One of the touchstone novels that seperates the true affectionado of science fiction from the more casual fan or the affectionado of pulp adventures with fantastic tropes.

I like pulp adventurers with fantastic tropes, but that's hardly the sum of either science fiction or fantasy.

Alot of people report being rather stunned by this book, as they didn't think science fiction was this broad or this well written. This is one of the books I turn to when pretentious literary snobs challenge my taste in books. Being Silverburg, it's very readable and approachable and you won't find the book to be quite the hard slog you'll find trying to read other ambitious works of science fiction.

Silverburg is a soft science-fiction writer and that tends to make him seem to straddle the divide between fantasy science-fiction which raises the challenging (if perhaps unimportant) question of what makes something science-fiction and what makes something fantasy.

My own personal definition of the divide is that fantasy is the branch of speculative fiction that addresses the question, "What is the nature of good and evil?" by representing abstract concepts as tangible things. Whereas, science fiction is the branch of speculative fiction that addresses the question, "What does it mean to be human?" generally by imagining things that are not human and comparing and contrasting humanity with these inventions.

By this definition, Silverburg is rightly shelved in the science fiction section. As with almost all of Silverburg's works, the real theme of 'Dying Inside' is the nature of personal identity - how we define it, how shallow those definitions prove to be in a crisis, how a sense of self may be gained and how it may be lost.