Recent reads

The World Inside, by Robert Silverberg. "Here begins a happy day in 2381." Silverberg's wryly imagined utopia/dystopia presents a staggeringly huge human population living in titanic, thousand-story "urbmons", or urban monoliths, that tower over a mostly depopulated countryside while their teeming inhabitants while away their "happy days" with carefully managed jobs, abundant entertainment, and above all, sex with whomever they desire on any given night. Sexual "availability" is a social obligation whenever propositioned by either sex. Procreation is regarded as literally sacred, and status is measured by how many "littles" mommo and daddo contribute to society, to be married off and join the happy everlasting open-marriage orgy as soon as they hit puberty at 12 or 13. Sex, drugs, food, safety, all are provided in a life carefully designed to be free of "frustration".

It's possible that that might be enough to satisfy much of the human race. Several times, Silverberg describes the windows of Urbmon 116 "deopaquing" in the morning light, and I don't remember a single character ever looking through them. But are "happy days", free of physical frustration of any kind, enough to keep the best and brightest individuals really, truly content? And if one is discontented with such a life, does it mean that he is an atavistic misfit, a throwback to undesirable anti-social habits of the past, or that there's something lacking about "a happy day in 2381"?

The book, published in 1971, is obviously an exercise in projecting the tendencies of population growth, urbanization, and the Sexual Revolution to their logical extreme, but there's more to it than that. Beyond the risque caricature of a mile-high commune full of swingers enacting the biggest imaginable production of Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, there's a serious query about whether a managed, controlled, "inside" existence, with every biological urge satisfied without struggle or frustration, is a fit existence at all. A worthy counterpart to Brave New World, which it (of course) resembles in some ways.