Dying Inside excerpts read by the author Robert Silverberg Vinyl Record Album LP buy Abridged

Dying Inside is a book written and read for you by the author Robert Silverberg. From the back cover: Of all the questions readers ask me about my novels, the one that recurs most frequently is, “How autobiographical is Dying Inside?” Odd that this should be so, I used to think. Readers of The Book Of Skulls don't seem to think that I'm homosexual; readers of Shadrach In The Furnace don't ask me if I've ever been a doctor; readers of Tower Of Glass don't surmise that I'm an android, or, if they do, they don't do it in my hearing. But ever since Dying Inside was published in 1972, there has been a general and almost automatic assumption that David Selig, my poor tormented schmendrick of a telepath, is a one-to-one surrogate for Robert Silverberg.

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Dying Inside excerpts read by the author Robert Silverberg

Cover: VG+ with some chips, and ex-library markings (Stickers and marker cross-outs)
Vinyl: VG+ has some cloudiness and sleeve marks (from storage method by Lew Wallace High School Library)

SIDE A:
Band 1: Chapter 9
Band 2: Chapter 12
SIDE B:
Chapter 26
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I suppose I asked for it. Selig and I are of the same age, we grew up in Brooklyn, we went to the same college at the same time, we are both non-practicing Jews; we have similar tastes in music; we have read many of the same books. Selig even looks a little like me, although he's a little taller and he's been losing his hair a lot faster than I have. But there are some major differences, too. His parents are nothing like my parents; his troubled relationship with his sister is no part of my life, for I am an only child; his dreary bachelor existence in obscure furnished rooms bears no resemblance to the exceedingly comfortable life I've been leading over the past twenty years.

And Selig can read minds. I can't. There are some days when I can't even tell what's on my own mind.

So the autobiographical aspects of Dying Inside, it has always seemed to me, are most superficial. Since I chose to set the novel in the New York of the 1970's, and I was living in New York myself during the period when most of the novel takes place, it was convenient to use certain events of my own life as an armature on which to hang the fabric of the book. Since certain incidents of my own life are more familiar to me than most incidents of other people's life, I used a little actual autobiography here and there to give intensity and vividness to the story. (The term papers that Selig quotes in Dying Inside are indeed my own, verbatim out of 1955.) And, since any writer's characters represent the writer himself in positive or negative image, I suppose that Selig, like all the other inhabitants of all my books, can be said to be a projection, distorted and transformed, of my own sense. of myself. But none of that matters very much in understanding Dying Inside. It's gossip, maybe, but it isn't literary analysis. There are two significant things about this book, and neither of them depends for understanding on knowledge of where I went to college or how I part my hair. The first is that the book is a science-fiction novel which attempts to make the reader experience the reality of what it is like to make direct contact with other minds. The second is that the book is a novel about a universal condition of life: the changes of time, the gradual loss of powers, the inevitable decline of the fires of youth.

On the first level, the science fiction, I am (I insist) writing about things of which I really know nothing. I'm not a telepath. I'm making it all up, guessing, bluffing. Doing my best, I think, and the passage on this record in which young David enters the minds of a fish and a bee and an old farmer is as close as I can come to a pure act of willed imagination. The best science fiction is made up of such acts of imagination: the writer strains to see what is alien to him, and does see it, and puts it down on paper so you can share his vision. As herewith.

And the other level, the novel about time, loss, decline? I know a little about that, too, and what life hasn't yet taught me I can imagine, just as I imagined telepathy. It's on this level that the book has been most misunderstood by its critics, who say that Selig is a complainer, even a whiner, full of self-pity, sinking toward a miserable fate. No. Not so. David has a lot to complain about-he's been hurt often, and often unjustifiably—and a lot to feel sorry for himself about. But his story is one of gradual and grudging acceptance. “I'll be of good cheer,” he says at the end. It's a novel of acceptance of loss, not just a novel of loss. I believe the book has a happy ending, myself, although I suppose that by the relatively primitive literary standards of most science fiction it looks like an unrelieved slide into the abyss. The last pages of Dying Inside are on this record too. Judge the direction of buy the ending for yourself.

Anyway, not autobiography, not in any important way. Universal, I hope. True, I hope. And with an element of fantasy, science fiction, grotesquerie, at its core. When I wrote it, I thought I was extending the possibilities of science fiction into the realm of the contemporary novel, and vice versa. That was in 1971. The book still lives: perhaps time is bearing me out. -Robert Silverberg

Robert Silverberg was born and educated in New York City and lives now near San Francisco. Since 1953 he has been a prolific author of science fiction, whose work has many times received the Hugo and Nebula awards and has been translated into two dozen languages. Among his best-known books are Dying Inside, Shadrach in the Furnace, Born with the Dead, Downward to the Earth, and Nightwings. He is also the editor of the Alpha and New Dimensions series of s-f anthologies, and is a past president of the Science Fiction Writers of America. These days he is doing relatively little writing, devoting most of his energy to the raising of subtropical plants.

CREDITS:
Cover: Leo & Diane Dillon
Library of Congress #: 78-741947
© 1979 Caedmon
Directed by Ward Botsford Recorded at Columbia Recording Studio, San Francisco, California
Tape Editor: Howard W. Harris
SOURCE: DYING INSIDE, by Robert Silverberg, copyright © 1972.
Published by Ballantine Books, New York.

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