In Praise of The Shockwave Rider

John Brunner was a British science fiction writer who, in the 1960s and 1970s, wrote some of the most powerful and prophetic novels the genre has produced. Although he didn't always get the technological details right, he consistently nailed the social effects of technology. His best books, like Stand on Zanzibar and The Shockwave Rider are still readable, unlike many more well-known novels from that period. 

In Factor Daily, Gautham Shenoy has written an appreciation of The Shockwave Rider, a book that I've read three times, and would happily read again if I had the time. I recommend reading both it and novel, as well as Brunner's other major works. 

Over the course of a writing career spanning a little over forty years, John Brunner wrote almost sixty novels. Of these, four books considered to be his best, stand out for their prescience. Each one is set roughly about fifty years into the future at the time of their writing. Each one deals with a specific problem that he thought the world would face: The Hugo Award-winning 1968 novel Stand on Zanzibar (that dealt with an overpopulated world), 1969’s The Jagged Orbit (interracial tensions), 1972’s The Sheep Look Up (ecological disaster), and last but not the least 1975’s The Shockwave Rider about identity, freedom and the power of controlling information in a world grappling with rapid change and ‘information overload’.

Today, The Shockwave Rider is hardly discussed and chiefly remembered for two things. Firstly for Brunner’s coinage of the term ‘worm’ to describe a program that propagates itself through a network, and for describing a computer virus before there were viruses. Secondly, for being one of the precursors of the cyberpunk genre. As per the author Bruce Bethke, who coined the term ‘cyberpunk’, Brunner’s Shockwave Rider, Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange, and even Alfred Bester’s The Stars My Destination all were important antecedents of the thing that became known as cyberpunk fiction.

The Shockwave Rider deserves more. For it is amongst the few science fiction books of yore that you could lay your hands on, read and feel like it was written about what you, we, are going through on an everyday basis. Prescient? Yes. Definitely one of the more disturbing tomorrows (our today) as imagined in the past, with its depiction of a world immersed in e-communication, topped up with surveillance, where control of information and data is tantamount – and essential – to controlling people and societies.