#143 The enemy within: The Second Trip (1971) by Robert Silverberg

A controversial psychological SF novel of crime and rehabilitation

The Second Trip is a 1971 novel by Robert Silverberg which incorporates aspects associated with both the US and UK conceptions of the New Wave. This episode looks at this disturbingly intense work of psychological science fiction, in which two minds battle for control of one body. 

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Transcript

Paul Macy is a brand-new man. Walking down the street in a future New York, he knows that he is a kind of fiction - a personality construct designed to put a perfectly good body back into circulation. The future looks bright - until a chance encounter with a telepath allows the previous owner of his body to resurface. Nathaniel Hamlin was supposed to be destroyed, but the brilliant artist and serial rapist still exists and wants his body back.

Originally published as a two-part serial in 1971, The Second Trip is a hard-edged psychological SF novel by prolific author Robert Silverberg. Its intense depictions of misogyny and sexual violence generated intense discussion at the time, and retain their power to shock. A less discussed work of the most notable phase of Silverberg's career, The Second Trip incorporates elements from both the UK and US conceptions of the science fiction New Wave.

Welcome to whoever you are

The novel is set in New York in 2011, 40 years into the future at the time of publication. Technology has advanced, but after “long orgies of waste and destruction”, many species are extinct or exist only in zoos. In the United States, capital punishment has been abolished. A new form of penalty has been enacted by the Federal Social Rehabilitation Act of 2001. Convicted criminals have their minds erased, and their bodies “recycled” as homes for new artificial personalities, constructed from invented or second-hand memories.

Paul Macy is one of these new personas. He is aware of his artificiality, and spent five years in a high-tech facility being prepared for his life. He is set up with a home, and a job as a TV news anchor, presenting broadcast packages filmed using a network of countless “hovereye” drone cameras operating worldwide. 

By chance, Macy stumbles into Lissa, an old flame and muse of Nat Hamlin - the previous tenant of his body. Macy becomes entangled in Lissa’s broken life, and her powers of ESP trigger the traumatic return of Hamlin’s latent, malign persona which has somehow survived. Two identities, one real and one constructed, begin a perilous struggle for the same body.

The second phase

In the 1950s, Robert Silverberg was extraordinarily prolific but he largely abandoned SF for a period after 1959. When he returned, he was changed. While a novel like To Open the Sky (1967) was to certain extent a holdover from his pulp background, others like Thorns (also 1967) represented a new mode. Silverberg was now working at a (somewhat) less furious pace, and with a great deal more ambition. This fertile period lasted until the mid-1970s, and Silverberg produced most of his best-known and most respected novels during this time.

While The Second Trip is of this era, it is not one of Silverberg’s most-discussed novels today. The two-part serial was originally published in the July and September 1971 issues of Amazing Stories, then edited by Ted White. White found himself dealing with a tide of letters from the magazine’s readers, some of whom were offended by The Second Trip - and they had their reasons.

Revolution in the head

This is a truly intense novel. From an early point in the story, Paul Macy is in an increasingly zero-sum struggle for his right to exist. Silverberg deftly weaves together the perspectives of the neophyte construct Macy and the genuine, but genuinely deranged, Hamlin. There are experimental passages which depict this struggle for control, in which the limbic system, the medulla oblongata, and the motor cortex become battlefields. The novel’s transgressive themes and emphasis on “inner space” help it straddle the US and UK conceptions of the New Wave.

The Second Trip is suffused by sexual violence and misogyny, which only mostly come from the serial rapist Hamlin. Lissa and other women are constantly referred to in sexualised terms. At one point, Macy speculates that “one of the doctors built his own archaic attitudes towards women” into his personality profile. It seems likely that Silverberg’s own immense production of porn novels had a bearing on the crass attitudes held by his characters, and on the multiple sexual encounters in the story.

There are various precedents for the plot and themes of The Second Trip. The novel explicitly references Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) by Robert Louis Stevenson. At times, Silverberg’s own multiple selves appear to struggle within the book - the high-minded SF author, and the man who wrote 200 smut novels. The notion of personality destruction as a criminal penalty recalls Alfred Bester’s The Demolished Man (1953), and Silverberg’s exploration of a technological “fix” for criminality links it with A Clockwork Orange (1962) by Anthony Burgess.

Not a real boy

The Second Trip plays engagingly with the themes of identity, memory, and authenticity - it could be that Silverberg was influenced by Philip K. Dick, and novels like Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968). Had Dick written this novel, he might have been more likely to make Macy initially unaware of, or in denial of, his synthetic nature. At one point, Hamlin says to Macy, “you’re nothing. You have no depth. You have no texture. You have no past. You have no reality.” One of the striking things about the novel is that Macy knows he is a person “only in the most narrow technical sense”, but still fights tenaciously to continue to exist. 

This raises interesting philosophical questions: is it more important for a person to be real, or for a person to be good? Would we have a sense of identity even if we knew our memories were someone else’s? How real are our memories, anyway?

Some elements of the novel undermine its potential. Lissa’s psychic powers fit uneasily into the setting, and come across as an overly contrived means of facilitating the plot. Listless as she is, Lissa also serves as a catalyst for the novel’s fairly abrupt ending, which could be described as a deus ex machina. Despite these flaws, The Second Trip is an uncompromising, intense, and thought-provoking entry in Silverberg’s glory era.