.KEYWORD ppbookmonth0899
.FLYINGHEAD PALMPOWER BOOK CLUB
.TITLE Get your SF fix from Peanut Press downloadable books
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.SUMMARY You may have heard of Peanut Press. This company is "reprinting" books in a form that’s downloadable to your Palm device. For a few bucks, give or take a little, you can download classic and first run editions to your Palm organizer. This month, Judith Tabron takes us inside Robert Silverberg’s The World Within, a great classic SF story she downloaded from Peanut Press.
.AUTHOR Judith Tabron
Originally I’d planned to write an August review of some science fiction work in honor of the World Science Fiction Convention, generally held in August. That was before I remembered they’re holding it during the first week of September this year, in Australia. Oh well. Just think of us as a little ahead of our time and you’ll enjoy this even more.
However, science fiction is still a fine genre for reviewing in this venue. Let’s face it, a lot of us who are cool enough to like Palm devices of various sorts and carry them around with us are also the sort of people who like speculative fiction – and want to carry it around with us to read at our convenience. The combination is a natural, like peanut butter and chocolate.
Palm devices aren’t just handy for writing down those pearls of wisdom that Harlan Ellison spews like buckshot. They enable you to have, on hand, the database of "Books I Want To Buy" BEFORE you go into the dealers’ rooms and spend several months’ allowance of pocket money on tasty-looking paperbacks.
When it comes to packing your Palm unit with SF reading material, you’re probably going to want to explore options aside from the traditional "it’s a million years old and out of print" route. Yes, you can find all kinds of H.G. Wells and Jules Verne at MemoWare, and that, as the poet said, ain’t hay. But if you limit yourself to this approach you’re missing some creative new avenues for getting good stuff to read.
.H1 Buying bits from Peanut Press
Peanut Press (at http://www.peanutpress.com) is a new publisher that publishes electronic versions of classic science fiction and fantasy works, as well as original, contemporary works and popular media tie-in novels. I thought I’d spend a little cash to report to you on the experience of buying an (electronic) book strictly for Palm device consumption.
.CALLOUT If you’re going to buy books from Peanut Press, you might be interested to know that I have only positive things to say about the whole experience.
If you’re going to buy books from Peanut Press, you might be interested to know that I have only positive things to say about the whole experience. The online store worked just as it should (I have met e-stores that didn’t). And there’s immediate gratification: after your credit card is authorized, you download your books right then. Every download includes the Peanut Reader software, which I think is excessive. Once I have it, I won’t need it next time. If I were downloading over a modem I wouldn’t relish wasting the time to download that extra few hundred kilobytes.
You have to have Peanut Reader to read the books you buy from Peanut Press. But the Reader program works like a well-behaved DOC reader, letting you change fonts AND screen orientation (a nice feature). The comprehensive Go menu includes a Find command, revolutionizing your ability to settle arguments about whether or not the author ever used the word "zaftig."
There’s also a tool for adding annotations, one for reversing the screen, and a thoughtfully added little tool that flashes the time onto the screen so you know how much time you’ve blown reading.
.H1 The World Within
Ordering from Peanut Press is dangerously addictive. They publish, on their Web site, lengthy excerpts from the novels enticing you to buy the whole thing — and it works. With no particular goals in mind I browsed through their selection of classic SF titles, and got hooked on an excerpt from Robert Silverberg’s The World Within. I read several others but came back to this one — I wanted more. So, for $6.99, I got more.
I was captured by this classic SF tale. At the start it appeared to be a rather anthropological treatise on the lives of future Earth dwellers in three-kilometer-high apartment complexes called urban monads, or "urbmons." As it turned out, the work is almost a collection of short stories about a handful of the citizens of Building 116 whose lives happen to intersect. The anthropological feel of the first section is primarily because it focuses on Charles Mattern, a "sociocomputator"in the year 2381, who is hosting a visiting sociocomputator from Mars to observe life in the monads. It’s a simple device that allows the narrator to tell us everything he wants us to know about life in these vast buildings where no one ever goes outside. The entire social machine is geared towards reducing friction between individuals, and to violate the edicts of the social machine is automatic death.
Silverberg’s urbmon stories are actually rather diverse. A computer operator longs to go outside — and does. A historian ponders whether or not the human race is actually evolving into something different inside the urbmons, and whether or not he is evolving along with it. A musician discovers two methods of empathy with the pathetic drudges of one of the lower-class "cities" inside the urbmon: performing and mind-expanding drugs. A young woman who has been involuntairily exported to settle a new urbmon is forced to undergo mental conditioning meant to "improve" her.
The book is much more than a long dreary recital of why things in the future are awful. Silverberg has more than a little sympathy with his characters, and seems quite intrigued by the possibilities of the urbmon lifestyle. While this lifestyle would seem monstrous to us (accustomed as we are to privacy, to some tenuous connection with nature, and to the glorification of the individual in Western culture), it is a good solution in some ways. The urbmons hold a population more vast than it was ever thought possible for Earth to hold: 75 billion. Their vertical growth has solved the problem of where to put all those people, leaving much of the surface of the earth available for farming — and it is ALL farmed. Sadly, there is no room for any animal in the biosphere except the human animal.
The human interest in Silverberg’s novel comes from this dilemma. If the entire world is given over to provide for humanity’s existence, what then does humanity do with itself? Inside the urbmons, fertility is revered to the point of neurosis. Producing even more inhabitants for this highly populated planet is the goal of every right-thinking person. It is to the greater glory of god (with a small ‘g’) for everyone to procreate as much as possible. Much of the "news" consumed by the populace is devoted to statistics regarding which building, which city within the building, which floor within the city, and which individuals on the floor are having more children than their neighbors.
There’s also a tremendous societal interest in eliminating those emotional strains that make life in close quarters difficult for large numbers of people — things like lust, adultery, jealousy, ambition, and materialism. The nominal equivalence of everyone’s social status is, in fact, a complex balancing of the value of one’s neighborhood, one’s literal height within it (higher floors generally being higher classes of people), and one’s ability to produce vast numbers of children.
The characters on which Silverberg focuses in the novel are struggling to maintain this balance. One character who appears in almost all the narratives is the tightrope-walking Seigmund Kluver, who begins the novel as a successful young intellectual destined to move to the very top. At fourteen, he has two children and a lovely wife. He is awakened by Charles where he is sleeping by the side of the bed, having had sex the previous night with Charles’ wife. No one may deny anyone else access to themselves or their spouse for sex; this is one of the primary tenets on which the society is founded. Charles displays only a passing interest in Siegmund’s visit to his home, but is jealous of Siegmund’s fertile wife — a feeling he suppresses. His own wife is sterile after only four children.
.CALLOUT Though written in 1970 and obviously with much to say about the sexual revolution, the basic idea of the liberated woman seems to have escaped Mr. Silverberg.
Siegmund reappears periodically throughout the novel, often "nightwalking," as Silverberg refers to this custom of wandering to others’ homes for sex in the night. Though Silverberg begins by saying that anyone can do it, it quickly becomes clear that men do the actual nightwalking while women stay home and accept anyone who drops in. Though written in 1970 and obviously with much to say about the sexual revolution, the basic idea of the liberated woman seems to have escaped Mr. Silverberg.
The novel ends with the story of Siegmund himself, now fifteen years and five months old, and already staring at the end of what he can achieve within the urbmon society. Cursed with the desire to actually accomplish something in his life, he becomes depressed by his inability to understand the ruling class of the urbmon, whom, he comes to find out, use their status primarily for their own pleasure rather than to make life better for others. Distressed by this nasty dose of realism, alienated from his fellow citizens, Siegmund is the perfect tragedy of the World Within because he is a person who would be utterly fulfilled by life as we know it: competitive, luxurious, individualistic.
As does much classic American science fiction, Silverberg’s novel idealizes individualism, but this idealization is a subtle undertone to the novel. "Oh, it’s better to be free," a voice whispers in the back of our head. "Free to do what?", the novel whispers back.
Many things that we might consider worthy goals now, in the last moments of the twentieth century, have already either been achieved or have been ineradicably lost in the World Within. In Silverberg’s world, population pressure is no longer a problem, at least for the foreseeable future; on the other hand, the environment has been utterly given over to the support of that population. Out-of-control capitalism has been reined in, and individuals do not own more than they need.
However, there are still imbalances between the privileged and the unprivileged that are perfectly hidden by the way the society is structured. Technically, a person can do almost anything she or he wants, except for a few rules that are for the greatest good of everyone. Those few rules, in practice, swell to encompass restrictions on just about everything that actually drives a person onward. It’s very clear that Silverberg sees this world as a dystopia; but there’s a flavor of doubt that saves the novel from being a boring lecture on the evils of the future.
There’s also a lot of sex in the book — I mean a LOT. It’s shocking to us now, in the post-AIDS era, to look back at a literary work that saw the future in terms of emotionless, but near-constant sex. In the late sixties, it must have seemed an inevitable result of the sexual revolution; and free sex as an opiate of the masses in the nasty future goes back at least to Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World of 1946. In that tradition, the sex in this novel is not a good thing, nor is it lovingly described, though it is graphic in various places. Silverberg isn’t out to write pornography; he’s out to portray an essentially dehumanizing society in which sex is available to all (though primarily men) to keep everyone "happy."
The drug use won’t surprise anyone familiar with modern literature, or cyberpunk SF of the last fifteen years either. It’s interesting how our literature has diverged in its treatment of these two crucial topics of the late twentieth century.
.H1 Back to Peanut Press
Peanut Press is doing a big favor for those of us who like to read science fiction; their catalog of classic works, which you can purchase and read on the same day, isn’t bad and is growing. They also have a catalog of plenty of other types of fiction, not just SF, and they have new novels as well as old ones in the mix.
I hope more publishers and copyright holders come to see the value of reprinting their work electronically, and I’m happy to give them the money they deserve for writing the books in the first place — but I hope they get big royalties from these works. Much of the cost of expensive paperbacks these days has to do with the way paper prices have risen over the last decade, and these books cost as much as the printed versions.
The editing and formatting, however, are good. I only noticed a few typos, certainly as many as you find in printed mass-market paperbacks these days. If you’re looking to expand your library without taking up more shelf space, and you’ve previously missed out on the great titles Peanut Press is publishing, you’ll enjoy buying from them.
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.H1 Product availability and resources
Visit Peanut Press at http://www.peanutpress.com.
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