Dying Inside

Author: Robert Silverberg

Despite his credentials championing hard, rational science fiction, John W. Campbell was a fervent believer in psi powers. Perhaps because of that, whenever telepathy appeared in science fiction, as in Alfred Bester's The Demolished Man, it was almost invariably presented as a talent, a power, usually a good thing. But what if it isn't, what if it is of little real value and perhaps even harmful? That is the premise of one of Robert Silverberg's most powerful novels.David Selig is a telepath, but it hasn't really done him much good. He makes a precarious living hanging around colleges writing essays for students, and using his telepathy to check the details, to get it right. But the power is waning, and since so much of his sense of identity is tied up in his telepathy (useless as it may be), so this loss of power is equated with losing his grip on reality. One critic complained that Silverberg had made the science fiction elements of the novel pedestrian, but that is precisely the point. The waning powers represent a loss of joy, a loss of creativity, it really is life becoming pedestrian. And the novel is beautifully and movingly written to convey exactly that point. For a period between the mid-60s and mid-70s, Silverberg produced work of the highest quality, and this was undoubtedly the best of the bunch, a novel that combines an intriguing sf idea with psychological insight and brilliant writing: how could it fail!

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Silverberg's had an odd career. For the first decade or so he was producing clever but not world-shattering sf; and after a brief retirement in the late-70s he wrote stuff that varied between expansions of Isaac Asimov stories, and the vast, colourful Majipoor series, beginning with Lord Valentine's Castle. Set on a huge planet with a mixture of human and alien races, with a low level of technology and suggestions of magic, the sequence, which currently amounts to six novel and two collections, lies somewhere between high fantasy and Brian Aldiss'sHelliconia Trilogy.

But between these two was a period of ten years or so when he wrote a string of novels that combined science fictional invention with mainstream literary sensibilities. We could list a host of these titles here, but these few will serve as an introduction.

James Blish said of The Book of Skulls that it came "as perilously close to poetic beauty as any contemporary sf novel I've ever read," which gives you an idea how good it is. It concerns four students who agree to undergo an initiation that will give them immortality, on the understanding that two of their number must die in the process.

Tower of Glass concerns a rich inventor who has created a race of androids which he uses to build a tower of glass with which he intends to communicate with a distant star. Unknown to him, the androids worship him as a god in the belief that he intends to free them, but all goes wrong when the androids discover what he really thinks of them.

Son of Man sends a 20th century man billions of years into the future, where he meets the descendants of humanity who can take on many strange forms.