Waffle

The Shockwave Rider has been listed among Brunner's great novels along with Stand on Zanzibar, The Jagged Orbit, and The Sheep Look Up, and it has been written up as a novel that anticipated the emergence of the internet and coined the term worm for a self-replicating, malicious computer program. Wikipedia article on The Shockwave Rider. So is it?

Not quite. On reading it, I found it weaker than the other three "great" Brunner novels. It's simpler and more linear and while it had some of the kaleidoscopic trappings of the other novels, it didn't quite take them as far as the other three did. It also felt very much like a repeat exercise. Stylistically, it didn't gel for me either, though on the plus side, it did have an engaging female character in Kate Lilleberg.

As for it anticipating the internet, it was a bit late for that, having been published in 1975 when DARPANET had been around for a few years. The use of the term "worm" does seem to be original though what Brunner speaks of is "tapeworms" and his description of them suggests that he conceptualizes them as being essentially worm-like in structure as well as behaviour. In other words, the lead character's descriptions of his worms suggests that they are segmented creatures and that this is part of the reason why they are called that.

Of course, those are mere technological details. What makes Brunner's most ambitious work interesting is his broad-brush depiction of entire social systems. In The Shockwave Rider, what Brunner puts under the microscope is the influence of extensive data registration and manipulation on society as a whole and the well-being of its individuals, and what happens when corporations and governments try to control and suppress their data while still having access to that of individual consumers and citizens. And in its handling of these concepts, The Shockwave Rider does not disappoint. Some choice quotes:

At Tarnover they explained it all so reasonably! Of course everybody had to e given a personal code! How else could the government do right by its citizens, keep track of the desires, tastes, preferences, purchases, commitments and above all location of a continentful of mobile, free individuals?
Granted, there was an alternative approach. But would you want to see it adopted here? Would you like to find your range of choice restricted to the point where the population became predictable in its collective behavior?

Chilling, huh? And (in character):

The behaviorists reduced the principle of the carrot and the stick to the same kind of 'scientific' basis as the Nazis used for their so-called racial science. It's not surprising they became the darlings of the establishment. Governments rely on threat and trauma to survive. The easiest populace to rule is weak, poor, superstitious, preferably terrified of what tomorrow may bring, and constantly being reminded that the man in the street must step into the gutter when his superiors deign to pass him by. Behaviorist techniques offered a meanst to maintain this situation despite the unprecedented wealth, literacy and ostensible liberty of twenty-first-century North America.

Unlike The Sheep Look Up, The Shockwave Rider ends more or less happily, with the "good guys" dealing some serious blows to the (as always mostly anonymous) powers-that-be. It's well worth reading if you've already read the other classic Brunner novels and are hungry for more.

Edited to add: one impressive feat of technical prescience that hasn't been mentioned as much in criticism of The Shockwave Rider is that the novel anticipated the rise of the mobile phone: ubiquitous phones tied to a person rather than a place, which are used, among other things, as data devices.

I've had John Brunner's The Sheep Look Up by my bedside for months, but hadn't had the energy to finish it. Actually, I have several books that have been partially read over the past few months, and during my latest plane trip too Tennessee I finally got around to finishing some of them. The Sheep Look Up, one of Brunner's sprawling dystopian novels from the late 1960s, early 1970s, has a huge underground reputation as a classic tale of ecological catastrophe, and it lives up to it almost completely. Like his better known Stand on Zanzibar, it has a huge cast and a caleidoscopic structure in which future press cuttings, parodies of old poetry, anecdotes, TV commercial and some present-day information get mixed up with the interlocking storylines. Unlike SoZ, though, it is almost unrelentingly grim, with every member of the huge cast falling sick, and dying either from that or through violence. As usual with the Brunner dystopias, there are some moments of uncanny prescience, such as the portrayal-through-soundbites of a buffoonish US president who goes by the name of Prexy and serves no purpose at all but to distract the population through one-liners, a credit crisis, creeping socialism introduced by a conservative government for the benefit of its patrons, "organic" food that isn't, climate change resulting from the wasteful lifestyles of the developed populace and much more. One particularly chilling aspect is the set-up in which there is one smart, well-informed activist character who offers insight into the problems and even some solutions, who is already marginalised at the start of the novel. As he disappears from public life, extremists take up his mantle and resort to terrorism, which serves to taint that character, Austin Train, even further. Meanwhile, throughout the novel, a thoughtful, reasonable, not-at-all-activist thinker is patiently working with computer models to come to a thoughtful, reasonable solution. A silver bullet that will solve everything without having to listen to the Luddites. What this thoughtful, reasonable person comes up with at the end, as the problems have multiplied and the United States are collapsing into fascism and anarchy simultaneously? "Eliminate the most wasteful 200 million people from the population".

The Sheep Looks Up is not quite as good as Stand on Zanzibar - the characterisation, particularly of female characters, doesn't always work, the technological forecasts are dated (Brunner famously anticipated the Internet, but that was in another novel - here, he has completely missed out on the increase in computing power that would happen in the real world, and while a seasoned science fiction reader can ignore that most of the time, it still detracts from the verisimilitude of the rest of the novel) and there are some dull bits towards the end. But it is very, very good and speaks to many concerns that I for one have today.

(Personal note 1: I am writing this from sunny Tennessee where I'm staying with Aggie. No work is getting done, and blog posting will be light for a while. Also, I can't be bothered right now to polish up this review like I would if I was posting from home.)

(Personal note 2: I will be reading that other novel, The Shockwave Rider on my trip home. I do need a writer of Brunner's caliber to distract me from the fact that I won't be seeing my girlfriend for two months after that).