The World Inside

The World Inside is a 1971 novel assembled from a series of linked stories Silverberg published in Galaxy Science Fiction, each set within "Urban Monad 116," one of thousands of thousand-floor residential towers housing Earth's population of 75 billion. The towers, inspired by architect Paolo Soleri's concept of "arcologies," contain entire self-sufficient societies in which constant reproduction is a civic virtue, privacy is nonexistent, and leaving the building is considered deviant behavior. The world's farmland is reserved entirely for agriculture, and the urbmons are where humanity lives now. Silverberg structures the novel as a series of portraits of different inhabitants across the floors, ranging from the cheerful conformist to the quiet despairing, resisting any single ideological verdict on the overall system. It is one of the more formally inventive and ambivalent of the major overpopulation dystopias, a subgenre that also includes Brunner's Stand on Zanzibar (1968) and Harrison's Make Room! Make Room! (1966). Signed by Silverberg on the front free endpaper.

Hardcover. First Edition, First Printing. Octavo, bound in light grey cloth covered boards. Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, 1971. #11114.
Fine in fine dust jacket.