I had a hard time deciding between one and two star rating for Dying Inside, as it was well written and the literary voice was engaging. But I found this to be vile. A sexist, racist, masturbatory exploration of a really cool concept. Dude took the laziest option and tried to be profound with it. Ick. Thanks a lot, TBR Jar! Anyway, as you can see, I ended up at 1.5 stars rounded up, because I am willing to extend some leeway for all the positive reviews, and because it was well written and not absolute garbage like I prefer my one-star reviews to be.
But this did not work for me.
The concept here is that there is man with godlike powers of telepathy, but he’s just an ordinary man born with these powers for no apparent reason, and now in his middle age he feels himself losing them for good, hence the title of the book. There was a lot of opportunity here to explore what it means to connect to other human beings, and a bunch of other stuff, but all of that was subsumed under the fact that the protagonist is a an incredible asshole whose head we are forced to be in while he thinks his miserable racist, sexist, pretentious, often cruel, superior to everyone thoughts. I hated him after ten pages.
I just do not think it is interesting to explore the inside of a person like this. There doesn’t seem to be any indication that it was the powers that made him this way, he just seems to naturally be terrible person (and a lot of the stuff that twigged me wouldn’t have twigged contemporary male readers). Why not explore what these kind of powers do to a more average type of person?
I just did not care at all. It made me want to take the rest of Silverberg’s books off my TBR if this is considered his “masterpiece”. But I will give him one more shot, if for no other reason that this book came in a bind-up with four others.
[1.5 stars]
