As does much classic American science fiction, Silverberg's novel idealizes individualism, but this idealization is a subtle undertone to the novel. "Oh, it's better to be free," a voice whispers in the back of our head. "Free to do what?", the novel whispers back.

Many things that we might consider worthy goals now, in the last moments of the twentieth century, have already either been achieved or have been ineradicably lost in the World Within. In Silverberg's world, population pressure is no longer a problem, at least for the foreseeable future; on the other hand, the environment has been utterly given over to the support of that population. Out-of-control capitalism has been reined in, and individuals do not own more than they need.

However, there are still imbalances between the privileged and the unprivileged that are perfectly hidden by the way the society is structured. Technically, a person can do almost anything she or he wants, except for a few rules that are for the greatest good of everyone. Those few rules, in practice, swell to encompass restrictions on just about everything that actually drives a person onward. It's very clear that Silverberg sees this world as a dystopia; but there's a flavor of doubt that saves the novel from being a boring lecture on the evils of the future.

There's also a lot of sex in the book -- I mean a LOT. It's shocking to us now, in the post-AIDS era, to look back at a literary work that saw the future in terms of emotionless, but near-constant sex. In the late sixties, it must have seemed an inevitable result of the sexual revolution; and free sex as an opiate of the masses in the nasty future goes back at least to Aldous Huxley's Brave New World of 1946. In that tradition, the sex in this novel is not a good thing, nor is it lovingly described, though it is graphic in various places. Silverberg isn't out to write pornography; he's out to portray an essentially dehumanizing society in which sex is available to all (though primarily men) to keep everyone "happy."

The drug use won't surprise anyone familiar with modern literature, or cyberpunk SF of the last fifteen years either. It's interesting how our literature has diverged in its treatment of these two crucial topics of the late twentieth century.

Back to Peanut Press
Peanut Press is doing a big favor for those of us who like to read science fiction; their catalog of classic works, which you can purchase and read on the same day, isn't bad and is growing. They also have a catalog of plenty of other types of fiction, not just SF, and they have new novels as well as old ones in the mix.

I hope more publishers and copyright holders come to see the value of reprinting their work electronically, and I'm happy to give them the money they deserve for writing the books in the first place -- but I hope they get big royalties from these works. Much of the cost of expensive paperbacks these days has to do with the way paper prices have risen over the last decade, and these books cost as much as the printed versions.