User Profile

As www.reddit.com/r/Cyberpunk/comments/7i5zm6/comment/dqwgbgh/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3 states:

In the homes of the wealthy, the rooms of the female members were blind, without windows or doors, open only to the jaunting of intimate members of the family. Thus was morality maintained and chastity defended. But since Olivia Presteign was herself blind to normal sight, she could not jaunte. Consequently her suite was entered through doors closely guarded by ancient retainers in the Presteign clan livery. Olivia Presteign was a glorious albino. Her hair was white silk, her skin was white satin, her nails, her lips, and her eyes were coral. She was beautiful and blind in a wonderful way, for she could see in the infrared only, from 7,500 angstroms to one millimeter wavelengths. She saw heat waves, magnetic fields, radio waves, radar, sonar, and electromagnetic fields. She was holding her Grand Levee in the drawing room of the suite. She sat in a brocaded wing chair, sipping tea, guarded by her duenna, holding court, chatting with a dozen men and women standing about the room. She looked like an exquisite statue of marble and coral, her blind eyes flashing as she saw and yet did not see. She saw the drawing room as a pulsating flow of heat emanations ranging from hot highlights to cool shadows. She saw the dazzling magnetic patterns of clocks, phones, lights, and locks. She saw and recognized people by the characteristic heat patterns radiated by their faces and bodies. She saw, around each head, an aura of the faint electromagnetic brain pattern, and sparkling through the heat radiation of each body, the ever-changing tone of muscle and nerve.

What a novel character.

As www.reddit.com/r/Cyberpunk/comments/7i5zm6/comment/dqwgbgh/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3 states:

In the homes of the wealthy, the rooms of the female members were blind, without windows or doors, open only to the jaunting of intimate members of the family. Thus was morality maintained and chastity defended. But since Olivia Presteign was herself blind to normal sight, she could not jaunte. Consequently her suite was entered through doors closely guarded by ancient retainers in the Presteign clan livery. Olivia Presteign was a glorious albino. Her hair was white silk, her skin was white satin, her nails, her lips, and her eyes were coral. She was beautiful and blind in a wonderful way, for she could see in the infrared only, from 7,500 angstroms to one millimeter wavelengths. She saw heat waves, magnetic fields, radio waves, radar, sonar, and electromagnetic fields. She was holding her Grand Levee in the drawing room of the suite. She sat in a brocaded wing chair, sipping tea, guarded by her duenna, holding court, chatting with a dozen men and women standing about the room. She looked like an exquisite statue of marble and coral, her blind eyes flashing as she saw and yet did not see. She saw the drawing room as a pulsating flow of heat emanations ranging from hot highlights to cool shadows. She saw the dazzling magnetic patterns of clocks, phones, lights, and locks. She saw and recognized people by the characteristic heat patterns radiated by their faces and bodies. She saw, around each head, an aura of the faint electromagnetic brain pattern, and sparkling through the heat radiation of each body, the ever-changing tone of muscle and nerve.

What a novel character.

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1333053972

Robert A. Heinlein demonstrated (time and again) that you can be a dirty old man and still get by, but when you get weird, you’re just creepy and the creep factor negatively effects your writing. In 1966 someone should have said to him, “Bob, you’re sexually free and you’re all about the ladies being wild and free too, got it, but you wrote some great fiction back in the day before the thick shag rugs and the hot tub parties … so take it easy on the porn, huh? And for God’s sake DO NOT order another round of oysters, I mean what the hell??” So we come to Robert Silverberg’s 1971 The World Inside. I’ve read a lot of Silverberg and he is a very sexually oriented writer, and this is the most sexually explicit of his novels I have read thus far (read in July 2015 – have not yet gotten to Up the Line, but “I heard things”). Silverberg was writing in the sixties and it was, no doubt, very liberating to be able to describe – sex. We all do it; it’s a big fun part of life, and so why not in science fiction? Indeed, why not? Until it gets in the way of, and deteriorates from, an otherwise really cool book. For me it was just too much, over the top, in your face page after page pornography. And I certainly do not want to come across as a prude – something that has NEVER before come up, I don’t think – but he could have taken a different tack, left some film on the editor’s floor to avoid the X rating and still had a damn fine novel that was not taken over by the Ron Jeremyesque saxophone solos.