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Dying Inside Robert Silverberg

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Dying Inside Robert Silverberg

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Dying Inside Robert Silverberg

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Published on July 6, 2009

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I was very excited when I heard that Tor were reprinting Dying Inside. It’s one of those classics of the genre that shows how amazing SF can be at its best, how it can do everything mainstream books do with good writing and depth of character and do something extra besides. It’s been out of print for far too long. Science fiction readers have been born and grown up and become knowledgeable about the genre and never had the chance to read it. There’s not much that I think ought to be canonical, that everyone ought to read, but this was one of my core introductory texts to how brilliant SF can be, and the kind of book I want to share with everyone. My old 1970s edition (with a cheesy wannabe-Magritte cover of a sunset inside a coffin) has been lent to more people than I can readily count. And now it’s in print again… I was excited… but the cover looks kind of drab, and also kind of mainstream. Maybe it’ll encourage lots of mainstream readers to read it, especially with quotes from Chabon and Lethem, but I hope it doesn’t put off science fiction readers. This is not a boring book, people! It’s a serious book, certainly, and definitely a classic, but it’s also the kind of book that makes your head explode because it’s so amazing. It isn’t in any way a YA book, but I loved it to pieces when I was fourteen.

The extra thing Dying Inside does is telepathy—not gosh wow wonderful telepathy, but telepathy as burden. It’s as if Silverberg read one too many Campbellian superman stories about telepathy and asked himself what it would really be like to be able to see into other people’s minds. David Selig is a New York Jew. He’s been telepathic since childhood. He’s mostly hated it. He’s 41, and the gift, or curse, is going away, and he hates that too. The book was published in 1972 and is set in 1976, and it’s only now that I noticed 1976 was the book’s near future not the historical year (I first read it in 1978) because of my inability to sufficiently distinguish science fiction and America.

Dying Inside is written in a jaunty way, with lots of references and wordplay—several years after first reading it I recognised various T.S. Eliot lines from it (talk about getting your culture in reverse). It’s mostly present tense first person Selig as he experiences the world, which almost makes it omniscient at times, when he’s experiencing the consciousness of others. Sections set in the past are third person and past tense. The style is Silverberg at the top of his form, playing with words, going from the present to the past, the scientific to the subjective on the bounce.

It has stood up to time fairly well. It’s set in a very specific place and time, which makes it read more historically now, but that’s not a problem. The only thing that did trouble me were the racial references. I think Silverberg was liberal and enlightened and ahead of his time on racial issues, for 1972, but “liberal for 1972” reads weirdly in 2009 and had me looking sideways at the text a few times. It’s been a long thirty-five years, and while things are still far from perfect on that front, reading this makes it quite clear how much progress there has been. I’d say the same on the gender front, but the gender stuff is easier to take anyway.

It’s mostly a very serious book, but it has its hilarious moments, such as the young David reading the words from the psychiatrist’s mind in a word association test. And the overall message is upbeat. I didn’t realise when I was fourteen that there was a way of reading the book that made it be about aging and the death of youth while life goes on, but reading it now, that couldn’t be clearer. I think that just goes to show what a masterpiece it is.

Of course, I don’t have the faintest idea what I’d think if I read this now for the first time. I have loved it too long and read it too often to be able to detach myself from it sufficiently. When commenting, do mention if you’ve recently read it for the first time. And those of you who haven’t read it yet, do read it now while you have the chance.

About the Author

Jo Walton

Author

Jo Walton is the author of fifteen novels, including the Hugo and Nebula award winning Among Others two essay collections, a collection of short stories, and several poetry collections. She has a new essay collection Trace Elements, with Ada Palmer, coming soon. She has a Patreon (patreon.com/bluejo) for her poetry, and the fact that people support it constantly restores her faith in human nature. She lives in Montreal, Canada, and Florence, Italy, reads a lot, and blogs about it here. It sometimes worries her that this is so exactly what she wanted to do when she grew up.
Learn More About Jo
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22 Comments
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PaulMcCall
15 years ago

“Science fiction readers have been born and grown up and become knowledgeable about the genre and never had the chance to read it.” They could have gotten it from a library or a used book store!

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Jon Lennox
15 years ago

This book also makes an excellent example of the genre of “The Man Who Melted Jack Dann”. (I actually mis-read the subject line as a sentence when I first saw it on the RSS feed.)

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15 years ago

: I don’t know what the libraries round your way do, but round here (Lancashire UK) most libraries sell off their genre fiction regularly to make room for new. I can’t imagine “Dying Inside” being on many library shelves.

@everyone: On the up side, a fair chunk of Silverberg’s back catalogue, including this, are available as ebooks.

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15 years ago

That’s it Dying Inside is getting broken out today! It’s been stuck in my “read next” pile for almost four years, I’m a little embarrassed to say. But then, after reading my first Silverberg I went on a used bookstore buying spree that’s ended up with me having around 70 Silverberg in the “Read next” pile.

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nlowery71
15 years ago

I guess it was awhile ago when I read this one (less than ten years, I think…) but I remember being really blown away by it, by the realism and vague sadness of it all.

There is something about some of those short novels from the 70s — when science fiction writers still scrambled to write many novels per year –that concentrated their ideas in such good ways.

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Admin
15 years ago

I just read this for the first time last month, thanks to Tor’s re-release. It’s a gorgeous book. Selig is such an interesting character – a telepath who is also completely self-centered and unable to form any meaningful relationships.

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15 years ago

“Dying Inside” was reprinted as part of Gollancz’s SF Masterworks in 2005.

Sorry to be pedantic.

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15 years ago

What a coincidence. I picked up a copy of “Dying Inside” at the library after work today. It’s a book of the month selection for one of my online book groups. Now, I’m really looking forward to it.

(I picked up Daphne DuMaurier’s “House on the Strand” because of your review too.)

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15 years ago

I read it when I was in my mid-20s. I was captivated by it as a tour-de-force, a science-fiction retelling of “Portnoy’s Complaint.”

I’d like to re-read it now that I’m nearly seven years older than David Selig, and see what I make of it now.

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15 years ago

Another book reviewed here that can go straight onto my wishlist. If only I could win the lottery…(unlikely since I don’t play, but still, people can dream).

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15 years ago

That’s a really awful cover, but the ibooks cover was worse. Great book, though.

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steve-g
15 years ago

,@Jo: or The Sheep Look Up John Brunner (I always visualise one sheep atop another two in an old red phonebox, trying to flick through the first volume of the London telephone directory with its hooves, what did you think I meant?)

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James Davis Nicoll
15 years ago

Dying Inside Robert Silverberg

I am both alarmed and claustrophobic.

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15 years ago

Read this probably about fifteen-twenty years ago (when I was a couple of years older than that). I really liked it, SF but with well drawn people (which you didn’t always see back then). Some of the stuff in it seems a little clichéd now, but it didn’t when it came out.

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15 years ago

Found a copy in the library’s new books today. I’m really surprised I’ve never heard of it before.

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15 years ago

I dimly recall DYING INSIDE as gloomy, angst-filled, and not at all to my taste. Like quit a lot of Silverbob’s output around then, come to think of it. So YMMV.

Happy reading–
Pete Tillman

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15 years ago

I read this when it was new, and it put me off Silverberg for years (until Lord Valentine’s Castle, maybe? though I see I haven’t picked up anything since that, either). Angst-ridden, depressing, but worst of all, boring boring boring! Almost as bad as Tower of Glass, in fact.

I would MOST certainly not describe it as any sort of a classic. It’s a cult book off on the creeping wacko literary end of the spectrum, and certainly can be recommended to people who like that sort of thing. But the vast majority of SF readers will be MUCH happier keeping at a safe distance.

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15 years ago

I have a very strong memory of it being serialized in Analog when it came out – during the few years that I had a subscription in the early 70s. I’m a couple of years younger than you – I would have been 12 at the time. I found it unreadable then – I wonder what I’d think of it now?

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Bob
15 years ago

I may be late to this conversation – but Silverberg from 1967-1976 was, and still is to my mind, the best writer SF ever produced. DYING INSIDE is his masterpiece.

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