There Are No Windows And I Must Scream

             A book which has haunted to me to this day is The World Inside, by Robert Silverberg. Written in the heyday of awareness of overpopulation and the illusory promise of urban high rises, it combines the two in a nightmarish future. In the future, everyone lives in Urbmons, gargantuan megabuildings that stretch from city to city of our time. The name Urbmon derives from “Urban Monad,’ indicating the intention of unity or conformity, but the second syllable is far too close to “monster” to be a coincidence. Within the Urbmons humanity breeds without constraint; birth control and chastity are sins. The fecund are valorized and those who fail to reproduce sufficiently are suspected of shirking their duty. Each Urbmon is encouraged to out-reproduce other Urbmons. None of this is due to a lack of population anywhere; the outsider in the story comes from Venus, where new Urbmons are being established. The origin of this book in the seventies is apparent through its addition of “night crawling” to the other dystopic elements. 

           Our protagonist is Siegmund Kluver, a character with a not-at-all conspicuous name and an age that would make Maplethorpe pull out his pencil. Siegmund’s prowess, at least that which gets him noticed, is distinctly heterosexual. The management of the Urbmon promote Siegmund, so he and his wife are going on up to a much better apartment in the sky. When he gets there, he is a hit with the ladies, especially the wife of Jason Quevedo, who has fallen short of her pupping potential. Jason is likely to be transferred to a newer Urbmon due to insufficient offspring; worse yet, his job is historian, this exposes him to how mad the world truly is. The elite of the Urbmon have no plan beyond maintaining the Urbmon out of self-interest; there is no coherent political ideology beyond accelerated reproduction. Nobody in the Urbmon starves, but not all prosper; intercourse (both literal and verbal) is limited between the forty-level “cities” of the Urbmon. This nightmare is the one in which you are trapped in a technically functioning society; the nightmare after is encapsulated in J G Ballard’s High-Rise.