You have to have Peanut Reader to read the books you buy from Peanut Press. But the Reader program works like a well-behaved DOC reader, letting you change fonts AND screen orientation (a nice feature). The comprehensive Go menu includes a Find command, revolutionizing your ability to settle arguments about whether or not the author ever used the word "zaftig."

There's also a tool for adding annotations, one for reversing the screen, and a thoughtfully added little tool that flashes the time onto the screen so you know how much time you've blown reading.

The World Within
Ordering from Peanut Press is dangerously addictive. They publish, on their Web site, lengthy excerpts from the novels enticing you to buy the whole thing -- and it works. With no particular goals in mind I browsed through their selection of classic SF titles, and got hooked on an excerpt from Robert Silverberg's The World Within. I read several others but came back to this one -- I wanted more. So, for $6.99, I got more.

I was captured by this classic SF tale. At the start it appeared to be a rather anthropological treatise on the lives of future Earth dwellers in three-kilometer-high apartment complexes called urban monads, or "urbmons." As it turned out, the work is almost a collection of short stories about a handful of the citizens of Building 116 whose lives happen to intersect. The anthropological feel of the first section is primarily because it focuses on Charles Mattern, a "sociocomputator"in the year 2381, who is hosting a visiting sociocomputator from Mars to observe life in the monads. It's a simple device that allows the narrator to tell us everything he wants us to know about life in these vast buildings where no one ever goes outside. The entire social machine is geared towards reducing friction between individuals, and to violate the edicts of the social machine is automatic death.

Silverberg's urbmon stories are actually rather diverse. A computer operator longs to go outside -- and does. A historian ponders whether or not the human race is actually evolving into something different inside the urbmons, and whether or not he is evolving along with it. A musician discovers two methods of empathy with the pathetic drudges of one of the lower-class "cities" inside the urbmon: performing and mind-expanding drugs. A young woman who has been involuntairily exported to settle a new urbmon is forced to undergo mental conditioning meant to "improve" her.

The book is much more than a long dreary recital of why things in the future are awful. Silverberg has more than a little sympathy with his characters, and seems quite intrigued by the possibilities of the urbmon lifestyle. While this lifestyle would seem monstrous to us (accustomed as we are to privacy, to some tenuous connection with nature, and to the glorification of the individual in Western culture), it is a good solution in some ways. The urbmons hold a population more vast than it was ever thought possible for Earth to hold: 75 billion. Their vertical growth has solved the problem of where to put all those people, leaving much of the surface of the earth available for farming -- and it is ALL farmed. Sadly, there is no room for any animal in the biosphere except the human animal.