#156 Superstructure: The World Inside (1971) by Robert Silverberg

Confinement and culture shock in a hyper-urban world

Recent projections suggest that the human population will peak somewhere around 2085; it could even occur, according to some models, as early as 2060. But what would society look like if it was governed by an obsessive push to increase population - to strain against every social and ecological obstacle?

Originally published in 1971, The World Inside is Robert Silverberg's exploration of extreme human population growth and density. It is set in the 24th century, at a time when the world government is close to achieving a population of 75 billion. 

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Transcript

Confinement and culture shock in a hyper-urban world

Robert Silverberg’s reflections on the sexual revolution, the ‘60s drug culture, and urbanisation are combined in his book The World Inside (1971). An assembly of six previously published stories, it is - like Keith Roberts’ Pavane (1968) - arguably a collection rather than a novel. 

Set in 2381, the stories each explore a future in which the world is rigidly bifurcated into two co-dependent societies. The World Inside focuses largely on the urban monads or “urbmons”, immense skyscrapers three kilometres tall and each home to 800,000 people - each one “a needle sticking into god’s eye”. Much of the rest of the world is dedicated to farmland, where a much smaller community produces the food for the vast and growing population of the vertical cities.

A product of Silverberg's prolific peak period, The World Inside is a broadly bleak look at life inside a pressure cooker of incredible population density, and a society closed off from past and future alike.

The stories that make up The World Inside were all previously published in 1970 and 1971. Two appeared in the 1970 anthologies Nova 1 (edited by Harry Harrison) and Science Against Man (edited by Anthony Cheetham); the others were all published in Galaxy magazine, then edited by Eljer Jakobsson, to whom the book is dedicated. 

An earlier Silverberg book, To Open the Sky (1967), also consisted of stories published in Galaxy, although those were overseen by Jakobsson’s predecessor Frederik Pohl.

The great indoors

By 2381, the world population is approaching 75 billion. This teeming mass has come about because the dominating ideology prizes procreation above all else. Having children is the ultimate “blessworthy” virtue, and is facilitated by a radical kind of free love. Men are expected to “nightwalk”, to seek out sexual partners at night - refusing this carries a powerful social stigma. 

No one is permitted to leave the urbmons, and few know much at all about the outside. The pressure of population density occasionally produces “flippos”, people who experience a psychotic break. They are summarily executed by being thrown down a chute that ends in the urbmon’s power generator. “The chute”, Silverberg states, “awaits those who persist in abrading the smooth texture of community life.” To prevent this outcome, a combination of brainwashing, psychoactive drugs, and a perfunctory religion are used. 

Still, some people conceal their growing unease at urbmon living - at least for a time. The World Inside follows several such individuals, all of them living in urbmon 116 in what was once the United States. In their own ways, they all consider what another place, another way of life, would be like. 

These disaffected individuals include Jason Quevedo, a historian fascinated with what little knowledge remains of the long-distant 20th century; Siegmund Kluver, a teenager seemingly destined for high office in the urbmon; and Michael Statler, a technician who longs to see the outside world.

Life in the vertical city

While several characters recur multiple times as the stories weave together, none are followed closely for long. The World Inside is not a character study, but rather a social study - an in-depth exploration of an extreme system. Each of the stories - or chapters in the book version - provides a different lens through which urbmon 116 is viewed.

In some ways, the urbmon is an extrapolation of contemporary trends. Its atmosphere of sexual permissiveness and the strong emphasis on drug use reflect the social shifts that had intensified in the 1960s. It is worth remembering that Silverberg was not only a leading light in SF at this time, but also an incredibly productive writer of porn novels. As with The Second Trip (1971), this comes to mind during the novel’s many sexual expeditions. 

In other ways, life in the urbmon instead runs counter to prevailing trends. Silverberg’s inclusion of marriage as an abiding institution in the book is surprising, and it would have been interesting if the stories had explored why marriage has survived to 2381. Reading today, it is interesting that in The World Inside, people marry and have children at a disturbingly young age - when in reality, many people now start families far later than they did in the 1970s.

Culture shocked

While much of The World Inside is focused on life in the urbmons, the strongest part of the book is the one which compares and contrasts the urbmons with the agricultural communities outside. This is done through the lens provided by the story about the technician Michael Statler. He longs to leave urbmon 116, even if only briefly, and ideally to see the sea. To achieve this, he exploits his access to and technical knowledge of the urbmon’s central supercomputer, “that huge watchful man-made mind in the middle of everything.”

Statler finds a seemingly endless expanse of farmland, tended by a small number of human labourers and a fleet of largely autonomous machines built in urbmon factories. This scenario suggests Silverberg may have been thinking about the advances of the then-recent real-world Green Revolution, in which new technologies hugely increased agricultural output and food availability. Statler also finds that the rural people do not share his language, and experiences profound culture shock at their very different ways.

Silverberg’s portrayal of these two communities recalls, but is quite different to, the situation in Alexei Panshin’s novel Rite of Passage (1968). The experiences of Statler drive home the tragic nature of The World Inside; both urban and rural communities are trapped in a stasis of mutual dependence and hostility. Both are parts of a system that has annihilated the natural world, erased much of human history, and almost destroyed the capacity to imagine a different way of life. As a cautionary tale, The World Inside is highly effective and worthwhile.