Filing Update – 5 p.m.

Bob Brown, the Democratic chairman of the Lee County Board of Commissioners, filed to seek a second term today.

I’ll have a brief story on this as well as filings from Chatham, Harnett and Moore counties in tomorrow’s Herald.

Book review: Dying Inside

Robert Silverberg’s Dying Inside has the distinction of being maybe the most depressing novel I’ve ever read. That’s not to say it was bad at all: I actually loved the book and I figure I’ll probably read it again later, but it’s not happy stuff, at least not most of the way through.

The 1972 novel that tells the story of David Selig, a man gifted with a sort of receive-only telepathy whose godlike power — instead of making him confident and willing to do great things for the benefit of others — actually debilitates him, wracks him with guilt at being able to see the inner-most secrets of anyone he comes in contact with, and makes him almost incapable of enjoying any kind of meaningful contact with others since, well, he can see all the bad thoughts inside people as well as the good. As the story begins, Selig’s power is fading, and he knows it, hence the name of the novel.

I found out about the novel after reading 1969’s The Man in the Maze, which Silverberg also wrote and I reviewed here. It was actually the wikipedia entry for The Man in the Maze which led me to Dying Inside, as the entry notes that both novels use “psychic powers as an allegory for human interaction.”

Having read both books, I think that’s an interesting comparison to make. In The Man in the Maze Robert Muller is an astronaut/interplanetary diplomat who after making the first contact between humans and extraterrestrials becomes imbued with a sort of reverse telepathy that makes anyone who comes into close contact with him feel waves of nausea, apprehension, anxiety, and sickness come washing out of him. It’s something he can’t help, so he goes into exile. Dying Inside’s Selig, conversely, can read the minds of others, and in most cases he doesn’t like what he sees, causing him to go into his own sort of exile, although it’s more of a metaphorical exile than in the other book.

This may all sound too depressing for most, but both novels end on high notes. In the foreward to Dying Inside, some noted science fiction scholar wrote (I’m paraphrasing here since I don’t have the book in front of me) that the story is less about the death pangs of a man with a gift and more about the birth pangs of just a man, and that’s pretty dead-on.

The most important part of the story to me was that Selig’s great power, which he’d had from birth, did more to alienate him from his fellow man than any good. As it dies, he has to learn to live without it, and become normal. This is a theme that’s repeated throughout the book in smaller, episodic microcosms. At its essence, I found the book to be about self-involvement and what it can do to a person. Much like The Man in the Maze, there’s hope for a selfish character toward the end, but you’re also not spoon-fed a happy ending. You have to think for yourself.

Silverberg made his bread and butter writing shlocky science fiction (stuff with titles like Invaders from Earth and Lost Race of Mars) throughout the 1950s and early 60s before moving on to stuff that’s rightfully viewed as blurring the line between genre fiction (sci-fi, in Silverberg’s case) and literature. Apparently, Dying Inside is hailed as Silverberg’s masterwork (I’d never heard of the guy before last year, but after enjoying two of his novels in less than five months, I’ll say I’m becoming a fan), and I’ve found it to be challenging and rewarding if only for the fact that it’s almost not even science fiction: It takes place in 1976 New York City, and deals almost exclusively in internal dialogue. There are no spaceships, time travel, or aliens.

But that’s not what science fiction is about. Science fiction, as a guy a lot smarter than I am once noted, is “the literature of ideas.” Specifically, ideas that might be possible in the future or ideas that flout the known laws of nature (a category into which ESP definitely falls), and how humanity might benefit or suffer from their application.

So Dying Inside is most certainly a look at how humanity might suffer from the ability for us to peer into each other’s souls. While Silverberg postulates that people’s insides (and outsides, for that matter) have their share of negatives, the idea seems to be that we should focus on what’s positive about the people we’re around and how fellowship and understanding might do the world a lot more good than knowing everything about each other’s insides would.

Hey, maybe that book wasn’t so depressing.

Filing Update – 1 p.m.

Nobody has filed to run for office today. I’ll update again around 5 p.m.