Phthor by Piers Anthony

In my teens I read lots of Piers Anthony, largely because of all the sex.  Earlier this year I reread Chthon, and thought it an OK adventure story about a guy imprisoned in a mine and having to go on a long underground trek and fight weird creatures.  Last week I reread the sequel to Chthon, 1975's Phthor.

Phthor is the story of Arlo, a young man living alone with his parents in the tunnels and caverns of Chthon.  This subterranean world is inhabited by many dangerous creatures, but Arlo is in psychic rapport with the god of Chthon (a sort of "mineral" entity, hostile to all life) which can control all the monsters and protect Arlo; Arlo, it seems, is the "chosen one" of the god of Chthon.

As the novel opens Arlo is 16, and meets, for the first time, another young person, a girl who calls herself Ex.  Apparently, she has escaped from the prison section of Chthon. (Interstellar human civilization has abandoned the death penalty and sentences the worst criminals to life imprisonment in the caves of Chthon.) Arlo is fascinated by Ex, and rescues her from various dangers.  She is also the cause of a rift that develops between Arlo and the god Chthon - she is, in fact, a sort of advanced scout for an all-female commando team from the planet Minion that is about to land on Chthon and try to destroy the god - the mineral sentience, it turns out, will soon have the power to kill all life in the galaxy.

Anthony includes in Phthor some of the sexual/erotic elements that have made his work controversial.  He concocts situations in which sadism, masochism, incest, and sex involving minors is "natural" for some of the characters.  The women of the planet Minion, for example, are emotionally telepathic, but perceive emotions in reverse, so that if someone hates them, they perceive it as love and enjoy it, while if someone were to love them, they would feel pain.  These women are almost indestructible, and so can safely enjoy being beaten. A woman of Minion lives for centuries, always looking young and beautiful (of course), and when her husband dies, usually at around fifty, she takes her son as her next husband.   

To what extent Anthony includes this sort of thing in his book to explore a bizarre alien society, to shock the bourgeois attitudes of the reader, and/or to appeal to people with unconventional sexual appetites, I cannot say.  Anthony presents the incestuous desires of many of the book's characters as a direct challenge to traditional mores; Arlo, who has never left Chthon's caverns, learned to read from a compendium of pre-space age Earth literature, and we are reminded more than once of the incest taboos he learned from this compendium.  Most of the human characters in the book are forced to choose whether to violate or honor these taboos.

Arlo's mother tells her son that "There is no right and wrong, objectively," and perhaps this is Anthony talking; Anthony certainly argues that in the war between Chthon and Life (and implicitly in any war) neither side is fully Good or Evil.  Perhaps Phthor is meant to be a refutation of most or all ideas of morality, of Good and Evil.  Anthony does seem to be using the novel to argue in favor of compromise and against war, and maybe he would claim he rests his argument on practicality, not morality.

Phthor also includes many references to Norse mythology, and showcases Anthony's interest in coming up with alien life forms with novel means of reproduction.  The first half, in which Anthony introduces his strange setting and concepts is interesting, but the second half, with boring action scenes and a lot of dialogue as the mineral sentience Chthon and the alliance of Life both try to get Arlo to join their side in the war, drags a bit.  I have to admit, the very end, when we don't know which side will win or if instead Arlo can negotiate a mutual peace, had me guessing.

I guess I'm giving Phthor a marginal recommendation.  My life would be easier if everything I read was as obviously laudable as Gene Wolfe's Pandora by Holly Hollander or Tanith Lee's short stories, or as blatantly irritating as Judith Merrill's Tommorow People and Algis Budrys's Rogue Moon, but much of the fiction I read falls on the vague borderline between "acceptable" and "unacceptable."

I read the Berkley paperback, from 1982.  The cover painting is by Clyde Caldwell.  Through the 1980s my brother and I played lots of RPGs, mostly Basic/Expert D&D, 1st ed AD&D, and Star Frontiers, and we had a subscription to Dragon magazine.  Caldwell was one of the artists who did work for TSR, and so we saw many of his illustrations.  Caldwell always seemed to include in his depictions huge translucent gems, whether or not they were appropriate, and so my brother and I called him "The Gemster" and felt like art connoisseurs because we could always identify a specimen of his art.

The Starmen of Llyrdis and The Big Jump by Leigh Brackett

Via Twitter, Joachim Boaz of SFruminations reminds us that it is Leigh Brackett's birthday.  I have enjoyed a number of Brackett's books and stories, most recently (in January of this year, I believe) The Starmen of Llyrdis and The Big Jump.  I wrote reviews of these novels, then in a computer mishap erased them, but have drafts of these reviews that I will paste below; the Big Jump draft looks almost finished.

There is a blog dedicated to Brackett that does not appear to be updated regularly, but includes quite a few interesting posts: http://leighbrackett.blogspot.com/.

The Starmen of Llyrdis

This was a competent SF adventure story, not very innovative, but not bad.  A mid 20th century guy who has never felt like he has ever belonged, despite being the US Air Force's best test pilot, traces his roots in Europe and learns he is the offspring of the union of an alien and an Earth person.  It turns out that the universe is full of intelligent life, but only one race of space aliens (one that can breed with Earth people) has the mutation necessary to survive interstellar travel.  This race, thus, has a monopoly on interstellar trade.  They have been secretly buying Earth goods, like Scotch whiskey, French perfume, and American movies.  The main character joins this race of space merchants and travels the galaxy with them, becoming involved in rivalries between various factions of the merchant race and getting involved with a dangerous femme fatale.  There is a very effective scene on a planet covered in a fungus forest. 

The Big Jump

Originally appearing in 1953, then published in 1955 by Ace, The Big Jump is a noirish/hard-boiled tale of man's first extrasolar exploration.

The moon, mars, and other parts of the solar system have been colonized for genberations, buyt only noew has a ship tavelled to another star and returned.  However, only one member of the crew, Ballantyne, has come back with the ship, and he is an emaciated near-comatose wreck who dies soon after his return.  What happened to the others?  The only clue are Ballantyne's last words, whispered to his friend, musclebound construction worker Arch Comyn.  Comyn is determined to find out what happened to the expedition because he owes a favor to one of the men left out in space, and tpo do so he has to contend with various members of the wealthy Cochrane family, a ruthless bunch of robber barons wjho financed Ballantyne's expedition.

A pleasant pulpy sort of thing about tough guys, a sexy dame and hit men, as well as space travel and alien planets; people who like a little Mickey Spillane mixed with their rocket ships should check it out.
 

The Green Planet by J. Hunter Holly

Here we have a paperback by an author I had never heard of, 1960’s The Green Planet by J. Hunter Holly. The Author’s Profile informs us that J. Hunter Holly is the pen name of Joan C. Holly of Michigan, and that she did very well in college. My edition was printed by Monarch Books in 1961. Monarch Books, we are told, is dedicated to publishing books of literary merit, like hagiographies of Elizabeth Taylor and Jackie Kennedy, guides to alternative medicine, and soft core pornography.  I paid two dollars for this book, and the list of titles on the advertising page (among them Sex Fiend and Campus Girl (hubba hubba), $50 A Night (ah, the days before inflation), and Brother and Sister (yuck!)) provides a roller coaster ride of titillation, nostalgia and terror worth at least three dollars all on its own.  (Prolific mystery writer Donald E. Westlake seems to have produced many of the more striking titles.)

In the future, humanity is ruled by the totalitarian League. Radical egalitarians, the League has as its goal “to get rid of the sub-normals and the super-normals until there was a stable population of nothings.” People opposed to the League get a free ticket for a three-month-long one way trip to Klorath, planet of exile. The Green Planet tells the story of the ninth shipment of rebels to Klorath, 11 adults and two children. The first thing they find on Klorath after getting off the robot shuttle is a pile of human bones; the first eight shipments of rebels haven’t fared too well!

But what killed the earlier settlers? Disease? Giant bulletproof pterodactyls? Native barbarians? All of the above? As the exiles wait for the tenth shipment of rebels and try to build a little colony, constructing cabins and planting crops, they suffer repeated attack from native life forms. Their numbers dwindle, but the two manly men among the group still find time to fight over who should be leader.  The last half or so of the book deals with the human exiles' efforts to develop a relationship with the Klorath natives, who bear a striking similarity to Native American Indians and have a close relationship with nature and their god.  Negotiations are difficult because, it seems, the last eight groups of human settlers spoke with forked tongue.  The crisis is resolved when the humans take up the worship of the god of the natives (a big crystal sphere) and achieve collective consciousnesses.  

This is a pedestrian piece of work with nothing special to make it stand out or stay in your memory. Holly tries to liven it up with lots of psychological stuff, people stricken with fear, cracking under stress, committing suicide, the two men of the group who aspire to lead trying to manipulate the weaker-minded exiles, etc. Unfortunately Holly’s writing style is uninspired and the characters are boring. I couldn’t bring myself to care who lived or died.

Holly is also undermined by irritating errors. For example, Holly (and her editor) don’t seem to know anything about guns, so we get sentences like “In a desperate chance, he blasted forth with a whole round, in a volley.” I guess she means he fired off an entire magazine? There are also quite a few typos, missing quotation marks, missing prepositions. “Jason wanted smash their complacency.” (page 80). This sounds like a line from The Incredible Hulk: Political Activist. These are the kinds of mistakes you can brush off in a good book, but in a mediocrity they rankle. Why should I bother reading this thing if your copy editor didn’t?

I don't regret giving a new writer a try, but this one has to get a marginal thumbs down.  I won't be seeking out any more of Holly's work.  

Post Office by Charles Bukowski

Yesterday I reread Charles Bukowski’s first novel, Post Office, copyright 1971.  This slim volume (the 1974 Black Sparrow edition I read is just 115 pages) is the semi-autobiographical story of Bukowski’s alter ego “Henry Chinaski,” who works on and off for the postal service in Los Angeles as a carrier and then a clerk, taking time off to go to Texas where he marries an heiress (she divorces him) and then to try to live off his winnings at the racetrack.  The book describes Chinaski’s generally sad, and sometimes brutish, relationships with women, as well as his encounters with various strange characters.  There is little overarching plot; for the most part Post Office is a series of humorous anecdotes, written in a simple, smooth style that employs short and direct sentences.  As these anecdotes pile up, however, they do succeed in generating a sense of the sadness and futility of life.

I think Post Office is laugh out loud funny, but it is crudely sexist, and I do not doubt that some might find it offensive on that score. The unflattering picture Bukowski paints of the black men he meets over the course of his postal career may also raise the ire of readers. Part of the appeal of Post Office is Bukowski’s effort to shock us. Through a little intellectual jujitsu one could perhaps claim that Chinaski’s objectifying women and treating them shabbily is Bukowski’s way of indicting our sexist society. I doubt you could convincingly claim that, when Bukowski describes how blacks at the post office do no work because they will assault any supervisor who gives them an assignment, he is criticizing the racism of our society.

I have no idea how accurate his depiction is, but I found Bukowski’s description of what it was like working in the post office in the 1960s interesting. But I’m also the guy who enjoys the scenes in Moby Dick about whaling. On the other hand the paragraphs about horseracing: the odds, how to choose the winner, etc., bored me.

Bukowski is similar in some ways to Henry Miller. In both men’s most successful fiction we find the first person narrative of a writer, living down and out, casually describing to us his misbehavior and unconventional and/or uncouth opinions, implicitly justifying his misbehavior by pointing out how corrupt and absurd the world and people in general are. Where Bukowski differs from Miller is in how unpretentious he is; Miller repeatedly tells us how his friends proclaim him a genius, Miller talks about his love of such great cultural figures as Proust and Dostoevsky and cult authors like Hamsun, Miller thinks we are interested in his opinions about India and the theories of Spengler, Miller regales us with page after page of his surreal dreams. For the most part Bukowski sticks to funny anecdotes which reveal (revel in?) how much of an outsider and how much of a jerk he is, and sticks to his straightforward pithy style.

I read all of Bukowski’s novels in the 1990s, thinking Ham on Rye the best and Pulp the worst. Post Office made me laugh quite a bit, so I am considering rereading more of Bukowski soon.

Two SF Adventures by Edmond Hamilton: “Monsters of Mars” (1931) and “World of A Thousand Moons” (1942)

Project Gutenberg is a good source for classic science fiction and fantasy that have fallen into the public domain.  Last night and this morning I took advantage of this fact and read two stories full of ray guns and dangerous aliens by Edmond Hamilton, SF pioneer and husband of famed SF writer and Hollywood screenwriter Leigh Brackett.

“Monsters of Mars”

The entire April 1931 issue of Astounding Stories is available for free at Gutenberg.org. The cover story is by Hamilton, the story of three men who travel to Mars, entitled “Monsters of Mars.”

Physicist Milton and his two colleagues have been in radio communication with Mars for two years. They are eager to visit Mars and meet their new friends, but, in this story spaceships are impossible! (O ye of little faith!) Luckily, the Martians have developed a matter transmitter device. They radio the plans to the Earthmen, who build the device. Jealous of their professional reputations, the three scientists don’t tell anyone about their contact with the inhabitants of the Red Planet. They are also not suspicious that the Martians are willing to send them the blueprints for a teleporter, but are too shy to reveal anything about their own appearance or society or history. Milton and his assistants enlist one additional friend to join them on the Mars trip, but don’t waste time telling other academics or newspaper reporters or the government or anybody like that about their jaunt to Mars. So, unbeknownst to the world, three Earthmen (one stays behind to operate the matter transmitter) are zapped off to Mars. The teleporter will operate again in exactly 24 hours.

The Martians turn out to be rapacious crocodile men who plan to use the matter transmitter to invade and colonize the Earth, Mars being worn out. They seize the three humans for a little pre-invasion experimentation. Two of the Earthlings manage to escape, and flee to the jungles that surround the Martian city. Here they are captured by hideous ten foot long worm creatures. One of the scientists suggests that these worm monsters may be descended from humans! (Evolution played a role in the three Hamilton stories I read on November 14, and here it is again; I guess Hamilton was interested in evolution.)

The worm people are just about to sacrifice the Earthlings to their worm god when the crocodile men attack with their disintegrator rays and walking vehicles. In the confusion, the humans get a hold of one of the walking vehicles, drive back to the city, rescue their buddy (I guess they didn’t experiment on him after all) and jump in the matter transmitter just in time. Back on Earth they wreck their own matter transmitter and burn the blueprints. Hamilton doesn’t tell us if they call up Mars to taunt the crocodile men.

This is a lightweight story. There is nothing really wrong with the main plot, but to be a good story something more is necessary. There is no twist or surprise; I was hoping the worm creatures would recognize the Earthlings as their allies and that the humans would lead the worms in an apocalyptic war on the city, but the evolution idea is dropped immediately. The human characters are totally uninteresting, each indistinguishable from the other. (The most interesting character in the story is the ruler of the Martians, a freak with one huge head atop three normal-sized bodies who gets to make a fun “You dummies, we have wanted to conquer your world for centuries and now you have opened the front door for us!” speech.) Hamilton conjures up an interesting vision of the Martian city, with its conical skyscrapers, walking vehicles, wide canals and suburban jungles, but there is nothing about Martian culture, politics, or society. Hamilton doesn’t pull off any particularly effective horror or action scenes either, though this material is ripe with possibility; his style here is too bland.

I often complain that a story is too long, and praise writers (I think on this blog I have praised Gene Wolfe and Tanith Lee thusly) whose stories are economical, each sentence adding to plot or atmosphere. “Monsters of Mars” presents the rare case of a story I think is too short. A story about scientists who teleport to Mars and fight crocodile men in a city and worm people in a jungle could be a thrill if the scientists are interesting characters and the crocodile men and worm people have some kind of vivid society for us to fear and/or deplore. This story made me smile, so it was worth a read, but with some fleshing out it could have been so much more.

“World of A Thousand Moons”

The December 1942 issue of Amazing Stories included a story by Hamilton, “World of A Thousand Moons.” The story is advertised on the cover, but the cover painting is for a different story, one by Howard Browne about a prehistoric man.  (Incidentally, this story, "Warrior of the Dawn," is also available at Gutenberg.org.)

“World of A Thousand Moons” is much better than “Monsters of Mars.” In the first few pages Hamilton sketches out an interesting milieu: a multicultural interplanetary society with a hardened human spaceman, a ruthless Jovian criminal, and members of the decadent Earth bourgeoisie in the foreground, and Martian and human working class and lower middle class people, a notorious space pirate, and the Space Patrol in the background. We can easily visualize these people, imagine their motivations, and feel for them or hope they are brought to justice.

Lance Kenniston, human, and Holk Or, Jovian, are desperate space-sailors looking to buy a space ship on Mars. When they find none are for sale they fool young Earth heiress Gloria Loring and her hangers on into agreeing to transport them on their pleasure yacht to the dangerous asteroid belt. Kenniston tells the rich kids they are partners in a treasure hunt; in fact Kenniston is delivering them into the clutches of infamous space pirate John Dark, whose ship, shot full of holes by the Space Patrol, is stranded on Vesta, a particularly large asteroid covered in monster-haunted jungle.

The plot that follows includes startling revelations, double crosses, speculative medical science and lots of mayhem. And a happy ending (well, except for the nameless innocent crewmembers who get killed in the struggle for the space yacht.)  A fun tale.

*********

Hamilton was a prolific writer, and I look forward to reading more of his work in the future.    

The Devil Is Dead by R. A. Lafferty

This is an unusual piece of work that makes no effort to be realistic (critics often describe Lafferty’s writing as being like “a tall tale”) and at times is self-consciously difficult. The introduction, which is titled “Promantia,” even ends with the lines, “Is that not an odd introduction? I don’t understand it at all.”

The plot of the first half of The Devil is Dead consists of the voyage of the ship Brunhilde, among whose passengers are numbered: the Devil; Anastasia, a Greek woman who claims to be a mermaid; Marie, a murdereress and some kind of leftist scold (she considers “being a lady” and “happily-ever-after” to be “bourgeois conceits,” and thinks good and evil are merely superstitions); and the main character, Finnegan, a “bugle-nosed dago with an Irish moniker,” who is not only a talented painter and draughtsman but has clairvoyant powers (Finnegan reads a letter through a sealed envelope, and has lots of hunches and premonitions.)

The novel starts with Finnegan coming to his senses, but not knowing where he is, what time of year it is, his own name or that of his companion, Saxon X. Seaworthy, millionaire ship owner. I didn’t know if Finnegan was an angel, a demon, a drunk, or a metaphor for a human soul just about to set out on life’s journey. Several times throughout the novel characters claim that Finnegan is not one of the “regular people” but one of “the other people.” Finnegan tells Seaworthy that he has “an upper life and a lower life,” and Seaworthy responds “Who hasn’t! All of our sort indulge in amnesia….” Late in the book Finnegan implies that if he, and his kind, don’t like people, they set them on fire (page 139). Does this mean Finnegan is a (fallen?) angel? On page 27 the third person narrator declares that there are two sorts of people in the world, those who belong with “such as Finnegan and Anastasia... with all good people everywhere…” and the “wrong sort” who “belong in Hell.”

Soon Seaworthy’s vessel, the Brunhilde, is under weigh (or perhaps underway.) Finnegan and his companions sail around the world, following the coast from Texas south along Latin America then across the Atlantic to Africa and north to Europe. The ship stops at every port, and in each port the Devil does his work – Finnegan, reading the newspapers, realizes that each town they visit is stricken, a few days later, by mass murder, riots, or similar large scale mayhem. The crew and passengers of the Brunhilde split into hostile factions and become embroiled in a sneaky back-stabbing fight against each other which culminates in a tremendous firefight in Greece with WWII rifles and machine guns. Anastasia and the Devil are among the dead, while Seaworthy, apparently the leader of the victorious faction, and Finnegan, who sat the fight out, survive.

In the second half of the book Finnegan seeks revenge on Seaworthy, whom he blames for the death of Anastasia, but when Seaworthy survives Finnegan’s attack, Finnegan flees across the United States, a squad of murderers on his tail. The page count of this part of the book largely consists of strange and amusing stories not directly connected to the Brunhilde/Finnegan/Seaworthy plot at all, stories about and told by the various characters Finnegan meets while on the run.

The identities of the characters in The Devil is Dead, and their statuses, are always in flux. People in the novel often die, are buried, and then reappear, so much so that on page 118 (of a 224 page book) Finnegan declares, “I become a little impatient with people who are supposed to be dead and who keep reappearing. It loses its humor after a while.” Characters have multiple names, characters who look alike impersonate each other, characters change appearance, different characters share names. I was often wondering if a character was a human, or an angel, or a devil, or The Devil. There is even a hint that Finnegan, Seaworthy, and some other characters are members or descendents of a Lovecraftian “old race” which ruled the Earth before mankind and is still pulling the strings behind the scenes. (Even though much of Lafferty’s references and themes seem to be Christian, by mentioning A. E. Van Vogt and Murray Leinster on page 164 he seems to invite the reader to think in SF categories.)

A large part of the appeal of The Devil is Dead comes from the fact that Lafferty fills the novel with odd jokes, jokes which hover between the “bad” and “bad enough that they are good” categories. There are also cryptic references and what appear to be parodies of epigrammatic wisdom. Two examples:

A description of Anastasia’s grandmother:

She was vital and pretty, she had been prettier than Anastasia Granddaughter, though fairly destitute. She would have been able to feed a small family of visiting mice, but that was all. She wouldn’t have been able to feed a large family of visiting mice.

A description of a Greek mountaintop at night:

The moon lacked a week of being full, but the night was very bright. Here on top was nothing but rocks and gnarled old branches and stump trees. That is the way the top of the world always looks. But by Greek moon it was even stranger. Moonlight is different in Greece. As you know, it was the Greeks who invented the moon.

I read the 1971 Avon paperback (V2406) with the black Bosch-style cover. The history of the book seems almost as crazy as the story it tells. According to Wikipedia two portions of the book are missing from this edition, including the final chapter, which the publisher didn’t receive in time. I get the idea this is a relatively rare paperback; I paid almost ten times the cover price for it at Half Price Books; luckily the cover price is 75 cents.

I enjoyed The Devil is Dead and recommend it. It is unconventional, but once I fell into step with Lafferty’s style it felt comfortable, I laughed at many of the jokes, and even the Promantia was explicable when I reread it after finishing the novel. Readers interested in literary SF, Roman Catholic SF, or books you have to “figure out” should definitely give it a whirl.

In Praise of Robert Silverberg

I feel like I have been pretty rough on Robert Silverberg on this blog, but if this is so, it is due to what I might call a sampling error or a statistical anomaly. In fact, I have enjoyed most of the Silverberg I have read, and I have the Amazon reviews from years past to prove it, five of which are pasted below.

The Second Trip

In this very readable novel Silverberg addresses issues somewhat similar to those he wrote about in "To Live Again," but whereas the plot of that novel was something of a soap opera, this one is more of a traditional adventure story.

In the future, serious criminals like rapists and murderers are punished by having their identities erased. An artificial personality is created and implanted in the criminal's empty mind, thus creating a productive member of society. In this novel, however, the personality of the criminal, a famous artist, has somehow survived the process, and the body's new and original personalities battle for control. Silverberg describes this battle for dominance and portrays the character of the combatants in an arresting fashion, and the supporting characters and the world they all inhabit are also pretty interesting.

"The Second Trip" merits a strong recommendation to Silverberg fans. Not as good or "literary" as the brilliant "Dying Inside," but definitely in the same league as "To Live Again," "The Glass Tower" or "Shadrach in the Furnace," and more "adventure"-oriented than those, like, say, "Man in the Maze."

In the Beginning: Tales from the Pulp Era

Fans of Silverberg and anybody interested in the 1950s SF scene should definitely check this out. For the most part the stories are fun and move along briskly, and each is preceded by an epigraph or short essay in which Silverberg talks about his early career and sheds light on his writing techniques and his relationships with SF magazines, their editors, and other SF writers in the 1950s.

Kingdoms of the Wall

Silverberg tells a good, if somewhat traditional, adventure story here, the tale of a long and dangerous journey with Homeric overtones. His effective, and sometimes subtle, use of first person narration takes the novel to a higher, more literary level. A very good read.

The Palace at Midnight: The Collected Stories of Robert Silverberg Volume 5

This volume of Silverberg's collected stories, the fifth in this series, is, like the others, full of good SF stories. I wouldn't say Silverberg is a spectacular writer, but he is a solid professional with a smooth style and these stories are all a pleasure to read. There is a lot of the standard SF stuff, like dinosaurs, time travel, scientists and strange alien creatures, but Silverberg also writes about people and their relationships and how they react to novel circumstances, and he does it well.

Each story has a pretty extensive preface in which Silverberg talks about his life, writing and editing career, his relationships with magazine editors and other SF writers, and the history of SF, all of which is quite interesting.

The World Inside

An examination of class and sexual morality on a future Earth with a population of 75 billion, most of whom live crammed into 3 kilometer tall skyscrapers housing 800,000 each, vertical cities they are forbidden to leave. The World Inside is more of a series of interrelated character studies than a true novel. While most of the vignettes are interesting enough (I can only complain about one, the tale of a rock musician's ecstatic concert performance and then ecstatic drug experience, the lengthy "psychedelic" portions of which grow tedious) the book suffers a little from its lack of an overarching plot. Silverberg gives the reader a good setting and some interesting characters, but World Inside is a bit light in the story department.