| Article: 396
From: dani@netcom.com (Dani Zweig)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.reviews
Subject: REPOST: Belated Reviews PS#9: John Brunner
Organization: Netcom Online Communications Services (408-241-9760 login: guest)
Date: 08 Oct 93 22:06:06 GMT
Belated Reviews PS#9: John Brunner
John Brunner's been unlucky in his forty-year writing career. He's
frequently written well-accepted novels, but they tend to fall out of
favor and out of print. (One might argue that luck has little to do with
that.) There are two particularly identifiable phases in his writing
career. In the fifties and early sixties, he was turning out numerous
competent space adventures. And in the late sixties and early seventies,
he was writing near-future socially-oriented fiction. Both these
generalizations ignore some of his best work.
"The Traveler in Black" (***+) is a personal favorite. It's a fixup
fantasy novel -- a series of stories set in a time when the universe is
coming out of an age of chaos and magic into one of order and reason. The
Traveler is the being responsible for this transition. His main weapons
are the ability to grant wishes, and the dry sense of humor needed to give
a wish its most effective literal interpretation. (This can take alarming
turns. He might hear someone yelling "I never want to see you again!" and
use it as an excuse to strike everyone in the city blind.) A fifth TiB
story appeared in Asimov's SF Adventure Magazine (Fall 1979) -- and was
added to the first four, to be rereleased as "The Compleat Traveler in
Black" -- but I thought it weaker than the others, and unnecessary, as well.
"The Long Result" (***+) is placed on a very placid Earth of the future.
Technology is advanced, a couple of experimental colonies have been place
in other solar systems -- no rush, as there is no population or resource
pressure -- and most of today's social problems have been solved. There
are still lunatic fringes, such as the xenophobic Stars Are For Man League,
which has suddenly become very visible. Roald Vincent, a senior department
head in the Bureau of Cultural Relations is living an equally placid life
until everything seems to start happening at once: A new intelligent
species is encountered, a rash of too-high-tech sabotage breaks out, and
someone tries to murder a representative of a species generally believed to
be more advanced than Humanity. Brunner uses this crisis to construct an
interesting low-pressure look at a future Earth that might or might not be
on the verge of a large step towards maturity.
(This is actually a theme which runs through most of Brunner's novels, the
early ones as well as the later ones. His novels tend to be set in
societies which are at crossroads, facing a choice -- of which they might
not be aware -- between maturation and failure.)
In the late sixties and early-to-mid seventies, Brunner wrote a series of
very-well-received novels of near-future sf. I've seen them referred to
as dystopias, but in at least some instances this is inaccurate. They are
simple projections of social trends which had particularly high profiles
at this time -- the population explosion ("Stand on Zanzibar"), future
shock ("The Shockwave Rider"), pollution and environmental degradation
("The Sheep Look Up"), violence and race hatred ("The Jagged Orbit").
These trends are projected linearly to the early twenty-first century --
forty to fifty years, at the time. (The linearity is a problem. Each
near-future world is a jazzed-up world of the sixties, with just one trend
extrapolated. Most of these books, for instance, are clearly written under
the shadow of the Viet Nam war.) In some cases, Brunner ends his novels
with science-fictional solutions to real problems, and I hate when that
happens. By way of analogy, imagine a novel that spends five hundred pages
dramatizing the energy crisis, and then ends with one of the characters
announcing the invention of a cheap, safe, portable, fusion-from-sea-water
device.
"Stand on Zanzibar" (***+) is the best of these novels. The title comes
from an observation that, allowing two square feet for each person, "you
could stand us all on the six hundred forty square mile surface of the
island of Zanzibar." In other words, a population of some eight billion
by 2010, which was a reasonable mathematical projection in 1968 and still
is today. (Brunner also projects the population of the US at four hundred
billion, which is *not* reasonable without major changes which he doesn't
show.) The main effect of this population increase -- aside from the fact
that the economy can barely sustain it -- is psychological: People have
become obssessed with the population control and eugenics. Which means
that a third-world country's announcement that it has the ability and the
willingness to genetically improve its next generation has the potential
to trigger tremendous social upheaval. "Stand on Zanzibar" is the most
honest of Brunner's near-future novels, as well. He takes pains to
portray a real society, not a one-problem caricature, and the result is
worth reading.
"The Jagged Orbit" (**+) is also highly readable, but the society it
portrays -- of madness, race hatred, and a gun salesman at every corner --
is a bad caricature of late-sixties fears. "The Shockwave Rider" (**) is
also a caricature, and one that, by its limitations, shows the limitations
of Toffler's "Future Shock". And some people swear by "The Sheep Look Up"
(*), but I gave up after a hundred pages of pollution and starvation and
mass extinctions and human deaths.
John Brunner was a prolific writer of space adventure fiction in the
fifties and sixties. Much of it was published by Ace (frequently in Ace
Doubles), and was ruthlessly trimmed for page count. Brunner used his
market clout in the seventies aggressively, to have many of those novels
reissued uncut, under new titles, which has the potential to make shopping
for his books very aggravating. Virtually all these books were fairly
minor efforts that didn't merit the revision. Not that some of them don't
still make enjoyable light reads. Most of these are short by today's
standards, often falling in the 100-150 page range.
"Born Under Mars" (***) is placed on a backwater Mars: It had been
settled as a prelude to starflight, but the development of ftl travel
caused it to be bypassed. Since then, the settlers have grown their own
isolated way -- until the intrigues of the interstellar unions converge on
Mars. A well-written novel, more thoughtful than most of Brunner's
earlier works.
Others I enjoyed from this period include "The World Swappers" (**) (a
secret association tries to break an interstellar cultural deadlock while
handling a first contact); "The Day of the Star Cities" (** -- later
expanded to "Age of Miracles") (unknown extra-terrestrials build
impregnable 'cities' on Earth, shattering society in the process, the way
we might shatter some anthills in the process of building a bus terminal);
"Ladder in the Sky" (**), under the pseudonym Keith Woodcott (a gutter-
snipe is possessed by a 'demon', as part of a political plot, and then
abandoned to deal with the consequences); "The Altar on Asconel" (** --
later appearing as part of "Interstellar Empire") (Asconel is one of the
few planets which remained civilized after the collapse of the Empire, but
something has mysteriously reduced it to near-barbarism); "Castaways
World" (** -- later expanded to "Polymath") (a shipload of refugees from a
planet whose star went nova are led by a man whose training would have
made him an expert in colonization -- in a couple of decades); and "The
Skynappers" (**) (would-be rebels have found the ultimate computer, but
can't figure out what questions to ask, so they recruit or kidnap some
primitives, including one from Earth). All of these and others are solid
books of their kind, though their kind was nothing special even at the time.
"The Crucible of Time" (**+) is a more recent book, about an intelligent
alien species on a dying planet: The planet's system is travelling
through an overly-dusty region of the galaxy, and its inhabitants must
develop the ability to leave it before they are destroyed. This story of
an alien species' ascent towards technological civilization has much the
same feel as Forward's "Dragon's Egg": It's better written, although the
setting is less exotic and interesting. I thought it ambitious, but not
equal to its scope. John Brunner is also the author of "A Maze of
Stars" (**), for which I didn't much care, and "Muddle Earth", which
I'll read when it comes out in second hand.
%A Brunner, John
%T The Traveller in Black
%T The Long Result
%T Stand on Zanzibar
%T Born Under Mars
%T The Crucible of Time
=============================================================================
The postscripts to Belated Reviews cover authors of earlier decades who
didn't fit into the original format -- whether because the author seemed
an inappropriate subject, or because I was unfamiliar with too much of the
author's work, or whatever -- or sometimes just isolated works of such
authors. The emphasis will continue to be on guiding newer readers
towards books or authors worth trying out, rather than on discussing them
comprehensively or in depth. I'll retain the rating scheme of ****
(recommended), *** (an old favorite that hasn't aged well), ** (a solid
lesser work), and * (nothing special).
-----
Dani Zweig
dani@netcom.com
Roses red and violets blew
and all the sweetest flowres that in the forrest grew -- Edmund Spenser
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