Rating: 
Summary: 4/5ths mad collage ; 1/5 clunky normality
Review: The more abstract collage-like bits, along with the small "slice-of-life" vignettes, are brilliant. Absolute poetry. Here, Brunner absolutely suceeded in breaking free from his conventional sf style. But then there's there's a boring, almost useless (and conventional) central plot running through the whole thing. My guess is Brunner wasn't confident enough about his new and more abstract style to write a complete non-novel, but he wrote 4/5ths of a great one. Ergo: 8.
Rating: 
Summary: Too Many Rats in a Cage
Review: There was a brief period from the late sixties to the early seventies that saw a veritable explosion of new ideas and new methods of painting those ideas on the reader's consciousness within the SF field. This book is one of the finer examples of both of those items, winning (quite appropriately) the Hugo award for 1969 (though I thought that Samuel Delany's Nova was just as deserving that year). Stylistically, this book is a mosaic, a patchwork of cross-cutting images, scenes, advertisements, headlines, interviews, scientific paper excerpts, startlingly different from almost everything else published up till then. It takes a little bit to get used to this style, to let the world picture build into something coherent in your mind. But once you do, it lends a verisimilitude and a sense of frenetic pace that is perfectly suited to this dystopian vision of a world staggering under severe over-population pressure, driven by mega-corporations and military influence, forced genetic regulation, socialism and severe pressure to conform. From the Mr. and Mrs. Everyman that has become a daily part of everyone's daily video viewing to the 'muckers' so prophetically envisioned (just see today's headlines), this is an expose of just what happens when there really are too many people crowded onto too small a planet. Some portions of this are a little dated, mainly in those areas where Brunner used straight-line extrapolations of trends that were present at the time of writing, such as the liquid-nitrogen cooled mega-computer (rather than any vision of today's internet) or the portrayed 'integration' of blacks in the society. But these items do not seriously detract from the power and depth of the themes that tackled here. Characterization is a little thin. Other than Norman and Donald Hogan, most of the characters are pretty flimsy, or they are an obvious preaching board for Brunner's thematic comments (Chad Mulligan). But as this is an idea book, not a book of character or strong action, this is a minor fault. This book was probably the archetype for today's cyberpunk sub-genre, written with power and conceptual brilliance, one of Brunner's best, standing alongside his The Whole Man, The Sheep Look Up, and The Jagged Orbit as prime examples of just what science fiction is all about. A dark vision of which all too much is still very relevant in today's world.
Rating:
Summary: Book remains relevant
Review: This book started me on my science fiction quest in medical school in 1972. I ca still recall phrases like "skanalyze my name", and the sense of the human population ever increasing into the area and ocean around Zanzibar. I thought of the word "berserker" immediately this week when the news came from that infamous Colorado High School. Together with "A Clockwork Orange",this book seems to be more and more prophetic. I was also very sorry to read about John Brunner's death in 1995.
Rating: 
Summary: Mixed feelings - impressive but dated
Review: This novel is a vision of the future - and a cold and depressing one it is, with severe overcrowding, a war with China, economic hardships, racial and religious intolerance, etc. However, it is engrossing and parts are absolutely brilliant (i.e. those parts with the Chad Mulligan character). You are drawn into the imagery - immersed in Brunner's vision of the future. However..... Am I the only one that thinks this novel is severely dated? It is a product of Cold War hysteria. One of the main plot lines involves a "backwards" country announcing a new scientific (genetic) breakthrough that sends the western world into a panic of rioting, suicides, etc. This seems highly unlikely to me - such a breakthrough would rather be met with skepticism ("How could such a country do something we couldn't"), or impatience for western scientists to figure out how they did it. But widepread dispair? I think not. There are other reflections of this Cold War inferiority complex. The highlight of this book is its ability to immerse you in the world of the future. Unfortunately, it means that in the first 300 pages or so, little happens. This would not be irritating if it wasn't so repetitious and random. I was so frustrated that I almost put it down without finishing (something I've only ever done once before). The final 300 pages are quite a bit better, but is mostly following standard-type plotlines, and so cannot make up for the repitition and irritation of the first half. Finally, a pet peeve. What possesses writers to automatically equate "Christianity" with "Roman Catholicism"? In a book that is so careful to talk about different religions, this is very irritating. And what possesses science fiction writers (Brunner included) to consider Christianity inherently evil but all other religions noble and uplifting? To sum up - I can see why some people in the '60s would have thought this was an important work (I was born in the '70s, so perhaps I have not appreciated the subtleties). However, the human race has not followed Brunner's path and now this book is just dreary, depressing, and out of date.
Rating:
Summary: Are you felling depressed by this? Well, you should!
Review: When I first opened this book and tried to read it I started to panic:I thought that I had completely forgot English!Nothing made sense and first chapters were in complete chaos. I continued reading and slowly,pieces started falling into right places.One month and 650 pages later I can honestly say that this non-novel is among the best SF-books I ever read!It is a neurotic and hysterical picture of neurotic and hysterical society.Reader is bombarded with the descriptions of TV-commercials and sociological theories,casual conversations and cynical quotations, scientific facts and musical videos.There are dozens of characters, but basically none of them matters because they are only specimens representing their reality.Their world is mad but unfortunately their world is our,too.Brunner didn't decribe anything that didn't allready existed in his world (in late 1960-es):USA being the world policeman, supercomputers, big corporations, experimentation with drugs and sex and so on.But this is also a incredible picture of society into which that world evolved.Read this book but beware:that man knew things about us that we constantly try to ignore!
Rating:
Summary: An Eternal Instant
Review: While some aspects of this novel are dated and a bit annoying, John Brunner delivered an eerily prescient and haunting epic on the human condition back in 1968. This is mostly thought of as a story about overpopulation, but that is actually just a background setting that weighs down upon the bizarre near-future society Brunner has created. Social pressures of population have led to twisted morals and ethics. Discrimination and xenophobia have been mechanized with eugenics legislation, people have become over-reliant on the cold logic of supercomputers rather than human reasoning, corporations are buying and controlling entire nations, and crime, terrorism, and social sabotage have become endemic. Back in 1968 these may have seemed like creative aspects of Brunner's imagination, but they are becoming disturbingly familiar over the intervening decades. Brunner's writing style here can be a real trip too, with a montage of styles incorporating quick cuts between the viewpoints of different characters, along with constructed snippets resembling newspaper reports, government documents, advertisements, and even folktales from Brunner's imaginary world. This style of writing is becoming rather dated, and the book gets off to a slow start as you try to digest the writing methods. Also, the ending is a bit anti-climactic with the long and extensive build-up fizzling out into an off-screen denouement. But in the end this novel has the power to implant rather disturbing thoughts in the back of your mind about the near-future course of humanity. [~doomsdayer520~]
|
