The Shockwave Rider

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Brunner won plenty of plaudits. If the likes of Martin Amis were snooty about him (Amis declared The Sheep Look Up "a massive, chaotic, jangling hotchpotch"), plenty of others praised his creativity, clever plotting and philosophical acuity. He won, too, almost every sci-fi prize worth winning, including the Hugo Award for best science-fiction novel, which had never before gone to a Brit. Born in 1934 in the Thames riverside hamlet of Preston Crowmarsh, Oxfordshire, John Kilian Houston Brunner was just six years old when he discovered science fiction. As Professor Jad Smith relates in his comprehensive study, John Brunner, with World War Two raging, the family moved to Herefordshire, where Brunner’s father intended to support the war effort by running a farm. In the chaos of the move, his grandfather’s rare 1898 edition of HG Wells’ The War of the Worlds ended up shelved in the playroom. Brunner devoured it and from that moment, as he would later explain in a short autobiography, was imprinted by the genre “as permanently as one of Konrad Lorenz’s geese”. Ultimately, it is Brunner’s process that makes Zanzibar’s crystal-ball-gazing predictions so enduringly fascinating: he arrived at them via a combination of careful observation, listening and reading – that and a zany imagination. He was looking to the future, but it was only by being fully immersed in the present that he was able to see it with such unnerving clarity, effectively turning his typewriter into a time machine. He died in 1995, appropriately enough while attending a science-fiction conference.

Shockwave Rider | Scape One Shockwave Rider | Scape One

This is indeed the father and mother of a tapeworm. It’s of a type known as parthenogenetic. If you’re acquainted with contemporary data-processing jargon, you’ll have noticed how much use it makes of terminology derived from the study of living animals. And with reason. Not for nothing is a tapeworm called a tapeworm. It can be made to breed. 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”. Precipice turns out to be a Utopian community of a few thousand people. The nearest comparison would be an agrarian, cottage industry community designed by William Morris. Precipice is also the home of Hearing Aid, an anonymous telephone confession service accessible to anyone in the country. Hearing Aid is also known as the "Ten Nines", after the phone number used to call it: 999-999-9999. People call the service, a human operator answers, and they simply talk while the operator listens. Some rant, others seek sympathy, still others commit suicide while on the phone. Hearing Aid's promise is that nobody else, not even the government, will hear the call. The only response Hearing Aid gives to a caller is "Only I heard that, I hope it helped." In the early years of the 21st century, computers dominate society. Everyone, from the super-rich to the barely scraping by* lives their entire life plugged into the global datanet via their veephones. Data savvy professionals can earn enormous amounts, but secure permanent jobs are a thing of the past, with people adapting to 'the plug in lifestyle,' living from short term contract to short term contract and never staying in one place long enough to make lasting relationships. Targeting your enemies with malicious computer programs (called 'worms' here) is an everyday bit of vindictiveness, and Government computers in'Canaveral' monitor every aspect of online existence. The pressure of life at this pace, and awareness of this panopticon, puts people under massive mental pressure. Physical and emotional burnout are common, and the aging survivors of the last century seethe with resentment at the lifestyles of children who have grown up in the world they created. Meanwhile, in Silicon Valley deluded utopians are funding unethical, not to say plain stupid, experiments in posthumanism to 'win the brain race.' It is also one of the first books to ever describe the internet (although the book calls it the data-net) as something prevalent in everyone's everyday life. If you read it when it came out, you might have trouble understanding why the threat to destroy the data-net is taken as almost the ultimate threat. Today, it is pretty easy to realize the economic and other disasters that would happen.Por el tinte del libro, en este caso me atrevo a aventurar que al escritor en realidad el cómo se la suda, y sólo le interesa describir los efectos sociológicos. Pues muy bien, con las diferencias obvias entre realidad y premonición, el tío lo clava. Esa falsa creencia de creer que tenemos acceso a TODA la información existente es muy real; que la existencia de un Nicholas Halflinger en nuestro mundo y sus actos nos sacara de ese estado anestesiado, visto lo visto, no creo que sucediera. Pero es bonito imaginarlo. Brunner had an uneasy relationship with British new wave writers, who often considered him too American in his settings and themes. He attempted to shift to a more mainstream readership in the early 1980s, without success. Before his death, most of his books had fallen out of print. Brunner accused publishers of a conspiracy against him, although he was difficult to deal with (his wife had handled his publishing relations before she died).[2] El libro, a pesar de estar escrito a retazos, no se hace difícil de comprender. Además, la acción sigue un ritmo creciente digna de cualquier película palomitera de calidad que lo hace superentretenido. The novel was written shortly after two pivotal events of the 1970s, the resignation of Richard Nixon and the overthrow of the Chilean President Salvador Allende, which are cited in the novel as examples, in Nixon's case, of a failed attempt by organised crime to suborn the Presidency, and in the second, of the consequences of working against multinational commercial interests. That we are a civilized species. Therefore none shall henceforth gain an illicit advantage by reason of the fact we together know more than one of us can know.

Shockwave Rider - 1482 Words | 123 Help Me Shockwave Rider - 1482 Words | 123 Help Me

jaimebabb on Five SF Visions of Society Free From Rules, Regulations, or Effective Government 2 hours ago But it’s full of details—like the game of “fencing,” like an electronic form of Go. Or there are the identities he has taken: “lifestyle consultant, utopia designer, priest, data retrieval specialist”—that last is like being a systems analyst, but they didn’t have the name when the book was written. They barely had computers. But it has social networks, sort of. It has future slang that works. Every time I read it different bits of it have become relevant. (It’s wrong about “veephones” though. There’s a piece of tech we actually have and that nobody wants.) Deus Est Machina: Well, the machine isn't exactly God, but it does see all and the ending is, without giving it away, interesting.Spider Robinson gave the novel a mixed review, saying that while "the book reads well..., [i]ndividual sections are often brilliant, [and] the message is incisive and timely", that "as a story it limps" and that many characters, including the main antagonists, "are cut from cardboard". [6] The New York Times reviewer Gerald Jonas was even more critical, saying that while Brunner was attempting to write "slice-of-life" fiction about a future society, the result of his arbitrary choices about social details is that "the entire fictional edifice collapses like a house of cards." [7] Themes [ edit ]

The Shockwave Rider (Literature) - TV Tropes The Shockwave Rider (Literature) - TV Tropes

Brunner extrapolated forward the drug culture of the seventies—not the pot and acid culture, the “mother’s little helper” culture, where everyone is taking tranquilizers and uppers to deal with their work. He took the trend of interchangeable suburbs and extended it out to make everywhere interchangeable because people move about so much and don’t have roots, the “plug in lifestyle.”“Bounce or break,” and a lot of them do overload and break. You can bet on “Delphi boards” that predict coming social trends, and everyone does, even though the government are fixing the odds. Brunner did well in exploring the question of what this increasing power of connectivity, the creating, recording and sharing of personal information, might do. His vision did not fully realized, he did not seem to have anticipated that corporations might make more use of this information than government (but aren’t we govern by corporations today anyways?) His solution is drastic. You will hear the message 'Intercom Connected' to confirm connection, the red and blue LEDs will flash once periodically while the devices remain paired. There's far more to it than this, and though the ending wraps things up a little too neatly (I'm afraid the bad guys would almost certainly have won), this remains a brilliant net-based SF novel.

by John Brunner

Brunner's hero is a young man who is bent on changing the world. He struggles to evade the officials and uses all skills available to him, whether inherent skills or technological ones, to the best of his ability, to put an end to the misuse of power that is so much a part of his world which involves the entity of the world wide datanet. John Brunner was born in Preston Crowmarsh, near Wallingford in Oxfordshire, and went to school at St Andrew's Prep School, Pangbourne, then to Cheltenham College. He wrote his first novel, Galactic Storm, at 17, and published it under the pen-name Gill Hunt, but he did not start writing full-time until 1958. He served as an officer in the Royal Air Force from 1953 to 1955, and married Marjorie Rosamond Sauer on 12 July 1958

The Shockwave Rider by John Brunner | Goodreads

K H Brunner, Henry Crosstrees Jr, Gill Hunt (with Dennis Hughes and E C Tubb), John Loxmith, Trevor Staines, Keith Woodcott James Davis Nicoll on Five SF Visions of Society Free From Rules, Regulations, or Effective Government 3 hours agoi was really charmed by the idea that after the arms race and brain race there'd come a time when there was the wisdom race, and that all these countries are fighting to tune their populace for wisdom but in the dumbest most data-driven hyperrational way possible, which obviously doesn't work. i think there's a kernel of optimism that wisdom is something our societies will intentionally pitch for, and perhaps a hint of pessimism that we'd have the hubris to believe it is achievable in a measurable, technological way.