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" (Zanzi

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.