The World Inside

The World Inside is a science fiction novel by the American writer Robert Silverberg, published in 1971.

It grew out of a group of stories Silverberg had published in 1970 and 1971, all but one of them in Galaxy, including The World Outside, which was nominated for a Hugo Award. The novel's setting is an Earth where war, starvation, crime and contraception have been abolished and reproduction has become a religious duty, so the population has risen to seventy-five billion and everyone lives in the towers. An urban monad holds over eight hundred thousand people arranged by status, its residents walk between floors rather than outside them, and the book moves from apartment to apartment across the building's social levels, following people who work, marry, change partners and raise children according to rules none of them wrote. The novels of the early 1970s often imagined the future as an overcrowded city, and this one is unusual for taking the arrangement seriously as a way of life rather than as a warning about somebody else's country. The World Inside was nominated for a Hugo Award in 1972 and Silverberg declined the nomination.