Rob Price
Gutbrain Records
rob + gutbrain.com = email

2026 July 29 • Wednesday

Dying Inside is only the second Robert Silverberg novel I've ever read, after Collision Course, but based on these two I'm just going to grab Silverberg books whenever I see them.

This particular book could have been like any number of other books in, perhaps, the Philip Roth or Saul Bellow zone. It's the thoughts, feelings and memories of a middle-aged man struggling with his declining potency.

David Selig lives in Manhattan and barely makes ends meet by ghostwriting term papers for Columbie University students decades younger than him.

The voice of the book is Selig's but he swings back and forth between first and third person, sometimes addressing the reader directly, in one instance taking us on a tour of his apartment and going through old letters he's written and received.

Some of these letters exist only in his imagination. Sören Kierkegaard, for example, replies to a letter that Selig has composed in his head ("Dear Mr. Kierkegaard: I agree entirely with your celebrated dictum equating 'the absurd' with 'the fact that with God all things are possible'…") despite having died in the previous century ("Dear Mr. Selig: The present state of the world and the whole of life is deased").

We also get to read some of the term papers he writes, taking detours through Kafka and Sophocles.

Selig acquaints us with his family and how for the first time he has a healthy relationship with his younger, adopted sister.

He has very few friendhsips but one very important one, and a fairly decent sex life that included two significant relationship. The strongest of these fell apart as the result of a disastrous acid trip.

Which was only really a problem because of the one thing that qualifies this novel as science fiction. David Selig is a telepath.

He's not the only one. His one major friendship is with a fellow telepath who himself has encountered a few others in his travels.

Selig's own telepathic powers are waning in mid-life, though, adding anothere layer of fear and distress on top of the neuroses he's had all of his life, as well as the more universal experiences of aging.

That this is a metaphor for other, more obvious kinds of power, of the sort that Roth and Bellow concentrated on a great deal, is dealt with up front and more or less dismissed as we take a tour through Selig's life, which is more downs than ups, despite his having what should be a superpower.

It's a remarkable book and certainly adds credence to Ursula K. Le Guin's assertion that Silverberg was "probably the most intelligent science fiction writer in America".

The first line is "So, then, I have to go downtown to the University and forage for dollars again".