3 ms·

Sheep is a great, underrated novel. I love its structure, and how it constantly undermines narrative expectations through bathos and dramatic irony; every char

Sheep is a great, underrated novel. I love its structure, and how it constantly undermines narrative expectations through bathos and dramatic irony; every character in the book seems to be positioning themselves for misfortune and irrelevance. People you've been led to think are major, leading characters are suddenly and unceremoniously killed off (I like to think that George R. R. Martin read Brunner years before he used the same tactic in ASOIAF), while the novel's ostensible hero, Austin Train, a legendary environmental activist leader who has gone into hiding and spends the book preparing to mysteriously re-emerge, turns out — well, I don't to spoil things; not what I expected, anyway. Even more than character development, the sense of impending doom lies thick. My favourite part of the novel is the tech guy who for years has spent spare computing processing at his computer company to build an accurate socioeconomic model of the world, and his conclusion is summarized in a single sentence which seems to be playing out in real life exactly as he's uttering it. Some of the "environmental" predictions are admittedly a bit off and dated; sonic booms from hypersonic airplanes posing a danger to avalanche-prone mountain resorts, for example. But it's forgivable in a novel that, 42+ years ago, got so much right.

bediger4000 12y ago
I agree about The Sheep Look Up being an underrated novel. I read it in 1984 or '85. Until the end of the book, I was thinking it was a parody or satire or projection of Ronald Reagan's presidency. When I finished, I looked at the copyright date, and realized Brunner was projecting Richard Nixon's presidency forward. Sort of unrelated, is it me or does every other John Brunner book kind of suck? The Sheep Look Up, is good, so is Stand on Zanzibar, but then Brunner wrote real stinkers like Children of the Thunder, which also predicts a world of Usenet, UUCP-like email, and climate change. None of thse things have anything to do with that book sucking mind you.
- lobster_johnson 12y ago
  I read recently some commentary by a colleague and friend of his (I forget who; Silverberg, probably) that Brunner felt that after his "American trilogy" (Zanzibar, The Jagged Orbit and Sheep) he'd said everything he had wanted to say, and he was disappointed that his work was not recognized to the extent that it deserved. Without knowing much about Brunner's life, it's possible to infer that he simply lost his passion. On the other hand, between the first (The Squares of the City) and the last (The Jagged Orbit) of the books in his "golden period", he wrote 11 books that nobody talks about. As far as I can tell, his signal-to-noise ratio was higher than contemporary novelists such as Dick and Zelazny. One has to pay the rent, I suppose. Not many people know that Brunner spent years working on a big, ambitious historical novel he hoped would put him on the map as a mainstream novelist, though from the subject matter alone you can pretty much tell it was doomed from the start: The Great Steamboat Race. Apparently it's quite good, but nobody noticed when it eventually came out.
- tjradcliffe 12y ago
  Pretty much every Brunner novel I've read sucks, though I've not read The Sheep Look Up or Stand on Zanzibar. From what I recall after reading a few (whose titles I do not remember) the important thing for Brunner is that everything come out badly, no matter how contrived or tortured the plot becomes to achieve that end. It makes his work boring and predicable, as well as despressing, and the contrivance is unartful and awkward. Brunner hated the possibility that technology might solve any problems: he was opposed to Cold Fusion before it became obvious it was nonsense because he thought it would enable cheap, easy, consumption with a small environmental footprint, so people like him wouldn't be able to tell the rest of us how aweful we were for enjoying ourselves. There is a great deal of Puritanism in his work. With regard to these "predictions" I have to agree with the assessment that failed predictions are being touted as successful ones. Fuel cells are not batteries, for example. And the US is hardly "beset by terrorists": that is simply proganda by the security-industrial complex. There have been terrorist incidents, but far more people have been killed in the excessive and poorly thought out response to those incidents (the invasion and occupation of Iraq in particular) than were killed in them. Likewise, extrapolating that Europe would be united when there was a blueprint and long term plan already underway to do this is not a great leap of the imagination. It's more curious that American SF authors tended to see the world as either having a single government or a bipolar distribution of power rather than a multi-polar world, which has long been more probable.
- olefoo 12y ago
  I have a pretty strong opinion that The Shockwave Rider does not suck, even if the protagonist is a bit of a Mary-Sue. In terms of prescient details it gets some things wrong. But it gets a lot of the subtleties of a dystopian dataveillance society very, very right. If you read it you'll see what I mean. The idea that pretty much every institution you deal with knows you by your dossier and makes unaccountable decisions based on that knowledge. That this power is unequally distributed and that the data you need to make competent decisions about your future is deliberately hidden from you. The viewpoint that at the elite levels governments and corporations are indistinguishable in their criminality. One could imagine graduates of Tarnover stalking the halls at Google, Palantir and the NSA w/ equal ease. It's actually reasonably fast paced and well plotted ( exceptionally so by Brunner's standards ); and it's an easy read. I recommend it.
- ebiester 12y ago
  Reagan has been acknowledged as the inspiration for Prexy, as remember, but cannot find the source for that at the moment.
- zem 12y ago
  IMO, Brunner has written four outstanding classics: "Stand on Zanzibar", " The Shockwave Rider", "The Sheep Look Up" and "The Jagged Orbit", and one that was not quite in that league, but was great niche sf, " The Squares of the City". the rest is all what I term "minor sf" for want of a better term - I hesitate to call them potboilers, because some of them are very well written and entertaining, but they are the sort of book that sinks into the general background sea of science fiction, or are interesting experiments that did not quite click ("The traveller in Black", e.g.).
TheOtherHobbes 12y ago
>Sheep is a great, underrated novel. Brunner is a great, underrated writer, well ahead of the curve on cyberpunk, econo-politics, and libertarian dystopias - and even further, on ideas that are so far into the future they aren't even part of the futurology zeitgeist yet.

bediger4000 12y ago

I agree about The Sheep Look Up being an underrated novel. I read it in 1984 or '85. Until the end of the book, I was thinking it was a parody or satire or projection of Ronald Reagan's presidency. When I finished, I looked at the copyright date, and realized Brunner was projecting Richard Nixon's presidency forward. Sort of unrelated, is it me or does every other John Brunner book kind of suck? The Sheep Look Up, is good, so is Stand on Zanzibar, but then Brunner wrote real stinkers like Children of the Thunder, which also predicts a world of Usenet, UUCP-like email, and climate change. None of thse things have anything to do with that book sucking mind you.

lobster_johnson 12y ago
I read recently some commentary by a colleague and friend of his (I forget who; Silverberg, probably) that Brunner felt that after his "American trilogy" (Zanzibar, The Jagged Orbit and Sheep) he'd said everything he had wanted to say, and he was disappointed that his work was not recognized to the extent that it deserved. Without knowing much about Brunner's life, it's possible to infer that he simply lost his passion. On the other hand, between the first (The Squares of the City) and the last (The Jagged Orbit) of the books in his "golden period", he wrote 11 books that nobody talks about. As far as I can tell, his signal-to-noise ratio was higher than contemporary novelists such as Dick and Zelazny. One has to pay the rent, I suppose. Not many people know that Brunner spent years working on a big, ambitious historical novel he hoped would put him on the map as a mainstream novelist, though from the subject matter alone you can pretty much tell it was doomed from the start: The Great Steamboat Race. Apparently it's quite good, but nobody noticed when it eventually came out.
tjradcliffe 12y ago
Pretty much every Brunner novel I've read sucks, though I've not read The Sheep Look Up or Stand on Zanzibar. From what I recall after reading a few (whose titles I do not remember) the important thing for Brunner is that everything come out badly, no matter how contrived or tortured the plot becomes to achieve that end. It makes his work boring and predicable, as well as despressing, and the contrivance is unartful and awkward. Brunner hated the possibility that technology might solve any problems: he was opposed to Cold Fusion before it became obvious it was nonsense because he thought it would enable cheap, easy, consumption with a small environmental footprint, so people like him wouldn't be able to tell the rest of us how aweful we were for enjoying ourselves. There is a great deal of Puritanism in his work. With regard to these "predictions" I have to agree with the assessment that failed predictions are being touted as successful ones. Fuel cells are not batteries, for example. And the US is hardly "beset by terrorists": that is simply proganda by the security-industrial complex. There have been terrorist incidents, but far more people have been killed in the excessive and poorly thought out response to those incidents (the invasion and occupation of Iraq in particular) than were killed in them. Likewise, extrapolating that Europe would be united when there was a blueprint and long term plan already underway to do this is not a great leap of the imagination. It's more curious that American SF authors tended to see the world as either having a single government or a bipolar distribution of power rather than a multi-polar world, which has long been more probable.
olefoo 12y ago
I have a pretty strong opinion that The Shockwave Rider does not suck, even if the protagonist is a bit of a Mary-Sue. In terms of prescient details it gets some things wrong. But it gets a lot of the subtleties of a dystopian dataveillance society very, very right. If you read it you'll see what I mean. The idea that pretty much every institution you deal with knows you by your dossier and makes unaccountable decisions based on that knowledge. That this power is unequally distributed and that the data you need to make competent decisions about your future is deliberately hidden from you. The viewpoint that at the elite levels governments and corporations are indistinguishable in their criminality. One could imagine graduates of Tarnover stalking the halls at Google, Palantir and the NSA w/ equal ease. It's actually reasonably fast paced and well plotted ( exceptionally so by Brunner's standards ); and it's an easy read. I recommend it.
ebiester 12y ago
Reagan has been acknowledged as the inspiration for Prexy, as remember, but cannot find the source for that at the moment.
zem 12y ago
IMO, Brunner has written four outstanding classics: "Stand on Zanzibar", " The Shockwave Rider", "The Sheep Look Up" and "The Jagged Orbit", and one that was not quite in that league, but was great niche sf, " The Squares of the City". the rest is all what I term "minor sf" for want of a better term - I hesitate to call them potboilers, because some of them are very well written and entertaining, but they are the sort of book that sinks into the general background sea of science fiction, or are interesting experiments that did not quite click ("The traveller in Black", e.g.).

TheOtherHobbes 12y ago

>Sheep is a great, underrated novel. Brunner is a great, underrated writer, well ahead of the curve on cyberpunk, econo-politics, and libertarian dystopias - and even further, on ideas that are so far into the future they aren't even part of the futurology zeitgeist yet.