The Elliott Bay Book Company

As the literature of ideas and imagination, Science Fiction and Fantasy simply demands discussion. Our selection for February is Dying Inside by Robert Silverberg. David Selig graduated from Columbia but has never done much with his life despite his possession of a unique advantage, the power to read minds. Still, he has come to take it for granted, to use it thoughtlessly in matters great and trivial, and it has shaped his personality. Now, as he enters early middle age, something happens that David never anticipated: the power starts to fade. This brilliant novel follows the progression of that loss—an inexorable decline to the power's extinction—and how this untimely mental autumn affects him. It is a story as powerful as it is simple in outline; the result is literature's premier portrait of the telepathic mind, a character study unmatched in science fiction.