The World Inside

There is a history to be written about the idea of man-made societal collapse. In literature it seems to arise after we invented the tool to actually eradicate society: the nuke. Last year I reviewed Leigh Brackett’s 1955 The Long Tomorrow, one of the very first books that built an entire story on the possibility.

Another road to collapse is overpopulation, and already in 1798 Malthus speculated about famine because of it. In the 20th century, improvements in medicine and agriculture added to the anxiety: Paul Ehrlich published The Population Bomb in 1968, and 1972 saw the Club of Rome’s The Limits to Growth.

A full history of these matters is outside the scope of this review, but I think two things are interesting:

1) By the 1970s science fiction culture was well aware that we were heading for catastrophic problems as a result of modernity – quite possibly in the next century. It would be interesting to study how much of this awareness permeated into mainstream Western culture, as science fiction had more or less become part of the mainstream – both 2001: A Space Odyssey and Planet of the Apes came out in 1968, and Star Wars is from 1977. Possibly it’s much earlier: the risk of global warming due to CO2 was already mentioned in a newspaper in 1912.

2) Most apocalyptic novels remain firmly tethered to some form of optimism. They are post-apocalyptic: somehow, after collapse, humanity finds a way. I guess part of this is that one needs humans to tell a human story. Not that many books exist that chronicle the very last of us, On the Beach by Nevil Shute is maybe the first to do so in 1957. Even though our predicament seems more dire every year, most contemporary CliFi novels also think we still have a chance. Some because of a moral imperative, like Kim Stanley Robinson’s laudable The Ministry for the Future, and others because of scientific illiteracy, like Tim Winton’s Juice.

Either way, it is crystal clear that we have known for well over 5 decades graphs like these can’t mean anything good. Overshoot is a thing.

One of the earliest novels to focus on overpopulation is John Brunner’s brilliant Stand on Zanzibar, published in 1968. I have no idea whether Robert Silverberg had time to read other stuff than his own – his production is humongous – but either way his take on the matter is rather different.

The World Inside was first published serially in 1970 and 1971, and in a way could be described as Brave New World coupled with the 200 erotic novels Silverberg wrote under the Don Elliot moniker. The approval of female oral contraception in 1960 had so large effects on American society, its effects were clearly visible in this 1971 novel.

I’ve been reading Silverberg on and off for the last decade, not necessarily expecting a lot of literary merit, but mainly to get a better grip on the history of science fiction as a genre. The intro to this review can testify to that.

So, what of The World Inside?

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Full review on Weighing A Pig