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 titl

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.