Dying Inside

There is a kind of science fiction that uses a single fantastical premise not to build a world but to dismantle a man, and Dying Inside is perhaps the finest example the genre has produced. Robert Silverberg published it in 1972, at the height of his powers and at the close of an extraordinarily fertile period, and it was hailed almost at once as a masterpiece. More than half a century later that judgement has not softened; if anything it has hardened into consensus. This is one of the great novels of science fiction, and it earns the title precisely by being so reluctant to behave like one.

Silverberg needs little introduction to anyone who has spent time in the field. By the early seventies he had already written more than most authors manage in a lifetime, and the work of this period, the run that includes To Live Again and The World Inside, shows a writer turning away from the pulp velocity of his youth towards something quieter, sadder and more searching. Dying Inside is the summit of that turn. It is a book about a man losing something essential to himself, and it was written by an author who had spent a decade shedding one set of literary skins and growing another.

The man is David Selig, and he is, by any ordinary measure, a failure. In his early forties, living in New York, he scrapes a living ghost-writing term papers for Columbia students, a grubby and faintly contemptible trade that he is very good at. He is good at it because David Selig can read minds. He has been able to do so since childhood, slipping unbidden into the thoughts of everyone around him, and that gift has shaped, or rather deformed, the whole course of his life. Now, in middle age, the power is fading. The novel is the story of that fading: not a thriller, not a mystery, but the long, intimate record of a man watching the one thing that ever made him singular drain quietly away.

What Silverberg understands, and what makes the book so quietly devastating, is that Selig's telepathy was never really a blessing. He treats it less as a superpower than as a compulsion, something voyeuristic and faintly shameful, an unearned intimacy taken without consent. It has given him access to everyone and connection to no one. He knows what people think and so he can never quite believe what they say; he has spent a lifetime eavesdropping on the species and ended up estranged from it. The cruel irony at the heart of the book is that the loss of his gift terrifies him not because the power mattered but because, without it, he has no idea who he is. Strip away the telepathy and you are left with a lonely, ageing man, and that, Silverberg suggests, is what frightens Selig most.

He is not an easy man to like, and Silverberg makes no effort to soften him. Selig is self-pitying, evasive, casually prejudiced in the manner of his time and place, frightened of the very closeness he claims to crave. And yet the novel performs a remarkable trick: it earns our sympathy for him without ever asking us to approve of him. We are inside his head, after all, just as he has spent his life inside everyone else's, and proximity does its patient work. By the end we understand him completely, which is not the same as forgiving him, and the distinction is one of the book's great achievements.

The supporting cast is small and sharply drawn. There is Judith, his sister, whose relationship with him is poisoned at the root by the knowledge that he could always read her, a violation she has never been able to name or forgive. There is Toni, the lover whose mind he could not resist trespassing in, with predictably ruinous results. And there is Nyquist, the only other telepath Selig ever meets, a man who wears the same gift with an easy, untroubled amorality that Selig finds both magnetic and unbearable. Nyquist is everything Selig is not: comfortable in his own skin, unburdened by guilt, and his presence throws Selig's anguish into pitiless relief.

It would be a mistake to call Dying Inside a comfortable read, and an even greater one to call it conventional science fiction. The single speculative element aside, this is a literary novel through and through, steeped in the real New York of its day, the Vietnam years, the assassinations, the social ferment, all of it pressing in at the edges. The structure is fragmentary and non-linear, drifting between past and present in a way that mirrors Selig's own crumbling sense of self, and Silverberg studs the prose with allusions to the literary canon, weaving them in so naturally that they never feel like showing off. It is, frankly, a more ambitious and more literary book than the genre was generally producing in 1972, and it remains startling in its candour and its refusal to console.

If there is a criticism to be made, it is the same one that can be levelled at any unflinching character study: this is a bleak book, and Selig's relentless interiority can be wearing. Those who come to science fiction for incident and momentum will find little of either here. But that is rather the point. Dying Inside is not about what happens; it is about what is lost, and about the terrible clarity that sometimes comes only when the thing we relied upon is gone.

For too long this novel languished out of print, and its return is genuinely cause for celebration. It is a meditation on aging and decline dressed in the borrowed clothes of telepathy, a story about the slow leaching of vitality that every one of us will eventually understand from the inside. Not a single word is wasted. Silverberg shows us, with extraordinary precision, what it might truly be like to read the minds of others, and then he shows us something far more difficult: what it is to lose the only thing you ever thought you were. It is a true classic, and it deserves every reader it can find.