/lit/ - Literature

Has anyone read The World Inside by Robert Silverburg? I finished it, late last night, and I feel very strange about it. It's left me feeling guilty. The people depicted are so strange. The characters who do stand out are very tragic. Some of their fates hit me very hard. So, what did you think of it? Reactions, specifically?

>>2178351

>skyscrapers
Urbmons

Now The World Inside was a a cool book. Brave New World didn't hold my interest. The ideas are interesting, but the writing sucks.

The World Inside, by Robert Silverberg. It's about a future human race who have enshrined procreation as the primary social good in the world and have ordered their entire society around the concept. They live in geometric patterns of million-man skyscrapers with no personal space, have casual sex with each other ceaselessly, and total a world population of 75 billion (and growing).

It is a better ___topian work than those others mentioned because half of the people I've met who have read it have called it dystopian, while the other half have insisted it is a utopian vision instead. That sort of ambiguity to me is indicative of a future vision that has a real probability of coming to pass - just appealing enough for us to secretly want it; just sinister enough for us to recoil inwardly from it.