Reviews and Comments

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1333053972

Robert A. Heinlein demonstrated (time and again) that you can be a dirty old man and still get by, but when you get weird, you’re just creepy and the creep factor negatively effects your writing. In 1966 someone should have said to him, “Bob, you’re sexually free and you’re all about the ladies being wild and free too, got it, but you wrote some great fiction back in the day before the thick shag rugs and the hot tub parties … so take it easy on the porn, huh? And for God’s sake DO NOT order another round of oysters, I mean what the hell??” So we come to Robert Silverberg’s 1971 The World Inside. I’ve read a lot of Silverberg and he is a very sexually oriented writer, and this is the most sexually explicit of his novels I have read thus far (read in July 2015 – have not yet gotten to Up the Line, but “I heard things”). Silverberg was writing in the sixties and it was, no doubt, very liberating to be able to describe – sex. We all do it; it’s a big fun part of life, and so why not in science fiction? Indeed, why not? Until it gets in the way of, and deteriorates from, an otherwise really cool book. For me it was just too much, over the top, in your face page after page pornography. And I certainly do not want to come across as a prude – something that has NEVER before come up, I don’t think – but he could have taken a different tack, left some film on the editor’s floor to avoid the X rating and still had a damn fine novel that was not taken over by the Ron Jeremyesque saxophone solos.

As en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_Inside#:~:text=War%2C%20starvation%2C%20crime,are%20considered%20perverse describes:

War, starvation, crime and birth control have been eliminated. Life is now totally fulfilled and sustained within Urban Monads (Urbmons), mammoth thousand-floor skyscrapers arranged in "constellations", where the shadow of one building does not fall upon another. An Urbmon is divided into 25 self-contained "cities" of 40 floors each, in ascending order of status, with administrators occupying the highest level. Each building can hold approximately 800,000 people, with excess population totalling three billion a year transferred to new Urbmons, which are continually under construction. The Urbmon population is supported by the conversion of all of the Earth's habitable land area not taken up by Urbmons to agriculture. The theoretical limit of the population supported by this arrangement is estimated to be 200 billion. The farmers live a very different lifestyle, with strict birth control. Farmers trade their produce for technology and the two societies rarely have direct contact; even their languages are mutually unintelligible. The Urbmons are a world of total sexual license where men are expected to engage in "night walking"; it is considered very rude to refuse an invitation for sex. In this world it is a blessing to have children: most people are married at 12 and parents at 14. Just thinking of controlling families is considered a faux pas. Privacy has been dispensed with due to the limited area. Because the need to be outdoors and to travel has been eliminated, thoughts of wanderlust are considered perverse.

I consequently damn hope that I get to read about some exploration.