Dying Inside (Easton Press Signed Collector's Edition)

SILVERBERG, Robert (intro. Richard D. Erlich). Dying Inside. Norwalk, Connecticut: The Easton Press, 2004.

Octavo. Full deep blue leather. Spine with raised bands, 22-carat gilt accents. All edges gilt. Moiré silk endpapers. Satin ribbon page marker. Introduction by Richard D. Erlich. 245pp. Signed Collector's Edition. Signed by the author on the special title page. Includes signed Certificate of Authenticity, Collector's Notes, edition card, and bookplate adhered to front endpaper.

Robert Silverberg (b. 1935) has been one of the most prolific and consistently accomplished writers in the history of science fiction: a multiple winner of both the Hugo and Nebula Awards, inducted into the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame in 1999, and designated Grand Master by the Science Fiction Writers of America in the same year as this Easton Press edition, 2004. The range of his output is extraordinary, and Dying Inside, first published in 1972, is widely regarded as the work in which his literary ambitions were most fully realised and the work by which he is most likely to be remembered.

David Selig is a telepath. He was born with the ability to read minds, and for forty years he has lived with it as a burden rather than a gift. He has used it furtively, shamefully, to get by — ghostwriting academic papers for New York City students by reading their thoughts, conducting a series of failed relationships in which his knowledge of what the other person actually feels makes intimacy impossible. Now, in middle age, the gift is fading. The novel is the account of Selig losing his telepathy, and of what that loss means to a man whose identity has been inseparable from an ability he has never been able to acknowledge or use honestly.

The frame is science fiction but the literary register is that of the American realistic novel of the late 1960s and early 1970s: Bellow, Roth, Malamud, the tradition of the New York Jewish intellectual struggling with selfhood in an indifferent world. Silverberg structures the narrative in a shifting chronology that moves between Selig's past and present, and between first and third person, in a way that enacts the dissolution of a coherent self. It was nominated for the Nebula Award in 1972, and for both the Hugo and Locus Awards in 1973, and remains the most critically acclaimed of his novels. Brian Aldiss described it as one of the finest science fiction novels of the decade. The introduction by Richard D. Erlich — a scholar of science fiction and utopian literature — situates the novel within both Silverberg's career and the broader tradition of literary SF.

Near fine. Some loss to cover gilt; otherwise fine throughout.

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Catalogue Number: HH000490