If you haven't read The Shockwave Rider, do yourself a favor and read it ASAP.
One fascinating aspect of it, aside from the whole "computer hacker hero before there were any" bit, is that it was largely based on a non-fiction work - Alvin Toffler's Future Shock. Brunner was apparently so interested in what Toffler had to say, he chose to portray his ideas in novel form.
And Future Shock is another book which I can't recommend highly enough. Toffler might not have been right about everything, but I think he really hit on something with the basic concept of "future shock" as a state where you constantly feel out of sorts and disjointed due to how rapidly the world is changing. And given that he wrote that book in the late 60's, early 70's, imagine how much more profound that effect is now (just due to technological advances if nothing else).
I'm not sure either Toffler or Brunner had, or claimed to have, any answers for how to deal with the "future shock" phenomenon, but I think it behooves all of us to think about the idea and ways to deal with it.
Plus, The Shockwave Rider is just plain entertaining. And depending on who you ask, it's either the first cyberpunk novel, or an example of "proto-cyberpunk", and probably influenced any number of subsequent works that are widely beloved in this community.
And if you're going to read Toffler, dive deeper and read Herbert A. Simon's underlying works. He was an exceptionally unorthodox polymath genius.
Herbert Alexander Simon (June 15, 1916 – February 9, 2001) was an American economist, political scientist and cognitive psychologist, whose primary research interest was decision-making within organizations and is best known for the theories of "bounded rationality" and "satisficing".[5] He received the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1978 and the Turing Award in 1975. His research was noted for its interdisciplinary nature and spanned across the fields of cognitive science, computer science, public administration, management, and political science.[6] He was at Carnegie Mellon University for most of his career, from 1949 to 2001.[7]
The Shockwave Rider is largely responsible for my late-70's self deciding to get into Computer Science. Yes, I wanted to be Nick Haflinger; what can I say, I was a teenager.
Hearing Aid is not Facebook, but it's pretty amazing what he was able to imagine back then. Good stuff.
Will definitely read it after this -- as a past reader of Stand on Zanzibar and The Sheep Look Up, I feel surprised to have never heard of it!
On the topic of early cyberpunk, I personally feel Alfred Bester's Tiger! Tiger! aka The Stars My Destination, from _1957_, hits all the key notes -- which I won't go into for sake of spoilers. But if you like cyberpunk or science fiction in general: go read that book!
Well written, fun, and bizarrely prescient compared to a lot of SF written decades later. Even William Gibson (of all people) has Soviet astronauts in space and hard SF themes in short stories written in the 80s, but Stand on Zanzibar predicts the rise of SE Asian powers all the way back in 68, and is far more biology/sociology themed.
It has some great epigrams sprinkled through:
"Papa Hegel he say that all we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history. I know people who can't even learn from what happened this morning. Hegel must have been taking the long view."
"SHALMANESER That real cool piece of hardware up at the GT tower. They say he's apt to evolve to true consciousness one day. Also they say he's as intelligent as a thousand of us put together, which isn't really saying much, because when you put a thousand of us together look how stupidly we behave."
Note that a lot of the rest of Brunner's output is very different - I found the Traveller in Black stuff pretty much unreadable.
Another don't-miss Brunner 1975 novel: The Shockwave Rider ...
"notable for its hero's use of computer hacking skills to escape pursuit in a dystopian future, and for the coining of the word "worm" to describe a program that propagates itself through a computer network.... In the novel, data privacy is reserved for corporate entities and individuals who may then conceal wrongdoing; by contrast, normal citizens do not enjoy significant privacy."
The Sheep Look Up is fantastic. It's a very dark novel, but at the same time it has a great sense of irony. In particular, it keeps setting up characters and then throwing them to the wolves faster than you can say "Game of Thrones". For example, the plot is ostensibly about a legendary environmental activist who is about to come out of hiding — he's sought for inciting his followers to violence — at a pivotal time as the world is being thrown into a series of political wars/crises caused, indirectly, by environmental disasters (think Syria) and squabbling for resources, but the moment the hero emerges for his triumphant appeal to the American people, everything blows up in his face.
The article doesn't mention The Jagged Orbit, which Brunner considered to form a trilogy together with Stand on Zanzibar and The Sheep Look Up. Anyone read it?
The Jagged Orbit is about paperclip-maximizing corporations (except that the biggest one, Gottschalk, is selling weapons, not paperclips) manipulating social attitudes and legislation to increase their profits. People are encouraged to fear based on skin color, social class, wealth inequality, gender, and age.
The Gottschalk corp is descended from a legitimization of the Mafia, and has competing divisions locked into an internal war. Executives change their last names to that of the company, a device later used in Max Barry's _Jennifer Government_.
I read it a long long time ago. Got it from a garage sale as a kid. Strangely most of what I can remember is "future slang" and not plot or tech or themes or characters. One chapter started with a definition of a word, which was "not derog. unless abbr.", which I thought was lovely. A guy puts his beard on in the morning with a "rozar".
Not a helpful review, I'm afraid. I loved it at the time, but couldn't convince any friends to read it.
William Gibson: "No one except possibly the late John Brunner, in his brilliant novel "The Sheep Look Up," has ever described anything in science fiction that is remotely like the reality of 2007 as we know it. " (2007 interview)
yes, and it's excellent! I consider those three, and "the shockwave rider" to be Brunner's four "major" novels. he's also written lots of books that are entertaining enough but nothing really outstanding, and one other, "the squares of the city" that is not on par with the big four but which is inventive and well written enough that I'd recommend it to any fans of his.
a lot of the golden age sci fi authors were good guessers.
they were prolific (and their misses fell out of favor), scientifically literate (the foundation sciences have not progressed much since the 60s, biology/genetics being the major exception) and based their stories on old myths and legends (a standard trope in fiction), which allowed a type of reflective writing on the human condition with forward prediction power. many were also tied into anti-soviet/anti-american spy networks and traveled frequently working as information gatherers and agents for their respective governments.
sumna technologiae (stanislaw lem) is a good primer for people working in AI today, as lem attempts to understand cybernetics through the golden age lens. arkady and strugatsky's hard to be a god is about the problems of trying to order society and artificially advance it.
the soviet skepticism towards scientific/technological utopias comes through much stronger, given those authors lived through a failed one. the movement continued into the real sciences, fomenko's new chronology being the gold standard of what happens when you erode faith in your society, truth and the stability of reality. the western system is going through a similar social collapse the soviet one went through, reading the soviet literature of the time will help you understand the coming future of the english speaking peoples, no death or violence, just a disoriented sadness, a type of alien haze which clouds your senses and has you slowly floating down into cold darkness.
> a lot of the golden age sci fi authors were good guessers.
A while back I bumped into a sort-of fraud wherein someone would create a Twitter account and predict that someone die or something would happen on a given date, but for every date, i.e. "mieseratte will die on 2019-05-11", "mieseratte will die on 2019-05-12" and so on. Then when the even occurs they delete all tweets but the now correct tweet.
Whenever I bump into these "So and so predicted EVENT N number of years ago" I just sort-of assume that if I search hard enough I can find a book that "predicts" most broad scenarios.
I was listening to the Yale history of the new testament course a while back: https://oyc.yale.edu/religious-studies/rlst-152 and one of the more interesting observations was that scholars can date prophets (such as Daniel and John from Revelations) by when they start being wrong.
it's a shortcut to human thinking: sharpshooter fallacy, cherry picking, biased pattern matching, etc.
backdating and forging online content is an interesting concept in itself. you see it accidentally crop up with the way google search indexes old online articles. the technology to convincingly alter the recent past creates a type of time-fraud risk. linked triple ledger networks with unique ids (public)(private)(authoritative) could solve this problem for individuals, but information validity might become as fungible as a memory or an idea. floating around in a byte-stream as easy as backspacing away my last sentence.
Yup, it's interesting how good their guesses were. In the article, it says:
"So how did Brunner do it? To start with, he spent nearly three years reading up on topics from the role of genetic inheritance in disease to links between population spurts and urban violence. He also spent a month in the US in 1966, visiting Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago and New York. Then, breaking with his usual work routine, instead of outlining his plot, he filled 60 pages with thoughts before hammering out a first draft.
As he went, he devised a series of ‘parallel thought exercises’ to generate ideas."
This process makes me think of the 'premortem' concept in behavioral economics. In brief, it's the act of thinking/assuming that some event failed in the future - and then writing history leading up to that event. If interested, Richard Thaler writes a useful description of this: https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27174.
Let's hope that his Total Eclipse [1] does not predict tomorrow as well. It's one of the bleakest yet believable books I've read in a long time. First paragraph of the description from the link:
In 2020, an international space team, exploring Sigma Draconis, 19 light years from earth, discovers the remains of a highly advanced society that has left behind its most spectacular artifact; the largest telescope imaginable, carved & polished from a natural moon crater. Successive space crews determine that the native culture evolved & disappeared mysteriously after a mere 3000 years of existence. It's now 2028. Another mission reaches the planet with just one goal--to discover why the civilization disappeared--& with just one hope--that this knowledge will prevent the same thing from happening on earth.
My username came from going through a huge John Brunner phase when I was a teenager.
I always make sure to have at least two copies of Stand on Zanzibar on hand at any point in time so I can always gift one to a friend on a whim (I hunt used bookstores and pick up another copy if I’m below 3)
>>> As Smith describes it, he imagined a Victorian time-traveller pitching up in the 1960s, and then pondered how he’d go about explaining to them everything from the telephone to the sexual revolution
A while back oh write about taking a naive teenager and a seen-it-all elder and 'diff'ing their thoughts - everything left would be deep cultural assumptions
Always nice to see people rediscover John Brunner, he's one of my favorite authors. There's a quote i once heard that goes approximately like this : "Philip K Dicks novels turn into movies, John Brunners novels turn into reality".
Stand on Zanzibar was a real trip the first time i read it, though in later years my favorite Brunner novel has been Squares of the City. Its not as scifi-ey as Zanzibar, but it is interesting for being built on a famous chess game and for exploring the nature of propaganda and its influence on the body politic.
And honestly, deciding to write a book where the characters conform to the moves of an almost 100 year old chess game and pulling it off is just amazing.
I read Brunner voraciously when younger. I find "shockwave rider" aged badly, it's like SciFi juvenilia. Along with his source book, Alvin Toffler's "future shock" it sat in the remainder pile of most secondhand bookshops.
Some of his other work is .. bizarre. A book about sentient plants on a planet beset by Massive meteorite threat stimulating speedy evolution.
I can't but think Brunner was depressed. His books make grim reading sometimes. Perhaps less depressed than David Lindsay but overall he thinks humans are weak, and unlikely to find politically stable paths out of trouble.
> I can't but think Brunner was depressed. His books make grim reading sometimes. Perhaps less depressed than David Lindsay but overall he thinks humans are weak, and unlikely to find politically stable paths out of trouble.
You could also describe that as just “historically literate”.
> I can't but think Brunner was depressed. His books make grim reading sometimes. Perhaps less depressed than David Lindsay but overall he thinks humans are weak, and unlikely to find politically stable paths out of trouble.
I think this is a British sensibility, brought on by the experiences from 1914 through the 1950s. Two horrible wars, the collapse of an empire, the loss of economic dominance.
tbf, it was the utopian community of Shockwave Rider and attempted happy ending that was really annoying...
(Stand on Zanzibar is a superior book in every respect apart from Shockwave Rider having some interesting and novel ideas around computer hacking and surveillance and SoZ having stock scifi talking computers that always predicted things correctly)
In my childhood I went through a period where I only read sci-fi, borrowed in batches of 7 books a week from the city library. Sci-fi wasn't in a separate section, but the library had color codes for different genres, marked by a dot on the spine of the books. Sci-fi's dot was yellow, and it wasn't yet lumped into the weird 'Sci-Fi and Fantasy' arranged marriage of later.
I started scanning for yellow dots and reading through the shelves in alphabetical order, backtracking my way sometimes to pick up on books that were borrowed by others, or just added new in previous passes.
For that reason Brunner came rather early with pearls like 'Stand on Zanzibar' and of course 'The Shockwave Rider' most certainly fueling the habit. Even back then at a very young age I felt the dystopian writers for the most part were more thinking in terms of complete system dynamics while the utopian writers had a more narrow view and thus it comes as no surprise that the former turned out to be less blind-sighted than the latter in hindsight.
Ironic timing in that I'm about half way through this. Started a few months back and got side tracked but just picked it up again last night.
As at least one other said, the presentation/style is not like anything you have seen before and it takes getting used to (I'm not quite there yet). The first half of the book (roughly where I am) is kinda slow as well, but starting to pick up the pace now.
It is one of the most prescient books I've read, and a bit of a fave, as my user name probably shows (a character in the book). It is notoriously hard to start reading though because of its style - it breaks up the story with montages of news articles, stories and excerpts from books. Though once you get in the groove its hard to put down.
While Brunner's forecasts may have been prescient, that might be due to the freedom he enjoyed as a science fiction writer.
Forecasters making earnest and serious attempts to predict technological and social change over a couple decades often get it badly wrong.
One of my favorite books is "Megamistakes: Forecasting and the Myth of Rapid Technological Change" by Stephen P. Schnaars, which provides many examples of poor predictions. In some cases, technological change is simply delayed, as in video calling, which can now be done with smartphones 50 years after PicturePhone. In other cases, such as supersonic airliners or gas turbine powered cars, the predictions may never become true.
I wonder whether you can't write this story about almost any SF author. If you write a dozen books and stories each with a plethora of new ideas, you are sure to get some things right. Pick out all the things they got right, add a few mistakes for 'balance' and tadaaa, another visionary SF author.
Has anyone done statistical analysis on the accuracy of 'predictions' by SF authors? Are some really more visionary than others?
The difference with Brunner (or at least the 'Club of Rome quartet' Brunner; he wrote space opera too) isn't so much the prediction rate as that he covered topics like racial tensions and pollution that other speculative fiction authors largely either avoided or covered through allegorical interactions on foreign planets.
Prediction wise, he got plenty wrong and iirc explicitly disclaimed that he was making predictions so much as incorporating contemporary analysis of trends. But more importantly, he was writing about economic growth in Southeast Asia and polluted oceans and trying to get his inflation and population growth forecasts right, whilst scifi norms involved continuations of the Cold War with robots and spacecraft dogfighting like WWII fighters, post apocalyptic scenarios or futures in which the World Government sent out ships to engage in trade and conflict with space bugs in far flung star systems.
that would be a huge undertaking but I think probably the answer is that most are not that prescient, other than minor bits of prescience like making video calls or stuff like that -
Isaac Asimov - foundation series too far off to be prescient, robots future hampered by three laws of robotics not being really possible so prescience of those not very high.
Heinlein - lots of space travel, time travel, far future - does not seem very prescient.
Bradbury - major sci-fi martian chronicles, I don't think likely to be prescient.
Andre Norton - too far future to be prescient.
Ursula K. LeGuin - sci fi too far future to be prescient.
Phillip K. Dick - his artistic worldview was prescient, but that is to say he predicted a lot of the concerns of literature and pop culture in our present, but I don't think his worlds were prescient. You could also say LeGuin was prescient in the same way Dick was.
In fairness to Asimov's laws of robotics, he invented them as a device to illustrate how fundamentally flawed those sorts of rules can be. His robot stories are about how unforeseen situations create unexpected behaviour, despite apparently simple and rigid rules. He wasn't really trying to promote those laws as a practical solution to future robotics problems. He wanted a source of conflict as fuel for stories.
Perhaps I've misrecalled but I thought Asimov said something to the effect that the reason he did the 3 laws was because all robots stories were about robots going amok and making war on humanity which he found unlikely to happen because of course robots would be programmed not to do that.
"New Path" operating rehab centers to "help" Substance D addicts deal with their addictions is pretty similar to IRL Purdue Pharma setting up Oxy rehab centers.
huh...
the article says that in response to overpopulation that the world "governments have responded globally with draconian eugenics laws, harnessing genetics to determine who can and cannot be allowed to have children."
Well, we do have the same overpopulation that brunner predicted, but instead our governments encourage overpopulation because it props up our Western ponzi economies, which are based on debt and consumer demand....our govt's should be responding to the overpopulation crisis, but they do not because they are under the control of the big corporations that want to keep propping up the ponzi economy...so, brunner called it wrong on this angle...he failed to foresee our out of control Western pseudo-democracies
Did you not notice the one child policy in China? (It came along after Brunner published SoZ, so I'm calling it a win on the predictive front, although they discontinued it more recently.)
One fascinating aspect of it, aside from the whole "computer hacker hero before there were any" bit, is that it was largely based on a non-fiction work - Alvin Toffler's Future Shock. Brunner was apparently so interested in what Toffler had to say, he chose to portray his ideas in novel form.
And Future Shock is another book which I can't recommend highly enough. Toffler might not have been right about everything, but I think he really hit on something with the basic concept of "future shock" as a state where you constantly feel out of sorts and disjointed due to how rapidly the world is changing. And given that he wrote that book in the late 60's, early 70's, imagine how much more profound that effect is now (just due to technological advances if nothing else).
I'm not sure either Toffler or Brunner had, or claimed to have, any answers for how to deal with the "future shock" phenomenon, but I think it behooves all of us to think about the idea and ways to deal with it.
Plus, The Shockwave Rider is just plain entertaining. And depending on who you ask, it's either the first cyberpunk novel, or an example of "proto-cyberpunk", and probably influenced any number of subsequent works that are widely beloved in this community.