Dying Inside
A telepath is losing his power as he ages. Silverberg's meditation on declining ability, middle age, and the horror of becoming ordinary reads closer to Bellow or Roth than Asimov, while remaining rigorously science-fictional. The most literary SF novel of the 1970s.
It is almost entirely interior with very little external event, and readers wanting momentum call it static, with attention sagging around the midpoint. A real slice experience the narrator as “an incredible asshole,” his bigotry “racist in a way that I find particularly uncomfortable” in the moment rather than safely of its era; the harshest verdict runs “a sexist, racist, masturbatory exploration.” Secondary characters get flagged as thin or stereotyped, which undercuts the book’s reputation for psychological depth. Some hear the aging-man mode as “the same vein of zeitgeist that gave us Portnoy’s Complaint,” derivative rather than new. And it is a demanding entry point into Silverberg rather than an easy one.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
