John Brunner was a British science fiction writer who had a fairly successful career that probably peaked in the late 1960s with the publication of the Hugo-winning novel, Stand on Zanzibar. I was an avid Brunner fan at the time it was published, having discovered his work as a teenager, and have read and re-read many of his novels.
The BBC has published an appreciation of Brunner and his work as part of a new series about books that predicted the future.
He fed his powerful imagination – of which vivid nightmares seem to have been a lifelong manifestation – with journals such as New Society and The New Scientist, and if some of his predictions now read like wacky sci-fi clichés, others have proven spot on. For instance, in his 1962 novella Listen! The Stars! he conjured up the ‘stardropper’, an addictive portable-media-player-like gizmo. In 1972, he published one of his most pessimistic novels, The Sheep Look Up, which prophesies a future blighted by extreme pollution and environmental catastrophe. And his 1975 novel, The Shockwave Rider, created a computer hacker hero before the world knew what one was. It also envisaged the emergence of computer viruses, something that early computer scientists dismissed as impossible. He even coined the use of the word ‘worm’ to describe them.
Brunner is a good choice for that; while he may have got the technological details wrong (the "internet" of The Shockwave Rider is based on touch-tone phone codes), he nailed the social and cultural aspects (hackers, for example).
Stand on Zanzibar remains his crowning achievement and is still readable and relevant today.
Though it divided critics on publication, Zanzibar has come to be regarded as a classic of New Wave sci-fi, better known for its style than its content. This seems a pity. When an excerpt appeared in New Worlds magazine in November 1967, an editorial claimed that it was the first novel in its field to create, in every detail, “a possible society of the future”.There’s irony in some of what Brunner got wrong. He assumed, for instance, that the US would have at last figured out how to provide adequate, inexpensive medical care for all by 2010. Other inaccuracies are sci-fi staples – guns that fire lightning bolts; deep-sea mining camps; a Moon base. And yet, in ways minor and major, that ‘future society’ nevertheless seems rather familiar today. For example, it features an organisation very similar to the European Union; it casts China as America’s greatest rival; its phones have connections to a Wikipedia-style encyclopaedia; people casually pop Xanax-style ‘tranks’; documents are run off on laser printers; and Detroit has become a shuttered ghost town and incubator of a new kind of music oddly similar to the actual Detroit techno movement of the 1990s.
The ebook of Stand on Zanzibar is on sale now, and I cannot recommend it highly enough. I guarantee that you will never forget Shalmaneser, the intelligent and possibly self-aware computer: "Every now and again there passes through his circuits a pulse which carries the cybernetic equivalent of the phrase, “Christ, what an imagination I’ve got.“
No comments:
Post a Comment