to portray urbmon society as dystopia is his failure to allow a good look at contented members. Mattern, to be sure, is completely adjusted, but after serving as guide in the first chapter he scarcely appears again, and is not a particularly attractive character when he does (“sleek, fast-talking” and “tight-souled” are the adjectives attached to him). Even during the “happy day” in the first chapter he is “sickened and dizzied” when he remembers his brother thrown down the chute many years before for antisocial behavior.

Dillon Chrimes, the musician, seems perfectly adjusted and at times filled with a positive delight about the urbmon. He enjoys a full life, has complete freedom to exercise his art, and toward the end of his ecstatic drug episode exults “‘Oh what a beautiful place. Oh how I love it here. Oh this is the real thing. Oh!’” But the net effect of the drug trip is negative—“‘You go all the way up, then you come all the way down. But why does it have to be so far down?’” (pp. 60-61)—and his creativity is temporarily blocked.

Dillon later admits to Siegmund, who has confessed his own feelings of alienation, that on the downside from the drug the urbmon “‘struck me as just an awful hideous beehive of a place.’” Nevertheless, “‘what's the good of hating the building? I mean, the urbmon's a real solution to real problems, isn't it?’” Since it works most of the time, and there's no sensible alternative, “‘we stay here. And groove on the richness of it all’” (p. 169). So even Dillon, who has experienced that total identity with his fellows which is the ultimate fulfillment of a hive's inner nature, offers no better justification for the urbmon than utilitarian calculation.

Even nightwalking, which is universally recognized as indispensable to post-privacy culture and also as a liberation from the “sterilizing” emotions of earlier societies, is not exempted from the disillusion afflicting all the main characters. Siegmund leaves his room because a nightwalker is visiting his wife there (although in a post-privacy culture no one cares if he stays), then realizes he is more interested in sleep than in sex. “Nightwalking suddenly seems an abomination to him: forced, unnatural, compulsive. The slavery of absolute freedom” (p. 174).

Silverberg does himself a disservice by concentrating on the dissidents and pointing up their plight with his own overt commentary. A mock utopia is most effectively exposed when it is shown at its best (by its own standards) and that best proves to be grotesque. Huxley does this superbly in Brave New World—Henry Foster, Lenina and Mustapha Mond are allowed to go through their usual paces on their own terms, and if the results appear ridiculous and appalling, it is not because Huxley says so, but because they are inherently ridiculous and appalling in the light of his readers' standards and need only be described to be condemned. Silverberg, in contrast, rarely lets his imagined civilization speak for itself.

A more serious flaw in The World Inside as a dystopian novel is that it strains the limits of utopian plausibility. Of course all utopian fiction involves a high degree of speculative “what if?,” but the “if” should not be ruled out by the nature of things. If the lion has to lie down with the lamb, or telepathy become a common mode of communication, or a comet's gases transform human nature, the story should be classified as a fantasy rather than a utopian vision. The cult of maximum fertility in The World Inside—which demands positive action toward procreation, not merely the elimination of restraints (i.e., continence is as morally reprehensible as abortion), and does so as a permanent command, not merely as a temporary measure to offset some population deficiency—is so exceptional a departure in recorded human affairs¹⁴ that readers need a plausible scenario of the events and attitudes which brought it about. Silverberg fails to provide this.

Historical developments from the twentieth century to the twenty-fourth are never described. A historian reflects that the twentieth century was the climax of the “ancient era,” followed by a chaotic twenty-first and the arrival at modern times in the twenty-second, but the reader is left to guess what happened, and why New York's skyscrapers have been reduced to stumps and London is deep under water. Nearest to a causal explanation of the preoccupation with fertility is the remark, made in light conversation, that “‘a cultural imperative telling us to breed and breed and breed [is] natural, after the agonies of pre-urbmon days, when everybody went around wondering where we were going to put all the people’” (p. 25)—and that is not very near. Thus urbmon society, which could not have come into existence without extraordinary events in both the material and ideological realms, floats in mid-air as far as historical conviction goes.

The World Inside’s most damaging shortcoming as a utopian novel—as a manifestation of serious visionary ideas in a persuasive fictional framework—is that too many of urbmon society's characteristics do not follow logically from its inner nature. The caste system in Brave New World mirrors perfectly the values and priorities of Fordian society, but the class system in The World Inside is simply arbitrary. Nothing in the organization of urbmon life makes class privilege and snobbery necessary or even probable. The only reason equality of sexual access does not produce the same social equality as equal income in Looking Backward or equality of refusal in Eric Frank Russell's … And Then There Were None is that Silverberg makes the outcome different. The same can be said about the political system. In Looking Backward it is a wholly logical outgrowth of socioeconomic priorities, but in The World Inside it is reduced to administration by a cynical elite for no stronger reason than that the author says so.

On a broader scale, all aspects of life on Le Guin's utopian planet Anarres flow persuasively from the society's ideological foundations, just as they did centuries earlier in More's Utopia. But many of the features of urbmon society do not survive the elementary question, “Why should they have taken these forms and not others?” Something as taken for granted as the rigid prohibition against leaving the urbmon is, when considered apart from story line, only one alternative among several. Sightseeing trips in land or air vehicles, for example, could hardly engender more restlessness than the frequent travelog shows on the “screen.”

All of this suggests that The World Inside is a dystopia because its author uses his literary skill to make it sound like one, not because he demonstrates that a society organized like an urbmon will inevitably be a dystopian place to live. Instead of persuading his readers that the application of some principles which may seem obviously in the human interest will actually lead to diminished human qualities in the future, Silverberg portrays a future which is less human mainly because he imposes unattractive features on it. He loads the dice so consistently that the cautionary element (inseparable from all dystopian visions) is clearly intended to be taken seriously, but it is not easy to pin down just what is being cautioned against. On the assumption that the novel is concerned with something of greater scope than “permissiveness” or “hedonism,” it seems to point to the loss of individualistic/romantic freedom under conditions of pervasive organization, even when that organization is not overtly oppressive and makes possible so estimable a goal as that propounded by Mattern after his visitor's reference to fertility control. The basic theme is hardly original, but is presented in an absorbing fictional framework and with some unusual variations.

But the classics of utopian literature do more (sometimes without even doing that): they weave so tight a bond between a society’s inner nature and institutional and psychological manifestations that the reader cannot help thinking, “Yes, it would have to be like that.” The urbmons, however, do not have to be as Silverberg describes them. What makes for literary effectiveness in a cautionary tale does not necessarily contribute to a fuller understanding of ideas. The World Inside, an outstanding achievement as science fiction, falls short of the more rarefied level of significant utopian thought.

Notes

1. In Hell's Cartographers, ed. Brian W. Aldiss and Harry Harrison (London: Weidenfield and Nicolson, 1975), p. 40.

2. The Tale of the Future (London: Library Association, 1961).

3. The Caves of Steel, in The Robot Novels (Garden City, N.Y. Doubleday, n.d.), p. 37.

4. Ibid., pp. 137-38.

5. Silverberg accomplished the same feat in his short story “Getting Across,” in Future City, ed. Roger Elwood, (New York: Trident, 1973). The story features a suspenseful adventure in a highly original yet plausible dystopian setting, the origins of which are intelligently described.

6. The World Inside (Garden City, N.Y. Doubleday, 1971), p. 7.

7. In its description of the physical appearance and functioning of the twenty-second-century world, “A Story of the Days to Come” is like a trial run for When the Sleeper Wakes, in which Wells greatly expanded this aspect. Therefore several of the points in this and the following paragraph are identical, or nearly so, with material in the latter novel.

8. “A Story of the Days to Come,” in The Complete Short Stories of H. G. Wells (London: Benn, 1948), p. 741.

9. Ibid., p. 737.

10. Ibid., p. 751.

11. Ibid., p. 771.

12. Despite his attention to most matters of detail, Silverberg's arithmetic suffers from a carelessness which lessens the impact of his “facts.” The most serious case concerns world population. This is said (by both a sociocomputator and an administrative insider, so it must be assumed to be the correct figure) to total seventy-five billion. But consider the following points, all quite clear in the book:

    1. The Chipitts constellation of fifty urbmons contains forty million people.

    2. Chipitts is not the largest constellation but is larger than most.

    3. Constellations cover large stretches of territory: from Chicago to Pittsburgh, Boston to Washington, San Francisco to San Diego, Berlin to Paris, Vienna to Budapest, Shanghai to Hong Kong, Bogota to Caracas, to list the ones actually referred to in the book. There is plenty of room between them, since no part of any other constellation is visible from the top of the three-kilometer- high urbmon in which the story takes place.

    4. Michael Statler walks many miles from the urbmon without coming across a single house or person, and when he is flown even further away, the settlement he arrives at is a small town at best. The non-urbmon population is clearly a negligible part of the world total.

    The conclusion from these points is that world population cannot be anywhere near seventy-five billion. If forty million is a more or less average figure for a constellation, it would take almost two thousand constellations to reach seventy-five billion; but since constellations cover such enormous swaths of land, it would be impossible to fit even five hundred of them on the earth's habitable surface.

    Less significant in the novel but still indicative of carelessness with numbers is the calculation of the urbmon's midpoint, where Dillon Chrimes, for symbolic reasons, wants to be when he starts his transcendent drug experience. He has to settle for the 500th floor even though the “true midpoint” is “somewhere between 499 and 500.” But of course the midpoint in a 1000-floor building is between 500 and 501.

    Finally, when Charles Mattern is showing his visitor from Venus around the urbmon, they enter a newlyweds' dormitory where “a dozen couples are having intercourse on a nearby platform.” Elsewhere in the book such a dormitory is described as shared by thirty-one couples (which, it is further explained, is eight more than it was meant to hold). The carelessness in the reference to “a dozen couples” lies simply in the failure to think about the implications of a number, since the possibility of almost half the couples having intercourse at the same daytime moment is, even in the supersexed urbmon atmosphere, exceedingly remote.

13. William Morris, News from Nowhere (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1890), p. 140.

14. Societies have attached spiritual value to a high level of procreation, for example in obedience to the biblical injunction to be fruitful and multiply, but that is not the same thing as bending every effort to achieve the greatest possible number of births among the entire population. It has been suggested to me that nineteenth-century Mormon society might be a precedent for insistence on maximum fertility.