#john-brunner — Public Fediverse posts

@angelastella
#JohnBrunner with Eptification - with a bad result - and #JoeHaldeman with some sort of overlays in #WorldsApart and assorted authors with "memory tapes and of course #TheMatrix "now I do!"

And in a less friendly way #LarryNiven with #Corpsicles and #RichardMorgan with the #DigitallyStoredHumans and #DigitallyFreightedHumans and uploading into a sleeve.

And a bunch more.

#SciFi

"
La boite à livres m’a donné accès à de vieux "J’ai lu" des années 70, de Clifford D. #Simak et #JohnBrunner. C’est de la SF. Et j’adore ce côté délicieusement démodé de ces essais futuristes.

Dans celui que je lis (difficilement), et qui fait que j’en parle en commentaire, c’est Brunner qui imagine une société où tout est interconnecté et traité par les ordinateurs.

Il évoque une société malgré tout fragmenté, et le traducteur utilise le mot « tribalisé ». Les populations se sont tribalisées. Ils ont beau tous être connectés, les groupes humains se sont fragmentés, et se sont tribalisés.
"

via @biggrizzly - #tribalisé

Sense of Wonder vous souhaite une bonne année en relisant Tous à Zanzibar de John Brunner (Prix Hugo 1969) !

https://buff.ly/VzuczgT

#senseofWonder #sciencefiction #JohnBrunner

@mondoweiss

John Brunner wrote about an armament firm talking up dangers and arming all sides.
The #Gottschalks IIRC, in #TheJaggedOrbit

Dystopian? Since you ask, yes, rather.

#SciFi #Dystopian #JohnBrunner

@skinnylatte He was with a lot of other things a marine biologist as far as i can renember. Cordwainer Smith

https://www.cordwainer-smith.com/

#cordwainersmith #johnbrunner #Lem #asimov #ursulakleguin

There's a John Brunner book about this

#sciencefiction #sf #JohnBrunner

CHILDREN OF THE THUNDER (1988)
Acrylic on Watercolor Board - 30" x 20"

A blunter statement on industrialization than my End of Nature personal works, this was painted in the late 80s for a novel set in the “decaying world of the 90s.” 1/2

#sciencefiction #scifi #sff #illustration #johnbrunner @delreybooks

20 books that have had an impact on who you are. One book a day for 20 days. No explanations, no reviews, just book covers (don’t forget the alt text).

Day 1/20

#20books #20books20days #bookstodon #StandOnZanzibar #JohnBrunner

Book Review: John Brunner’s The Squares of the City (1965) https://sciencefictionruminations.com/2024/03/02/book-review-john-brunners-the-squares-of-the-city-1965/
#scifi #sciencefiction #books #BooksWorthReading #JohnBrunner

Now that's a cool re-sale shop find. $1. The Sheep Look Up by John Brunner.
_____________
#JohnBrunner
#TheSheepLookUp

Not the #Cyberpunk proper, being written back in 1975, but fucking close. And still extremely to the point even some fifty years later. It feels so damn contemporary I couldn't believe it had been written so long ago.
(I only checked the publishing date after I finished the book) 😯

#ShockwaveRider #JohnBrunner #ComputerWorm #hacking #dystopia #mastobooks #SciFi #net #hackers
#GeneticEngineering #dystopian #government #deprogramming #FutureShock

Resale shop find. Stand on Zanzibar by John Brunner. $1.
________
#StandOnZanzibar
#JohnBrunner

Currently reading (technically listening). Truly saddening how close this "dystopia" is to reality.

#bookstodon #sciencefiction #scifi #JohnBrunner #TheSheepLookUp #books #novels #reading #audiobooks

I just finished reading (well, listening) Stand on Zanzibar by John Brunner. It won the Hugo Award, and has often been mentioned both by casual readers and by SF authors a must read, so I decided to give it a go.

I didn’t like it very much, but read till the end. Some minor spoilers included.

The Good & The Bad

The world building is pretty good, and the author uses the trick of having whole sections of jumbled up snippets, like zapping through TV channels, so that you get a bunch of advertisement, news reel and so on.

This is of course a common trope (my favourite Shaun of the Dead scenes plays on this) but it allows the writer to just give a ton of depth while avoiding character infodumping. It does not work too well on an audiobook, alas.

The plot lines are much of the same tho. We have multiple things happening, only tangential to each other.

There’s the megacorp that wants to develop something huge in Africa. There’s the afram (sic) manager which has risen quickly in the company ranks using his ethnicity. There’s the super-AI owned by the megacorp which is unable to approve the plans because they’re based on what it thinks are invalid assumptions. There’s the rising power of China with its own super-AI. There’s government-enforce eugenics, genetic manipulation, buying kids and baby farming in underdeveloped countries. The rise of a new power in south-east Asia. There’s the media controlling narrative and people living in their own bubble. There’s the truth-sayers which speak of the dangers of everything and are not censored, but they are basically ignored.

But, again: there’s so much stuff, and so little unity. I am not saying it’s badly written. It’s written perfectly. It’s just that I have not cared for this style since I hit 30.

The awesome

But wait, let’s go back to the worldbulding: it’s a really good world, and it holds together, and it feels very predictive, and modern and speaking a lot about our society.

But it was published in 1968. This means it is closer to World War I than it is to today. It’s a time when computers were in their infancy, and black&white TVs were still outselling the Color ones.

The author hit so many targets that it’s honestly mindblowing. And the writing still feel fresh and not dated at all.

So, I didn’t like this book very much, but I have to give say: maybe read it anyway.

6.5/10

PS

The AI, Shalmaneser, refuses to predict the economic results of the company’s projects in Beninia. I tried asking ChatGPT, and, alas, it also refused. So, mark one more point for the author.

#ai #books #john-brunner #science-fiction

https://riffraff.info/2023/03/mini-review-stand-on-zanzibar/

@evjoymoreno

some recommendations in no particular order:

#NancyKress - Beggars in Spain (Sleepless Trilogy)
#CJCherryh - Cyteen
#JohnScalzi - Old Man's War / Lock In
#JohnBrunner - Sheep Look Up / Stand on Zanzibar / The Shockwave Rider
#LoisMcMasterBujold - Vorkosigan

and my all-time favorite

#TadWilliams - Otherland

@albinokid Oof! hard to winnow it down to even seven but... #TerryPrachett #MarkTwain #StormConstantine #PatCadigan #TanithLee #JohnBrunner #TheodoreSturgeon

Il Come Eravamo del Come Saremo: isole nello spazio 9
di Mauro Antonio Miglieruolo

La Fantascienza come poesia per immagini, puntata numero 58

Un
https://www.labottegadelbarbieri.org/il-come-eravamo-del-come-saremo-isole-nello-spazio-9/
#bottegadelbarbieri #labottegadelbarbieri
#Difuturicen'ètanti #Dossier #EditriceNord #Fantascienzacomepoesiaperimmagini #IlComeEravamodelComeSaremo #IsolenelloSpazio #JohnBrunner #MauroAntonioMiglieruolo #narrativad’anticipazione #spazio #urania

Il Come Eravamo del Come Saremo: Robot 5
di Mauro Antonio Miglieruolo

La Fantascienza come poesia per immagini, puntata numero 52

Testo
https://www.labottegadelbarbieri.org/il-come-eravamo-del-come-saremo-robot-5/
#bottegadelbarbieri #labottegadelbarbieri
#Difuturicen'ètanti #Dossier #EditriceNord #fantascienza #Fantascienzacomepoesia #IlComeEravamodelComeSaremo #immaginidellafantascienza #JohnBrunner #MauroAntonioMiglieruolo #narrativad’anticipazione #robot #TuttiaZanzibar

Book Review: Bedlam Planet, John Brunner (1968)

(Jeff Jones’ cover for the 1968 edition)

3.25/5 (Vaguely Good)

To move past my variegated obsessions regarding William Kotzwinkle’s Doctor Rat (1976) (review + list of imaginary scientific articles), I decided to reread a lesser known John Brunner novel. I cannot pinpoint exactly when I first read Bedlam Plant (1968), other than before I started my site, but it holds up as a moody biological mystery with mythological undertones as colonists confront their deceptive new world.

This isn’t Stand on Zanzibar (1968), Shockwave Rider (1975), The Sheep Look Up (1972), or The Jagged Orbit (1969), but it left me wishing that Brunner applied his immersive near future SF skills to a vast, dark, far future tapestry. Brunner completists and fans of 1960s colonists on strange alien planet SF will not be disappointed—nor will you be blown away.

Far superior to the last John Brunner novel I read!

Analysis/Summary (*spoilers, as always*)

Dennis Malone is an explorer. He was one of the first four members of the expedition to the planet Asgard—“exposing themselves to the new planet to determine its habitability” (10). The men of the group, Dennis and Pyotr Tang-Lin, returned to Asgard with the colonization mission. Disaster strikes as Pyotr Tang-Lin crashes one of the three spaceships into the alien moon preventing Dennis from returning to Earth with any colonists who might be psychologically unsuitable for life on Asgard.

Dennis Malone is psychologically unsuitable for life on Asgard. Isolated and depressed, he spends his days bemoaning his fate. He is possessed by “the presence of the gashed terrible reproving moon” where Pyotr met his fate (5) wishing that he himself “had died on the alien moon” (12). An explorer at heart, he sinks into a morose state, characterized by Parvarti Chandra (one of the leaders of the colony) as a “martyr complex” (17).  He seeks any release from the tedium of establishing the colony. As the colonists are comprised from the specialists of Earth, Malone’s own area of expertise is unneeded.

When a biological disaster–in the form of a mysterious scurvy caused by an illness that modifies the gut’s bacteria–rampages through the colony, Malone might have a use after all! Tai Men, a Chinese medic and biologist, suggests the only answer to the dilemma might be to ingest plants grown in Asgard’s soil: “but when it came to risking the delicate balance of their very bodies on the assurance of someone whose data they could not fully understand, it was different” (31).

When Dennis sets off across Asgard’s landscape to carry out various banal tasks assigned by the colony’s scientists, he accidentally discovers there might be a way out. But by the time he returns to the colony, madness has already descended. Or has it?

Final Thoughts

John Brunner expands on the basic biological mystery besets colonists on alien planet in an intelligent (although not entirely successful) manner. Underpinning the lives of the various colonists, is a mythological substructure based on the cultural memory each diverse colonist brings from Earth. Brunner explores mythological memory and mythological action in various ways. Dennis Malone and Sigrid Kallela, one of the first four explorers who live on the planet, engage leave a “symbolic mark” on Asgard by a passionate/violent coupling (38). In addition, Parvarti wants the colony to “develop their own” festivals derived from the ones of Earth to create a new cultural memory (36). A memory derived from that of Earth but suitable for the new society…

The novel concludes with an excerpt from a much later historical text about the colonists suggests that they all played the role of the planet’s first Gods. This is both good and bad for Brunner’s characterizations and plot. At times the narrative–especially as each character undergoes a culturally unique transformation in terms of their mythological knowledge–reads like Brunner placed sections of the Larousse Encyclopedia of Mythology in a blender. Rather than focusing on individual powerful images, the story occasionally reads as an information dump in the form of a New Wave-esque descent into the metaphysical. As each colonist stands in for the accompanying cultural heritage, the diverse cast (Indian, Arab, African-American, Swedish, Chinese, Japanese, Greek, etc.) take on more archetypal (a clichéd) characterizations. Regardless, Brunner should be applauded for the women leaders and scientists, races, and religions represented by the crew, flawed although the representations might be.

Bedlam Planet attempts to break free from the straight-forward humankind settles alien planet template by emphasizing the psychological effects of colonists unable to return to Earth. The novel feels rushed although well-intentioned. If only similar ideas surrounding far future colonization were explored in a more refined and immersive experience à la The Jagged Orbit (1969) or Stand on Zanzibar (1968).

For more book reviews consult the INDEX

(Mike Rose’s cover for the 1973 edition)

(Uncredited cover for the 1975 edition)

(Darrell K. Sweet’s cover for the 1982 edition)

#1960s #bookReviews2 #colonialism #colonization #johnBrunner #paperbacks #pulp #sciFi #scienceFiction #spaceships #technology

Book Review: Total Eclipse, John Brunner (1974)

(John Cayea’s cover for the 1974 edition)

3/5 (Average)

Over the years I’ve deluded myself into becoming a John Brunner completest — around twenty-five of his novels line my shelves and I’ve read most of them over the years.  At his best he’s without question one of the great masters of the genre — Stand on Zanzibar (1968), The Sheep Look Up (1972), etc. are evidence of this.  However, in-between his social science fiction masterpieces are a plethora of unsatisfying attempts at traditionalist space opera.  In these works Brunner never fully leaves his pulp roots although he occasionally tries to inject a dose of hard science, (pseudo) intellectualism, and social commentary.

Total Eclipse (1974) fits this mold.  A group of scientists attempt to figure out the mystery of a highly advanced race which has apparently, died out. Character interactions are painfully silly along the “Oh heroic main character, you’re a genius let me jump into your bed” sort of lines.  The entire cast, despite the plethora of female scientists and racial diversity (Arabs, Africans, etc), are entirely interchangeable and bland.  After the mystery is solved Brunner desperately attempts to make the work have a relevant social message.  Also, apparently dissatisfied with his earlier cavalcade of undeviating naivete, melodrama, and endless faux-biological/linguistic/archaeological technobabble, Brunner tags on a dark ending out of touch with the rest of the work.  

For Brunner completests and fans of 70s Hard Science fiction only.

Brief Plot Summary (*some spoilers*)

In the  future, mankind has pulled together the necessary resources for a single space sparing vessel, the Stellaris.  The powers that be on Earth are increasingly beset by a populace against “wasting” money on space travel due to the crisises of growing overpopulation, pollution, etc.  As a result, it’s increasingly uncertain how much longer the space program will be funded.  Also, various conspiracy theories develop as to the real reasons for the Stellaris‘ treks into space.

Our paleolinguist main character Ian Macauly — cut from the nerdy, socially inept, scientist mold — is summoned by the group of scientists who have taken up residence on the planet Sigma Draconis III.  This planet was the home planet of a fascinating race of crab-like aliens which have long since disappeared.  The crab creatures communicated by manipulating electric fields, evolved incredibly fast (from primitivism to incredibly sophisticated technology in 3,000 years), appear to make mistakes only once before never repeating them, and left behind a vast assortment of intriguing, but hard to interpret, artifacts (including a moon with a massive telescope).  Ian is summoned to solve the alien language with the hope that answer for their disappearance will be solved.

Due to the conspiracies surrounding the program, a particularly egregious/paranoid South American official is assigned to interrogate all the occupants of the archaeological camp.  The first third of the book serves as an attempt to info dump the reader under the guise by means of the official’s interrogations.  Of course, Ian eventually makes him see the light and suddenly is considered a hero.  A female scientist fawns over him and desperately wants to get into his bed.  Of course, Ian’s anti-social nature provides a few giggles and laughs in between the “you’re a brilliant man tell me more of your brilliant theories and brilliant brilliance” pat yourself on the back moments.

The rest of the book follows Ian’s attempts to unravel the mystery of the crab creatures.  He eventually comes up with a plan to make crab suit (!) to simulate the creature’s movements, way of visualizing the world, and even the psychological impact of the creature’s evolving sexual stages.  This incredibly hokey contraption allows Ian approach a solution.  But, will the Stellaris even return or have the powers on Earth forgotten them.

(Chris Foss’ cover for the 1975 edition)

(Philippe Bouchet’s cover for the 1991 French edition)

For more reviews consult the INDEX

#1970s #bookReviews2 #british #hardScienceFiction #johnBrunner #sciFi #scienceFiction #spaceOpera #spaceships #technology

Book Review: Meeting at Infinity, John Brunner (1961)

A wonderful creepy cover by John Schoenherr

4/5 (Good)

Readers from the first days of my blog might recall my rather dismissive comment in my review of John Brunner’s abysmal Born under Mars (1967),

“I have still yet to find in Brunner’s early pulp(ish) novels any solid indication of his future brilliance that manifests itself so poignantly in his great novels of the late 60s and 70s (Stand on Zanzibar, Shockwave Rider, The Sheep Look Up, and to a lesser degree The Jagged Orbit).”

Well, I was wrong — Meeting at Infinity (1961) is a top notch effort which can be read both as a fast paced adventure story or a scathing attack on pure capitalism.  Likewise, John Brunner successfully turns the cliché of the noble primitive society–prevalent in so many works of the 50s and 60s–completely on its head (a theme he returns to in his masterpiece Stand on Zanzibar, 1969).

Plot Summary (rather minimal spoilers)

The Market looms above a city of twelve million still partially paralyzed by the devastation caused by the White Death. This horrific disease came was introduced through the indiscriminate use of the Tacket Principle.  This Principle allows passage between an infinity of parallel worlds (at various stages of development).  Because of the contamination brought from another parallel world, The Directors, a group of merchant princes, franchise out the use of the Tacket Principle to trusted individuals.  These merchant princes journey to various parallel worlds in search of technology and food (to import back to the home world)  The entire world survives ONLY by taking advantage of various peoples they encounter in parallel worlds.  The city itself is dominated by various factions who survive by collecting information for various merchant princes who are constantly fighting other merchant princes.

The plot follows a jumble of characters who slowly uncover information about the world of Akkilmar.  Akkilmar, a seemingly primitive peaceful altruistic society, supplies technology to Ahmed Lynken, the merchant prince who first “discovered” them.  The famous physician, Jome Kenard, purchased a piece of equipment from Ahmed Lynken (from Akkilmar) to treat a serious burn patient (Alyn Vage) who develops peculiar skills despite being completely bandaged.  I best not reveal the rest!

My Thoughts

John Brunner adeptly weaves the various narrative threads together (although initially they seem impossibly disparate).  I’m still not exactly sure of the point of the bizarre prologue.  By far the most interesting concept developed is the purely capitalistic state which utilizes colonialism in its most basic form in order to survive which is, subjected in turn to similar impulses under a drastically different guise.  Don’t expect well rounded characters.  But, there’s great action and the plot unfolds nicely!  There are also some harrowing images.  Tacket, the creator of the Tacket Principle, is completely vilified by the populace since his discovery resulted in the White Death.  Despite the fact that the limited use of his principle is the ONLY way which society is maintained, various cults have emerged in opposition to the merchant princes.  These cultists pound nails into the mouthes of wooden carvings of Tacket!

John Brunner, within the constraints of early 60s pulp science fiction, produces a remarkable (forgotten) little gem.

More Book Reviews

#bookReviews2 #capitalism #colonialism #johnBrunner #scienceFiction #technology