SOURCE: “The Mechanical Hive: Urbmon 116 as the Villain-Hero of Silverberg's The World Inside,” in Extrapolation, Vol. 21, No. 4, Winter, 1980, pp. 338-47.

In the following essay, Dunn and Erlich examine Silverberg's characterization of the urbmon community itself in The World Inside, demonstrating its triumph over the human tendencies of the novel's other characters.

At first glance, Robert Silverberg's The World Inside¹ (1970) seems to be a work with the standard flaws of satiric dystopian literature. We get long sections of exposition about the world of the story, primarily about Urban Monad (“Urbmon”) 116, the thousand-story, three-kilometer-high building in which the principal characters live. We meet a “stranger,” Nicanor Gortman of the planet Venus, whose only function is to be told about the strange land of Earth in A.D. 2381. And we read about major characters who meet and separate only in casual ways and who are dismissed after their stories are told...