The World Inside by Robert Silverberg

The World Inside by Robert Silverberg

The World Inside was written in the late 60s and early 70s, a collection of short stories that form a fresco, despite the absence of an overarching narrative arc. The book focuses on human society in the 23rd century, where to stave off overpopulation, instead of birth control, human society restructured itself into accommodating radical communal living with urban monads hosting hundreds of thousands of inhabitants in huge vertical cities. But while that is the starting point of the book, its core exploration is about the nature of such a human society, and particularly about the impacts of such communal living combined with a quasi-religious embrace of fertility on matrimonial and sexual customs. In a lot of ways, this is one of the most daring premises for a science-fiction book I've read, and not a topic I've seen much covered elsewhere. In some ways, and particularly in the unquestioning way gender roles seem replicated from the time when the book was written, it is of its time, but in other ways it's incredibly modern. It reminded way in its approach of the way Black Mirror structures its fiction: identify a core theme and stick to it without focusing too much on the rest of society/technology. Except of course there's way too much sex in The World Inside for this to ever be a Black Mirror style TV production. Anyway, absolutely brilliant, and I now understand why this is considered a classic of science-fiction.