John Brunner

I just finished reading Stand on Zanzibar (1968) by John Brunner. To save you looking it up, the title comes from the fact that at the time of writing, the World’s population would have fitted, shoulder to shoulder, on the Isle of Wight. By 2010, when the novel is set, it would just fit onto the island of Zanzibar. In fact Brunner was about right, estimating the population at about 7 billion.

These days you don’t hear much about Brunner; he died, aged 61, of a stroke while attending a SciFi convention in Glasgow. The SciFi criticism I have been reading doesn’t mention him and Brian Aldiss’ (1986) history of the genre is only mildly enthusiastic about his work, but then Aldiss is less than flattering about Day of the Triffids (“cosy disasters”), so his opinion isn’t that reliable. Anyway, I find this situation sad because some of Brunner’s work is brilliant [Note 1], especially the four novels he wrote between 1968 and 1976, which, according to Wikipedia, are known as the Club of Rome quartet.

I first read Stand on Zanzibar when, as a teenager in the mid 1970s, I was Hoovering up SciFi. Like his near contemporary Mike Moorcock (my hero), Brunner was one of the New Wave writers who created proto-cyberpunk novels written in a non-linear, some would say “post-modern” style. Again Wikipedia attributes this style to imitation of John Dos Passos USA trilogy (which I haven’t read, yet), but you could equally cite Alain Robbe-Grillet (who I also haven’t read). But who cares, as Borges says, writers create their own precursors (see The Borges Matrix).

Brunner’s 2010 is nothing like 2010. For one thing he foresees a great deal more racial tension and overt prejudice than actually exists today. For example, in The Jagged Orbit (1969) the USA is segregated into all black and all white regions that eye one another with suspicion. A vision that, presumably, only the Tea Party would embrace. Equally, in The Sheep Look Up (1972) his predictions of ecological disaster are a bit premature [Note 2]. But as Neils Bohr is reputed to have said “Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future.” [Note 3]. But if you are looking for predictions that come true, read The Shockwave Rider (1975). Here Brunner’s protagonist is a kind of anarchist hacker and fugitive who continually uses what is effectively the internet to reinvent himself. The novel also includes computer viruses. Of course Brunner was not the first to predict the rise of the net. Many people attribute this to Vannevar Bush in his article “As We May Think” (1945). But one could as easily cite E.M. Forster’s The Machine Stops (1909) or, in particular, Paul Valery’s essay “La conquête de l’ubiquité” (1928) which is well worth a read.

Although they are are uncanny, perhaps Brunner’s predictions are less important than his style and his concerns. John Brunner was a socialist, a fact that has led one commentator on a blog to write:

Unfortunately, Brunner, while a gifted writer, was also a raving socialist, and couldn’t keep his politics separate from his fiction. It made for a bitter brew in his novels.

He was an active supporter of CND and, apparently, even wrote them a song. As another raving socialist, I admire Brunner’s insertion of politics into his fiction. Indeed, what marks out all of the New Wave writers such as Moorcock, Ballard or Norman Spinrad, is that their work is political, in contrast to both the neutral pap that came before (and since), or indeed the raving right wing efforts of the likes of Heinlein and Jerry Pournelle (co-inventors of Reagan’s Star Wars initiative). Indeed, Heinlein serves a target for mockery in both Spinrad’s The Iron Dream (1972) and (as far as I’m concerned) Verhoven’s film of Starship Troopers. Whilst I admire the work of William Gibson, who incorrectly gets the credit for cyberspace, his work is largely neutral in political terms, except for its oblique satire on the excesses of Capitalism. Brunner and the other New Wavers, on the other hand, embraced the zeitgeist of the 1960s (and Moorcock’s editorship of New Worlds) to come out fighting.

And indeed there were battles. Spinrad’s Bug Jack Barron (1969), serialised in New Worlds, provoked questions in the House of Lords and a ban from the shelves of W.H. Smith. His Iron Dream was also banned in Germany, but this largely for the depiction on its cover of Uncle Adolf Hitler riding a motorbike. Similarly the Sage of Shepperton’s (1970) The Atrocity Exhibition was, according to Wikipedia; “the subject of an obscenity trial, and in the United States, publisher Doubleday destroyed almost the entire print run before it was distributed”. This is perhaps unsurprising given the chapter “Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan”.

John Brunner’s work wasn’t, as far as I know, banned, but it should have been. Because his dystopias, whilst they are not here yet, are surely on their way. We can, as of 2013, only just fit on Zanzibar.

Coda

I could have stopped there, but feel the need to mention a couple of Brunner’s other novels that are worth a read. The Dramaturges of Yan (1972) offers an interesting analysis of the relationship between the individual and society by positing a world in which an entire race can combine into one individual and do a lot of stupid things (I referred to it in my PhD thesis). This book and also Total Eclipse (1974) may be of interest to archaeologists in that they both use xenoarchaeology as their basic theme. Indeed Total Eclipse (which in some respects resembles Lem’s Solaris 1970[1961] or Fiasco 1987) is an archetype of people doing the archaeology of aliens, a theme that comes up again and again; c.f. Alistair Reynolds (2000) Revelation Space or numerous episodes of Star Trek TNG (Picard being an amateur archaeologist). Not to mention (but I will) Dr Who, in particular The Daemons (1971 my all time favourite) and The Stones of Blood (1978). I should write a book about it…

…I am.

Notes

Note 1: Brunner is often described as prolific, which means that as well as good novels he also wrote crap, including early stuff for the pulps.

Note 2: Since writing this I have reread The Sheep Look Up and yes its predictions are premature, but in many ways not far off. As usual Brunner seems to have been pretty well informed, e.g. about the dangers of PCBs in the water supply.

Note 3: The attribution of this quote to Neils Bohr is disputed

References

Aldiss, Brian 1986 Trillion Year Spree Gollanz

Ballard J.G. 1970 The Atrocity Exhibition Cape

Brunner, John 1968 Stand on Zanzibar Doubleday

Brunner, John 1969 The Jagged Orbit Ace

Brunner, John 1972 The Sheep Look Up Harper and Row

Brunner, John 1972 The Dramaturges of Yan New English Library

Brunner, John 1975 The Shockwave Rider Harper and Row

Brunner, John 1974 Total Eclipse Doubleday

Forster, E.M 1909 The Machine Stops Penguin

Lem, Stanislaw 1970[1961] Solaris Walker

Lem, Stanislaw 1987 Fiasco Harcourt Brace Jovanovich

Reynolds, Alistair 2000 Revelation Space Gollanz

Spinrad, Norman 1972 The Iron Dream Avon

Spinrad, Norman 1969 Bug Jack Barron Walker

Valery, Paul 1928 La conquête de l’ubiquity