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Club of Rome Quartet
The Jagged Orbit
Matthew Flamen, the last of the networks' spoolpigeons, is desperate for a big story. He needs it to keep his audience and his job. And there is no shortage of possibilities: the Gottschalk cartel is fomenting trouble among the knees in order to sell their latest armaments to the blanks; which ties in nicely with the fact that something big is brewing with the X Patriots; and it looks as if the inconceivable is about to happen and that one of Britain's most dangerous revolutionaries is going to be given a visa to enter America. And then there's the story that just falls into his lap. The one that suggests that the respected Director of the New York State Mental Hospital is a charlatan... John Brunner's brilliant and scathing vision of a society disintegrating under the impact of violence, drugs, high-level corruption and the casual institutionalization of the 'insane' was a powerful and important statement in 1969. It remains a compelling and chilling tour de force three decades on.
400 pages, Paperback
First published February 1, 1969
70 people are currently reading
1410 people want to read
About the author
John Brunner
572 books480 followersJohn 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
At the beginning of his writing career Brunner wrote conventional space opera pulp science fiction. Brunner later began to experiment with the novel form. His 1968 novel "Stand on Zanzibar" exploits the fragmented organizational style John Dos Passos invented for his USA trilogy, but updates it in terms of the theory of media popularised by Marshall McLuhan.
"The Jagged Orbit" (1969) is set in a United States dominated by weapons proliferation and interracial violence, and has 100 numbered chapters varying in length from a single syllable to several pages in length. "The Sheep Look Up" (1972) depicts ecological catastrophe in America. Brunner is credited with coining the term "worm" and predicting the emergence of computer viruses in his 1975 novel "The Shockwave Rider", in which he used the term to describe software which reproduces itself across a computer network. Together with "Stand on Zanzibar", these novels have been called the "Club of Rome Quartet", named after the Club of Rome whose 1972 report The Limits to Growth warned of the dire effects of overpopulation.
Brunner's pen names include K. H. Brunner, Gill Hunt, John Loxmith, Trevor Staines, Ellis Quick, Henry Crosstrees Jr., and Keith Woodcott.
In addition to his fiction, Brunner wrote poetry and many unpaid articles in a variety of publications, particularly fanzines, but also 13 letters to the New Scientist and an article about the educational relevance of science fiction in Physics Education. Brunner was an active member of the organisation Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and wrote the words to "The H-Bomb's Thunder", which was sung on the Aldermaston Marches.
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]
Brunner's health began to decline in the 1980s and worsened with the death of his wife in 1986. He remarried, to Li Yi Tan, on 27 September 1991. He died of a heart attack in Glasgow on 25 August 1995, while attending the World Science Fiction Convention there
aka
K H Brunner, Henry Crosstrees Jr, Gill Hunt (with Dennis Hughes and E C Tubb), John Loxmith, Trevor Staines, Keith Woodcott
Winner of the ESFS Awards in 1980 as "Best Author" and 1n 1984 as "Novelist"..
At the beginning of his writing career Brunner wrote conventional space opera pulp science fiction. Brunner later began to experiment with the novel form. His 1968 novel "Stand on Zanzibar" exploits the fragmented organizational style John Dos Passos invented for his USA trilogy, but updates it in terms of the theory of media popularised by Marshall McLuhan.
"The Jagged Orbit" (1969) is set in a United States dominated by weapons proliferation and interracial violence, and has 100 numbered chapters varying in length from a single syllable to several pages in length. "The Sheep Look Up" (1972) depicts ecological catastrophe in America. Brunner is credited with coining the term "worm" and predicting the emergence of computer viruses in his 1975 novel "The Shockwave Rider", in which he used the term to describe software which reproduces itself across a computer network. Together with "Stand on Zanzibar", these novels have been called the "Club of Rome Quartet", named after the Club of Rome whose 1972 report The Limits to Growth warned of the dire effects of overpopulation.
Brunner's pen names include K. H. Brunner, Gill Hunt, John Loxmith, Trevor Staines, Ellis Quick, Henry Crosstrees Jr., and Keith Woodcott.
In addition to his fiction, Brunner wrote poetry and many unpaid articles in a variety of publications, particularly fanzines, but also 13 letters to the New Scientist and an article about the educational relevance of science fiction in Physics Education. Brunner was an active member of the organisation Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and wrote the words to "The H-Bomb's Thunder", which was sung on the Aldermaston Marches.
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]
Brunner's health began to decline in the 1980s and worsened with the death of his wife in 1986. He remarried, to Li Yi Tan, on 27 September 1991. He died of a heart attack in Glasgow on 25 August 1995, while attending the World Science Fiction Convention there
aka
K H Brunner, Henry Crosstrees Jr, Gill Hunt (with Dennis Hughes and E C Tubb), John Loxmith, Trevor Staines, Keith Woodcott
Winner of the ESFS Awards in 1980 as "Best Author" and 1n 1984 as "Novelist"..
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 76 reviews
February 3, 2025
[Original review, Dec 26 2008]
A reasonably good near-future dystopia, where racial violence, stoked by unscrupulous weapons manufacturers, is gradually causing society to come apart at the seams. Some of the ideas are nice, but it is starting to feel rather dated, and the ending is an unsatisfying deus ex machina. If you want to read one of his books, I recommend Stand on Zanzibar, which is similar but better done.
___________________________
[Update, May 31 2022]
Sorry John Brunner, I take it all back. Any chance you could arrange that deus ex machina?
___________________________
[Update, Feb 3 2025]
Okay, okay, I said I was wrong. For some reason, I didn't find plausible your projection of a near-future US dominated by an unholy alliance of corrupt politicians, an out-of-control tech sector, and a cohort of South African race scientists busily converting the American population to their way of looking at things. Can't quite reconstruct why.
A reasonably good near-future dystopia, where racial violence, stoked by unscrupulous weapons manufacturers, is gradually causing society to come apart at the seams. Some of the ideas are nice, but it is starting to feel rather dated, and the ending is an unsatisfying deus ex machina. If you want to read one of his books, I recommend Stand on Zanzibar, which is similar but better done.
___________________________
[Update, May 31 2022]
Sorry John Brunner, I take it all back. Any chance you could arrange that deus ex machina?
___________________________
[Update, Feb 3 2025]
Okay, okay, I said I was wrong. For some reason, I didn't find plausible your projection of a near-future US dominated by an unholy alliance of corrupt politicians, an out-of-control tech sector, and a cohort of South African race scientists busily converting the American population to their way of looking at things. Can't quite reconstruct why.
February 1, 2010
5.0 stars. Not quite as good as Brunner's "Stand on Zanzibar" which I think is one of the best SF novels of all time. This is still head and shoulders above most of the SF out there. A superb novel. Where Zanzibar dealt with overpopulation, this novel deals with the propblem of racial disunity and the fragmantation of individuals to such a degree that people become almost totally isolated from each other emotionally. Highly recommended.
Winner: Britsh Science Fiction Award for Best Novel (1971)
Nominee: Nebula Award for Best Science Fiction Novel (1970)
Winner: Britsh Science Fiction Award for Best Novel (1971)
Nominee: Nebula Award for Best Science Fiction Novel (1970)
March 19, 2012
Originally published on my blog here in October 1998.
Brunner's four most famous novels take an aspect of today's society and exaggerate it, to create dystopias which are compelling because of the way they relate to our fears for the future. Stand on Zanzibar, the best known, is about the population explosion; The Sheep Look Up environmental pollution; Shockwave Rider computers and privacy; and Jagged Orbit race relations. They all use a similar technique, with news items interrupting the narrative and with a strong involvement from whistle-blowing academics. The Sheep Look Up and Jagged Orbit even share a character, the idiot US president Prexy, whom I have been told is an exaggerated picture of Ronald Reagan, then governor of California.
Of the four, Jagged Orbit perhaps works least well. It doesn't match the power of Stand on Zanzibar, the chilling realism of The Sheep Look Up or the narrative interest of The Shockwave Rider. It has the interesting difference that as well as including fictional news stories from 2018, when it is set, it has chapters which are reprints of real news stories from 1968, concerning race riots and what might be done about them. Brunner's idea is that nothing is done to help the disadvantaged non-white population of America's innner cities, which leads to increasing militancy and eventually an arms race as arms dealers begin to exploit the market potential provided by individuals terrified by the threat of the other side of the racial divide.
The reason that Jagged Orbit is less successful is that the plot depends on the introduction of two far fetched elements, which are not given the meticulous background of the rest of the novel. These are a woman whose mind interferes with television broadcasts and a time-travelling computer. Neither would be impossible in a science-fiction novel, but the lack of justification given them compared to everything else is a big problem, making them appear to be random devices introduced only to provide an ending to an out-of-hand plot line.
Despite the careless plot, Jagged Orbit is worth reading for is mainly convincing background and its spirited attack on racism.
Brunner's four most famous novels take an aspect of today's society and exaggerate it, to create dystopias which are compelling because of the way they relate to our fears for the future. Stand on Zanzibar, the best known, is about the population explosion; The Sheep Look Up environmental pollution; Shockwave Rider computers and privacy; and Jagged Orbit race relations. They all use a similar technique, with news items interrupting the narrative and with a strong involvement from whistle-blowing academics. The Sheep Look Up and Jagged Orbit even share a character, the idiot US president Prexy, whom I have been told is an exaggerated picture of Ronald Reagan, then governor of California.
Of the four, Jagged Orbit perhaps works least well. It doesn't match the power of Stand on Zanzibar, the chilling realism of The Sheep Look Up or the narrative interest of The Shockwave Rider. It has the interesting difference that as well as including fictional news stories from 2018, when it is set, it has chapters which are reprints of real news stories from 1968, concerning race riots and what might be done about them. Brunner's idea is that nothing is done to help the disadvantaged non-white population of America's innner cities, which leads to increasing militancy and eventually an arms race as arms dealers begin to exploit the market potential provided by individuals terrified by the threat of the other side of the racial divide.
The reason that Jagged Orbit is less successful is that the plot depends on the introduction of two far fetched elements, which are not given the meticulous background of the rest of the novel. These are a woman whose mind interferes with television broadcasts and a time-travelling computer. Neither would be impossible in a science-fiction novel, but the lack of justification given them compared to everything else is a big problem, making them appear to be random devices introduced only to provide an ending to an out-of-hand plot line.
Despite the careless plot, Jagged Orbit is worth reading for is mainly convincing background and its spirited attack on racism.
Read
April 27, 2022DNF... I tried getting into it. There are some good reviews out there. But I just couldn't get into it. I felt lost. Had no clue what they were talking about.
April 18, 2019
This novel was written close on the heels of Brunner’s acknowledged masterpiece, Stand on Zanzibar, and is one of his so-called Club of Rome novels, along with SoZ, Shockwave Rider, and Sheep Look Up, all dealing with the neo-Malthusian concerns cited in the Club of Rome’s Limits to Growth (1972). While Stand on Zanzibar was a satch-rich outpouring of narrative bits comprising fictional (and some real) media/news, music, essays, computer output, and an omniscient narrator, The Jagged Orbit is a slimmed down version of the same techniques, with an emphasis on a narrative that rapidly shifts from character to character.
The chief premises on which this extrapolative novel is based are the racial schism in the United States and a concomitant upswing in the manufacture and wide-spread sale of personal firearms. The germ for this extrapolation are found in the multiple stand-alone fragments of news articles from England’s Guardian newspaper, circa 1968, which chronicle the summer riots in major US cities as well as the weaponized responses that are proposed by US military and professional think tankers. The arms sales/distribution in Jagged Orbit has become almost evalangelized, as agents of the arms company (the former mafioso crime family, the Gottschalks, gone very legit) go from door to door to spread the good word about affordable protection.
The novel begins with the concept of individual isolationism, every individual lost to himself, afraid of intimacy and even casual relationships with others, a fearful atrophying of all social interactivity. While the generation of the us vs. them apartheid-style racism of black (“knees” or “knee blanks” from Afrikaans nei blanque) vs. white is a straight-line extension from the headlines, the origin of this essential aspect of the novel is not entirely clear... As typically understood, having a single Other against one’s community serves to strengthen bonds within the community, but in the world of Jagged Orbit, there is internal dissolution as well. Fear is rampant, paranoiac, able to dissolve people’s ability to develop and maintain intra-community bonds, marriages, or even friendships.
The plot is sufficiently clever, with an AI-enhanced robot altering what seems an inevitable path to racial/genocidal annihilation. The characters are mostly mouthpieces, but their roles are clear and each is sufficiently “real” within his/her orbit in the novel, interacting with plausibility. Brunner’s purpose is not to hint at the world behind carefully delineated characters in a literary-fictional fashion (a la Atwood and Handmaid’s Tale) but to build first in our mind a plausible dystopian future—an entire world gone mad—and for this he effectively uses broad, theatrical strokes.
The chief premises on which this extrapolative novel is based are the racial schism in the United States and a concomitant upswing in the manufacture and wide-spread sale of personal firearms. The germ for this extrapolation are found in the multiple stand-alone fragments of news articles from England’s Guardian newspaper, circa 1968, which chronicle the summer riots in major US cities as well as the weaponized responses that are proposed by US military and professional think tankers. The arms sales/distribution in Jagged Orbit has become almost evalangelized, as agents of the arms company (the former mafioso crime family, the Gottschalks, gone very legit) go from door to door to spread the good word about affordable protection.
The novel begins with the concept of individual isolationism, every individual lost to himself, afraid of intimacy and even casual relationships with others, a fearful atrophying of all social interactivity. While the generation of the us vs. them apartheid-style racism of black (“knees” or “knee blanks” from Afrikaans nei blanque) vs. white is a straight-line extension from the headlines, the origin of this essential aspect of the novel is not entirely clear... As typically understood, having a single Other against one’s community serves to strengthen bonds within the community, but in the world of Jagged Orbit, there is internal dissolution as well. Fear is rampant, paranoiac, able to dissolve people’s ability to develop and maintain intra-community bonds, marriages, or even friendships.
The plot is sufficiently clever, with an AI-enhanced robot altering what seems an inevitable path to racial/genocidal annihilation. The characters are mostly mouthpieces, but their roles are clear and each is sufficiently “real” within his/her orbit in the novel, interacting with plausibility. Brunner’s purpose is not to hint at the world behind carefully delineated characters in a literary-fictional fashion (a la Atwood and Handmaid’s Tale) but to build first in our mind a plausible dystopian future—an entire world gone mad—and for this he effectively uses broad, theatrical strokes.
June 4, 2023
First published in 1969, The Jagged Orbit is set in 2013. It's always slightly surreal to read scifi set in a future that is now the past, but I'm getting used to it. The novel deals with a remarkable number of 21st century American problems, among them loss of social trust, racism, mass shootings, waiting for tech support to fix your work computer, neo-Puritans, journalism being overtaken by advertising, militarisation of the police, and awkward zoom calls. The linguistic worldbuilding is pretty dense at first and takes some getting used to, e.g knees & blanks = black & white people. Once you become familiar with it, though, it adds a lot to the atmosphere.
I did not find The Jagged Orbit as powerful Brunner's The Sheep Look Up or Stand on Zanzibar, but like both of them it manages a large cast of characters (almost all men) very deftly. Brunner is notably excellent at this and I missed it in The Shockwave Rider, which only had one main protagonist. A wider range of characters makes for more interesting examination of big themes, I tend to find. The variety of settings was also notable - they include a psychiatric hospital, upmarket and downmarket New York homes, several workplaces, a presidential press conference, and the worst party in a flat with no toilet. Brunner employs his trick of including extended quotations and little editorial comments as mini-chapters, which I enjoyed so much in Stand on Zanzibar.
The plot is complicated, so I won't attempt to summarise it. The scenes of Lyla the Pythoness tripping are a highlight, as they are intensely vivid and strange. I also liked the ending, which is surprisingly hopeful and full of irony.
The Jagged Orbit definitely feels like a 1960s, sliding into the cynical 1970s, type of novel. It is densely imagined and cleverly plotted, with strident points to make on many different topics. As ever, Brunner is not very interested in female characters, although his handling of race has aged better than I expected. I think The Jagged Orbit remains involving and thought-provoking to read ten years after it is set, providing insight into how social concerns both have and haven't changed in the last 54 years.
I did not find The Jagged Orbit as powerful Brunner's The Sheep Look Up or Stand on Zanzibar, but like both of them it manages a large cast of characters (almost all men) very deftly. Brunner is notably excellent at this and I missed it in The Shockwave Rider, which only had one main protagonist. A wider range of characters makes for more interesting examination of big themes, I tend to find. The variety of settings was also notable - they include a psychiatric hospital, upmarket and downmarket New York homes, several workplaces, a presidential press conference, and the worst party in a flat with no toilet. Brunner employs his trick of including extended quotations and little editorial comments as mini-chapters, which I enjoyed so much in Stand on Zanzibar.
The plot is complicated, so I won't attempt to summarise it. The scenes of Lyla the Pythoness tripping are a highlight, as they are intensely vivid and strange. I also liked the ending, which is surprisingly hopeful and full of irony.
The Jagged Orbit definitely feels like a 1960s, sliding into the cynical 1970s, type of novel. It is densely imagined and cleverly plotted, with strident points to make on many different topics. As ever, Brunner is not very interested in female characters, although his handling of race has aged better than I expected. I think The Jagged Orbit remains involving and thought-provoking to read ten years after it is set, providing insight into how social concerns both have and haven't changed in the last 54 years.
October 9, 2023
I just didn't get this one. Brunner stories are obtuse but my autistic brain usually catches on sooner or later. Not with this one. I was lost all the way through.
May 2, 2017
The Jagged Orbit is another in Brunner's series of novels about the dysfunction of contemporary Western societies and is as true today (if not more true) as when written. This novel is about race relations, alienation, gun control, computerization, AI, political mental health diagnoses...
Though there are many passages or chapters which evoke concerns about Trumpism and creeping fascism, the novel overall did not really work for me. This structure is confused/weird as if the author is playing with new fictional modes, but has not learned to use them appropriately. There is a linear story of some interest. But, it is interrupted by 'philosophical asides which take reader's effort and even research to understand their pertinence to the story and characters. I suspect many would stop reading from this confusion and required effort. I only finished it because Brunner's concerns/prophecies about society that are also my concerns about society today.
--Full of great quotes for the politically minded
--Progressives take note!
7 of 10 stars for Brunners's accurate predictions for our future
Though there are many passages or chapters which evoke concerns about Trumpism and creeping fascism, the novel overall did not really work for me. This structure is confused/weird as if the author is playing with new fictional modes, but has not learned to use them appropriately. There is a linear story of some interest. But, it is interrupted by 'philosophical asides which take reader's effort and even research to understand their pertinence to the story and characters. I suspect many would stop reading from this confusion and required effort. I only finished it because Brunner's concerns/prophecies about society that are also my concerns about society today.
--Full of great quotes for the politically minded
--Progressives take note!
7 of 10 stars for Brunners's accurate predictions for our future
August 13, 2007
This is a prototype cyberpunk science fiction novel set in a future where racial relations have totally descended into open warfare. Due to rampant paranoia advanced personal armament sales are the most lucrative business on the planet. In addition to racial relations, western religious traditions are breaking down and people are turning to idolatry. And there are drugs that can make some people psychic.
There was a plot, but it was hard to follow, and I have a hard time recalling it.
This book wasn't very good. John Brunner is very inconsistent, even within some of his own books. He has a lot of good ideas, but he does not end up developing them very well in his plots. This book was ok for a mindless read.
I read this book because I really like The Shockwave Rider by the same author.
There was a plot, but it was hard to follow, and I have a hard time recalling it.
This book wasn't very good. John Brunner is very inconsistent, even within some of his own books. He has a lot of good ideas, but he does not end up developing them very well in his plots. This book was ok for a mindless read.
I read this book because I really like The Shockwave Rider by the same author.
April 29, 2009
Brunner dreamed up the most horrible things he could, and off course most of them came true. The race war in America didn’t quite play out like this, but with militarization of the police, psychiatric care by meds, edited news, snipers paralyzing cities, cities turned to war zones, over reliance on technology, private gun dealers engineering revolutions, are hardly the territory of science fiction, let alone fiction any longer. This book reads a little like the b-sides of Stand on Zanzibar, but is still worth considering with Brunner’s main quartet (Stand on Zanzibar, Sheep Looked Up, and Shockwave Rider).
November 10, 2019
VOTO: 3,8
Romanzo che sembra essere stato scritto l'altro ieri.
I temi trattati e dai quali si dipana la narrazione, oltre ad essere spinosi, sono più che mai attuali.
Altro libro che fa riflettere, e che difficilmente rimarrà indifferente al lettore.
Romanzo che sembra essere stato scritto l'altro ieri.
I temi trattati e dai quali si dipana la narrazione, oltre ad essere spinosi, sono più che mai attuali.
Altro libro che fa riflettere, e che difficilmente rimarrà indifferente al lettore.
September 18, 2022
En un mundo donde la gente no cree en su propio juicio si este no viene acompañado de una segunda opinión, preferiblemente mecánica, las fake news -como toda noticia- son capitalizadas y funcionan para maximizar la agitación civil que desemboca en el clasismo y el racismo descomunal, con el único propósito de alimentar la rueda económica nutrida por la familia corporativa Gottschalk, a cargo del monopolio de armas. En «Órbita inestable», las masas de audiencias son controladas, todo tipo de datos es extrapolado en ordenadores, el director de una clínica psiquiátrica puede volverse un megalómano, la dependencia ante las drogas es desmedida y algunas personas desarrollan una intuición empática que las conduce por el camino de la predestinación. Igual que un profeta, Brunner mueve los hilos de una trama que acorta las distancias entre el año en que fue escrita (1969) y nuestros días.
February 10, 2013
Set in 2014, The Jagged Orbit is a tale of our over-armed, over-medicated and Apartheid ridden future. As seen from 1968, Brunner sees America divided into "knee" and "kneeblank" enclaves. (The terms will be explained in the book, but you'll get it after a bit). Those who are not finding themselves committed to the Ginsburg psychiatric hospital for medical care designed to emotionally distance them from everything live in constant fear of riots and 'knee' enclave invasions. Their fears are stoked by the Gottchalks, an arms cartel who sells weapons to everyone and anyone - even if it's over the corpse of a dead boyfriend. Like Brunner's classic Stand on Zanzibar, he follows a series of characters through this world - a "spoolpidgeon" who's the last remaining investigative journalist, his 'knee' counter part, a pythoness who brings visions of the future through drug ingestion, and a man with an uncanny ability with computers - until their plotlines intersect. Unlike Stand or The Sheep Look Up his focus is very diffuse. He tackles race, the gun culture and pop psychiatry but doesn't really develop them equally until the very end. This feels like Brunner working to get in as many topics as possible before some imagined end. But what does remain is a book which oddly echoes our own world. The discussions of race - us against them - and cultivation of xenophobia for the purposes of marketing, especially for the purposes of marketing guns - still resonate today. If you can find this book, do read it. It's a fascinating view of how much, and how little, we have changed in the last forty some years.
May 10, 2014
I was briefly disconcerted when I came across a glossy full-paged ad for cigarettes in the middle of the book. At first I thought this was a commentary by Brunner about corporate power in his dystopian vision of 2014. Then I realised that it was just normal for the early 1970s (when my edition was printed)
April 1, 2014
review of
John Brunner's The Jagged Orbit
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - March 31, 2014
[sidenote: the actual edition I read is Ace's paperback version also from 1969 & NOT the hardcover bookclub edition - nonetheless, the cover's almost identical & the publisher & date are the same so it's not worth the trouble to create a new edition here - the paperback page count is 397 (not including the ads in the back).]
ALSO, 'of course', my review is "5727 characters" too long so the full review is here: https://www.goodreads.com/story/show/...
Whew! Another beaut from Brunner. In his intro to a 2003 edition of Brunner's 1972 The Sheep Look Up, author David Brin calls Sheep a "self-preventing prophes[y]" wch I think is an excellent way of looking at The Jagged Orbit (1969) too. As w/ Sheep, Brunner apparently bases his pessimistic projections on relevant mass media articles - in Jagged's case, ones written about racial unrest in the US in 1968. Brunner interweaves a pessimistic prediction of racism escalated, psychotherapy used as a mass control tool, & arms sales feeding off of carefully cultivated fear.
Regarding the latter, I think of when the G20 was in Pittsburgh in 2009. Some elements of the mass media spread a lurid image of any & all protesters as armed terrorists. (See my parody of this, made jointly w/ Rich Pell, entitled "TV 'News' Commits Suicide" here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hU-_a... ) One friend of mine told me that people where he worked were gathering their armaments, fortifying their homes (that were nowhere near where the protests were going to be), & even planning to flee to even more distant outskirts in precaution. All of this fear was completely unjustified. W/in a wk after the G20 ended there was a giant arms dealer event at the local convention center. Gee, I wonder if that was just coincidence (I'm dripping w/ sarcasm here in case the reader didn't notice).
An example of Brunner's imagined 2014 weaponry is something that can:
"(a) Energetic: in actual field trials a skilled operator reduced a sample group of 25 Reference Accomodation Blocks (12 stories reinforced concrete) to Unihabitable condition in 3.3 minutes, 12 being demolished and the remainder set ablaze." - p 347
Nice, huh?! During the 2009 G20 the City of Pittsburgh wasted huge amts of money on buying 2 sound cannons for dispelling protesters w/ the threat of inducing deafness. Pittsburgh 'needed' those like a hole in the head. Literally (& figuratively).
"SEVENTY-ONE
REPRINTED FROM THE LONDON OBSERVER OF 10TH MARCH 1968
"Colour—The Age-Old Conflict by Colin Legun
"Having recently spent several months in the United States, I came away sharing the view of those Americans who think that, short of two miracles—and early end to the Vietnam war, and a vast commitment to the public expenditure on the home front—the US is on the point of moving into a period of harsh repression by whites of blacks that could shake its political system to its very foundations."
[..]
"Voluntary separation—even separation into different bits of territory—is not always necessarily retrogressive. Although it is suspect to liberal minds—because of the horrors of twentieth-century racialism—liberals were the champions of all the nineteenth-century separatists who wanted independence from the Habsburg and Ottoman Empires and still today react sympathetically to the claims of Scots or of Welsh." - pp 244-245
I find the last-quoted paragraph a little misleading in its comparisons. The Scots & the Welsh (& the unmentioned Irish - who might've been 'too hot to handle' by the OBSERVER at the time), at least as I understand it, were on their own turf when they were colonized by the British. As such, they just wanted the colonialists to release them from their imperialistic hold. 'Black' separatists, on the other hand, were mostly forcibly brought to the US as slaves, they're not even on the land they were kidnapped from - any separatism means creating a new homeland rather than a reversion to an older one. Nonetheless, Black Panther claims that police in their neighborhoods are basically just occupying colonial troops strike me as accurate.
White Supremacists were/are big promoters of separatism. At least one such group proposed making the Northwest coast of the US be for 'whites' only - w/ Florida being for 'blacks' only. Such an idea is a throwback to the 'separate but equal' Jim Crow laws that certainly didn't insure any equality at all. It's all too easy to imagine white supremacists taking advantage of this geographical 'caging' by bombing black-Florida if such a separation were ever to take place.
"SEVENTY-NINE
REPRINTED FROM THE MANCHESTER GUARDIAN OF 13TH MARCH 1968
"Seven burned to death
"Mr David Lumsden, aged 26, stood outside his burning home in Toronto and screamed at passing motorists to stop and help as his wife and sex children were burned to death. All the drivers ignored his calls." - p 294
"EIGHTY
ASSUMPTION CONCERNING THE FOREGOING MADE FOR THE PURPOSES OF THIS STORY
"It would have been even worse if they'd stopped to watch the fun." - p 295
Coincidentally, as I was reading this, I was installing an exhibit on race for one of my jobs & spending some time w/ a person in the process of having a mental breakdown - both very relevant to this bk. But what made The Jagged Orbit particularly poignant to read now is that it's set in 2014, the actual yr in wch I've read it.
The back cover blurbs are by authors Philip K. Dick, Robert Bloch, & Thomas M. Disch. Dick goes so far as to say that "It is an superb work, plotted with amazing skill, and showing a magnetic artistry much above anything Brunner has previously shown." Disch then ups the ante w/ "Enough new ideas to fill a novel each by Dick, Farmer and Pohl." High praise indeed. It appears that this was a breakthru work for Brunner.
The dedication inside reads:
"FOR CHIP
"—the only person I know who really can fly a jagged orbit." - p 5
I assume/deduce that the "CHIP" in question is the great Samuel R. Delaney - gay, 'black', SF (& otherwise) writer whose work I have profound respect for. Why do I put the word "black" in single quotation marks? B/c I am so damned sick of the destructiveness of the simple-minded divisiveness of humans classified into 'black' & 'white', etc, etc.. Why not African-Americans then? B/c I'm also sick of humans categorized in terms of so-called (ancestral) origin. People ask me: 'Where is your family from? What nationality are they?' & I reply: 'I'm a BalTimOrean.' In other words, I'm from where I was born - not from some nation I may've never even been to. Some people claim that all humans originated in Africa & spread from there - are those who ended up in 'America' all African-Americans then? I prefer to think of people as individuals, not as representatives of some dubiously united 'ethnicity'. I certainly don't represent all so-called 'white' people, why shd I think that any 'black' person wd represent all so-called 'blacks'?!
Chapter ONE, entitled "PUT YOURSELF IN MY PLACE", sets a mildly experimental formal tone by consisting of only "I —" followed by Chapter TWO's "-solationism" on the verso. 1st person singular in isolation: this appears to set the mood for a critique of people living in so much fear of each other that no solidarity is likely or easy.
As w/ most novels about the future (now, for me, the present) there's lingo used extrapolated from the time of writing: "Meanwhile, continuing: something big brewing among the X Patriots. The routine reading carried him straight back to the Gottschalks and the superficial verdict that they were once more fomenting discontent among knee extremists to ensure good sales for their latest product among frightened blanks." (pp 12-13) Think "Malcolm X" in connection w/ "the X Patriots".
&, of course, along w/ the lingo there're the prophesies of technology: "They hadn't had a vuset in the apt before—only an ancient non-holographic TV which offered nothing more interesting than the three surviving 2-D satellite transmissions insisted on by the PCC. Since those were beamed primarily at India, Africa and Latin America, and she and Dan spoke neither Hindi, Swahili, nor more than a smattering of Spanish, they had seldom bothered to switch on unless they were orbiting." (p 16)
"Flamen's ingratiating voice said, "In this world which is so often terrifying, aren't you envious of the security people feel when they've installed Guardian traps at their doors and windows? You can't buy better, and you'd be a fool to buy anything less good."
"He vanished. A tall scowling kneeblank marched forward in his place, and before Lyla had time to react—she was still not awake enough to have convinced herself that the three-dimensional full-color image was going to stay buried in the screen—spiked metal bands had clamped on him at neck-, waist-, and knee-height. Blood began to ooze from the points where the cruel metal prongs had sunk in. He looked briefly bewildered, then sunk unconscious.
""Guardian!" sang an eldritch castrato voice. "Guar—dee—ann!"" - pp 17-18
"She moved to the door and began to strain against the handle of the winch to lift clear the hundred-kilo deadfall block that closed it against intruders overnight.
""Put your yash on," Dan said, stepping into a pair of green breeches and bleting them tight around his waist.
""Hell, I'm only going to the comweb!"
""Put it on, I said. You're insured for a quarter-million tealeaves and it says in the policy that you have to."" - p 19
There we have the technology, the paranoia, & the lingo all neatly rolled in one. My own prediction is that capitalism is aiming toward a society in wch people own as little as possible & rent as much as possible. Streaming is a big step in this direction. That seems to be the case in Brunner's 2014: ""But you're supposed to do duty to the Lar first, aren't you?" / "We only have it on seven-day appro," (p 18) "["]Got anything less revealing?" / "I don't think so. All my February clothes have expired["]." (p 19) "replacing the Lar in its niche, distantly aware that if she had indeed thrown it away there would have been a hell of a fight with Dan. The seven-day appro was up tomorrow and if they couldn't return it they would be billed two thousand tealeaves." (pp 151-152)
Brunner foresees junk mail w/ the greatest imagination. Junk Mail, Spam E-Mails, & Telemarketers have been among the banes of my existence. ""Practically all satches, same as usual. I do hate saturation mail! It clogs the comweb same as garbage does the drains, and I swear ninety percent of it goes straight into the drains without being read. . . .["]" / "She pantomimed tearing them across, but they were reinforced against that; they could only be torn along the line which would liberate the chemicals powering their in-built speakers. Satch mailing campaigns were too expensive to let illiterates escape." (p 27)
"Meantime, Dan had ripped along the sealing strip of the one from Lares & Penates Inc., and at once the room was full of a familiar high thin voice.
""You can't afford to be without a cult tailored to your private needs in this age of the individual. Consult Lares & Penates for the finest specialized—"
"It took him that long to locate the power-capsule driving the speaker and break it between finger and thumb. Promptly, he dropped the envelope with a yelp, shaking his hand.
""It burned me! That's a new one! They must have got wise to people cracking the capsules."" - p 28
For my own modest take on one aspect of our increasing branding as consumer-slaves, witness my "North Deface" movie here: http://youtu.be/r8Dre9tTEyE
& The Jagged Orbit anticipates The Sheep Look Up as self-preventing prophesy in glimpses of environmental concerns: "Humidity index in New York in excess of previous high for the current date, a factor ascribed by officials to the effect of the city's five and a half million air-conditioners. The insurrection probability index slipping ahead of schedule into what is nicknamed "the sweaty season downturn"" (p 31)
One of the main characters is a "spoolpigeon", an exposé TV show host. The network he works for is called Holocosmic: "if you dig into the private lives of the Holocosmic directorate you'd come up with material for another Hundred and Twenty Days without the need to plagiarize" (p 46) That's the Marquis de Sade's One Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom being referenced. & this spoolpigeon, hypothetically an investigative reporter watchdog guarding society from corruption & hypocrisy is that to a small extent - but using Manufactured Consent means (to paraphrase Noam Chomsky) to create the damning 'evidence':
""Very well then. Let's find out what stock we have available for Uys. I don't have to ask about Mayor Black; he's vain, and we have tape on him we could lasso the moon with." Flamen moved to a computer on the wall at right angles to the first one.
"More or less what I thought," he muttered when the data were screened in response to his question. "Practically nothing! Black-and-white 2-D material and that's it. Well, we can make do with that. This is a recent one, comparatively speaking." The screen blurred, cleared, showed Uys coming down the steps from a plane door, presumably at home in South Africa, being greeted by his family and gesturing away a group of reporters.
""Let's have color . . . holographic depth . . . yes, that's better . . . good . . . we can abstract from that and blend it with Mayor Black and let's see now . . . American location and b.g., better have some macoots . . . Ah, that's not bad for a start, is it?"" - pp 186-187
"He struck some codes on the keyboard. "Voices—we're bound to have something on tape, I guess, even for Uys, and even if we haven't the machines will fake a South African accent. Characteristic phrase-weighting—let's spice it with a few choice Afrikaner slogans . . . And here we go."" - p 187
Now, apartheid, the racist legally imposed separatism in South Africa was in full force in 1969 when The Jagged Orbit was published. As such, it's no wonder that one of the villains here is an Afrikaner, one of the 'whites' who maintains, enforces, & benefits from South African racism. I'd like to hope that such self-preventing prophesy on the part of creative anti-racists was one of the factors that led to the downfall of apartheid in 1994. Good riddance.
I'm sure that Brunner had fun envisaging the fashion 45 yrs in the future but, alas, such extravagances are few & far in between in the actual 2014: "Conroy hesitated, looking over the array of students and taking especial note of the girls. About a quarter of them were in street yashes, like Alice who had just spoken; the remainder wore a fantastic galaxy of costumes ranging from a height-of-last-year-fashion oversuit with inflated bosom and buttocks to a waist-length orange wig and a pair of shabby Nix." (p 58)
In Brunner's 2014, racism is an undiluted or even more intensified version of what he saw in 1968. 'Black' & 'white' people seen together are at risk just for the association. Racist profiling by the police is the norm. &, alas, racist 'white' cops have far from disappeared in the actual 2014. Look at the case of the police beating the innocent Jordan Miles in Pittsburgh & getting away w/ it. &, of course, similar instances are abundant. Perhaps the main difference between 2014 & 1968 is that at least Miles cd get a civil suit settlement of $119,000 even tho the cops went free on the "excessive force" charges. Anyone who's seen pictures of Miles's face after the cops beat him will know that excessive force was used - beating a person's face until it's swollen almost beyond recognition is hardly 'necessary' force - esp considering that the person being beaten was innocent in the 1st place. On the brighter side, 'blacks' & 'whites' seen together these days is considerably less likely to elicit a massive racist outburst than it was 45 yrs ago.
""What thin partitions sense from thought divide," she murmured as she came abreast of the watchful police at the head of the escalator.
""Talking to yourself, hm?" said one of them with a harsh laugh. "Watch it, darl, or you'll be booked for a one-way ride to the Ginsberg!"
""Here comes a knee," said one of his companions. "Let's work him over, huh? We didn't get anyone yet today, but there's always a chance. You! You kneeblank there!"
"On the firm ground, Lyla turned to look, and yes it was Harry Madison they'd chosen to drag aside and search: five tall policemen so armored and masked that one could not have told whether they themselves were light- or dark-skinned, with helmets and body-shields and pistols and lasers and gas-grenades. But there was no future in arguing. It would only make things worse if she said she and Madison were together." - pp 228-229
Harry Madison, perhaps the most sympathetic character in the novel, is a "kneeblank", a 'black' soldier who was put in the "Ginsberg" mental institution & kept there apparently overlong for unclear reasons. Why did Brunner call it the "Ginsberg"? What doing so evokes for me is Allen Ginsberg's poem "Kaddish" in wch he expresses his responses to his mother's 'schizophrenia' & its broader implications.
"What did they put you in there for, anyway—if you don't mind my asking?"
""For too many questions," Madison said. "That kind of question you just asked. They put a gun in my hand and said go kill that naked savage with a stone spear, he's the enemy, and I said why is he the enemy and they said because he's been got at by communists and I said does he even have a word in his language for 'communism' and they said if you don't kill him you'll be under arrest. So they arrested me. I went on asking questions and I never got an answer, and I didn't feel inclined to stop until I did. So, they discharged me and put me in the Ginsberg["]" - pp 241-242
For the complete review, go here: https://www.goodreads.com/story/show/...
John Brunner's The Jagged Orbit
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - March 31, 2014
[sidenote: the actual edition I read is Ace's paperback version also from 1969 & NOT the hardcover bookclub edition - nonetheless, the cover's almost identical & the publisher & date are the same so it's not worth the trouble to create a new edition here - the paperback page count is 397 (not including the ads in the back).]
ALSO, 'of course', my review is "5727 characters" too long so the full review is here: https://www.goodreads.com/story/show/...
Whew! Another beaut from Brunner. In his intro to a 2003 edition of Brunner's 1972 The Sheep Look Up, author David Brin calls Sheep a "self-preventing prophes[y]" wch I think is an excellent way of looking at The Jagged Orbit (1969) too. As w/ Sheep, Brunner apparently bases his pessimistic projections on relevant mass media articles - in Jagged's case, ones written about racial unrest in the US in 1968. Brunner interweaves a pessimistic prediction of racism escalated, psychotherapy used as a mass control tool, & arms sales feeding off of carefully cultivated fear.
Regarding the latter, I think of when the G20 was in Pittsburgh in 2009. Some elements of the mass media spread a lurid image of any & all protesters as armed terrorists. (See my parody of this, made jointly w/ Rich Pell, entitled "TV 'News' Commits Suicide" here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hU-_a... ) One friend of mine told me that people where he worked were gathering their armaments, fortifying their homes (that were nowhere near where the protests were going to be), & even planning to flee to even more distant outskirts in precaution. All of this fear was completely unjustified. W/in a wk after the G20 ended there was a giant arms dealer event at the local convention center. Gee, I wonder if that was just coincidence (I'm dripping w/ sarcasm here in case the reader didn't notice).
An example of Brunner's imagined 2014 weaponry is something that can:
"(a) Energetic: in actual field trials a skilled operator reduced a sample group of 25 Reference Accomodation Blocks (12 stories reinforced concrete) to Unihabitable condition in 3.3 minutes, 12 being demolished and the remainder set ablaze." - p 347
Nice, huh?! During the 2009 G20 the City of Pittsburgh wasted huge amts of money on buying 2 sound cannons for dispelling protesters w/ the threat of inducing deafness. Pittsburgh 'needed' those like a hole in the head. Literally (& figuratively).
"SEVENTY-ONE
REPRINTED FROM THE LONDON OBSERVER OF 10TH MARCH 1968
"Colour—The Age-Old Conflict by Colin Legun
"Having recently spent several months in the United States, I came away sharing the view of those Americans who think that, short of two miracles—and early end to the Vietnam war, and a vast commitment to the public expenditure on the home front—the US is on the point of moving into a period of harsh repression by whites of blacks that could shake its political system to its very foundations."
[..]
"Voluntary separation—even separation into different bits of territory—is not always necessarily retrogressive. Although it is suspect to liberal minds—because of the horrors of twentieth-century racialism—liberals were the champions of all the nineteenth-century separatists who wanted independence from the Habsburg and Ottoman Empires and still today react sympathetically to the claims of Scots or of Welsh." - pp 244-245
I find the last-quoted paragraph a little misleading in its comparisons. The Scots & the Welsh (& the unmentioned Irish - who might've been 'too hot to handle' by the OBSERVER at the time), at least as I understand it, were on their own turf when they were colonized by the British. As such, they just wanted the colonialists to release them from their imperialistic hold. 'Black' separatists, on the other hand, were mostly forcibly brought to the US as slaves, they're not even on the land they were kidnapped from - any separatism means creating a new homeland rather than a reversion to an older one. Nonetheless, Black Panther claims that police in their neighborhoods are basically just occupying colonial troops strike me as accurate.
White Supremacists were/are big promoters of separatism. At least one such group proposed making the Northwest coast of the US be for 'whites' only - w/ Florida being for 'blacks' only. Such an idea is a throwback to the 'separate but equal' Jim Crow laws that certainly didn't insure any equality at all. It's all too easy to imagine white supremacists taking advantage of this geographical 'caging' by bombing black-Florida if such a separation were ever to take place.
"SEVENTY-NINE
REPRINTED FROM THE MANCHESTER GUARDIAN OF 13TH MARCH 1968
"Seven burned to death
"Mr David Lumsden, aged 26, stood outside his burning home in Toronto and screamed at passing motorists to stop and help as his wife and sex children were burned to death. All the drivers ignored his calls." - p 294
"EIGHTY
ASSUMPTION CONCERNING THE FOREGOING MADE FOR THE PURPOSES OF THIS STORY
"It would have been even worse if they'd stopped to watch the fun." - p 295
Coincidentally, as I was reading this, I was installing an exhibit on race for one of my jobs & spending some time w/ a person in the process of having a mental breakdown - both very relevant to this bk. But what made The Jagged Orbit particularly poignant to read now is that it's set in 2014, the actual yr in wch I've read it.
The back cover blurbs are by authors Philip K. Dick, Robert Bloch, & Thomas M. Disch. Dick goes so far as to say that "It is an superb work, plotted with amazing skill, and showing a magnetic artistry much above anything Brunner has previously shown." Disch then ups the ante w/ "Enough new ideas to fill a novel each by Dick, Farmer and Pohl." High praise indeed. It appears that this was a breakthru work for Brunner.
The dedication inside reads:
"FOR CHIP
"—the only person I know who really can fly a jagged orbit." - p 5
I assume/deduce that the "CHIP" in question is the great Samuel R. Delaney - gay, 'black', SF (& otherwise) writer whose work I have profound respect for. Why do I put the word "black" in single quotation marks? B/c I am so damned sick of the destructiveness of the simple-minded divisiveness of humans classified into 'black' & 'white', etc, etc.. Why not African-Americans then? B/c I'm also sick of humans categorized in terms of so-called (ancestral) origin. People ask me: 'Where is your family from? What nationality are they?' & I reply: 'I'm a BalTimOrean.' In other words, I'm from where I was born - not from some nation I may've never even been to. Some people claim that all humans originated in Africa & spread from there - are those who ended up in 'America' all African-Americans then? I prefer to think of people as individuals, not as representatives of some dubiously united 'ethnicity'. I certainly don't represent all so-called 'white' people, why shd I think that any 'black' person wd represent all so-called 'blacks'?!
Chapter ONE, entitled "PUT YOURSELF IN MY PLACE", sets a mildly experimental formal tone by consisting of only "I —" followed by Chapter TWO's "-solationism" on the verso. 1st person singular in isolation: this appears to set the mood for a critique of people living in so much fear of each other that no solidarity is likely or easy.
As w/ most novels about the future (now, for me, the present) there's lingo used extrapolated from the time of writing: "Meanwhile, continuing: something big brewing among the X Patriots. The routine reading carried him straight back to the Gottschalks and the superficial verdict that they were once more fomenting discontent among knee extremists to ensure good sales for their latest product among frightened blanks." (pp 12-13) Think "Malcolm X" in connection w/ "the X Patriots".
&, of course, along w/ the lingo there're the prophesies of technology: "They hadn't had a vuset in the apt before—only an ancient non-holographic TV which offered nothing more interesting than the three surviving 2-D satellite transmissions insisted on by the PCC. Since those were beamed primarily at India, Africa and Latin America, and she and Dan spoke neither Hindi, Swahili, nor more than a smattering of Spanish, they had seldom bothered to switch on unless they were orbiting." (p 16)
"Flamen's ingratiating voice said, "In this world which is so often terrifying, aren't you envious of the security people feel when they've installed Guardian traps at their doors and windows? You can't buy better, and you'd be a fool to buy anything less good."
"He vanished. A tall scowling kneeblank marched forward in his place, and before Lyla had time to react—she was still not awake enough to have convinced herself that the three-dimensional full-color image was going to stay buried in the screen—spiked metal bands had clamped on him at neck-, waist-, and knee-height. Blood began to ooze from the points where the cruel metal prongs had sunk in. He looked briefly bewildered, then sunk unconscious.
""Guardian!" sang an eldritch castrato voice. "Guar—dee—ann!"" - pp 17-18
"She moved to the door and began to strain against the handle of the winch to lift clear the hundred-kilo deadfall block that closed it against intruders overnight.
""Put your yash on," Dan said, stepping into a pair of green breeches and bleting them tight around his waist.
""Hell, I'm only going to the comweb!"
""Put it on, I said. You're insured for a quarter-million tealeaves and it says in the policy that you have to."" - p 19
There we have the technology, the paranoia, & the lingo all neatly rolled in one. My own prediction is that capitalism is aiming toward a society in wch people own as little as possible & rent as much as possible. Streaming is a big step in this direction. That seems to be the case in Brunner's 2014: ""But you're supposed to do duty to the Lar first, aren't you?" / "We only have it on seven-day appro," (p 18) "["]Got anything less revealing?" / "I don't think so. All my February clothes have expired["]." (p 19) "replacing the Lar in its niche, distantly aware that if she had indeed thrown it away there would have been a hell of a fight with Dan. The seven-day appro was up tomorrow and if they couldn't return it they would be billed two thousand tealeaves." (pp 151-152)
Brunner foresees junk mail w/ the greatest imagination. Junk Mail, Spam E-Mails, & Telemarketers have been among the banes of my existence. ""Practically all satches, same as usual. I do hate saturation mail! It clogs the comweb same as garbage does the drains, and I swear ninety percent of it goes straight into the drains without being read. . . .["]" / "She pantomimed tearing them across, but they were reinforced against that; they could only be torn along the line which would liberate the chemicals powering their in-built speakers. Satch mailing campaigns were too expensive to let illiterates escape." (p 27)
"Meantime, Dan had ripped along the sealing strip of the one from Lares & Penates Inc., and at once the room was full of a familiar high thin voice.
""You can't afford to be without a cult tailored to your private needs in this age of the individual. Consult Lares & Penates for the finest specialized—"
"It took him that long to locate the power-capsule driving the speaker and break it between finger and thumb. Promptly, he dropped the envelope with a yelp, shaking his hand.
""It burned me! That's a new one! They must have got wise to people cracking the capsules."" - p 28
For my own modest take on one aspect of our increasing branding as consumer-slaves, witness my "North Deface" movie here: http://youtu.be/r8Dre9tTEyE
& The Jagged Orbit anticipates The Sheep Look Up as self-preventing prophesy in glimpses of environmental concerns: "Humidity index in New York in excess of previous high for the current date, a factor ascribed by officials to the effect of the city's five and a half million air-conditioners. The insurrection probability index slipping ahead of schedule into what is nicknamed "the sweaty season downturn"" (p 31)
One of the main characters is a "spoolpigeon", an exposé TV show host. The network he works for is called Holocosmic: "if you dig into the private lives of the Holocosmic directorate you'd come up with material for another Hundred and Twenty Days without the need to plagiarize" (p 46) That's the Marquis de Sade's One Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom being referenced. & this spoolpigeon, hypothetically an investigative reporter watchdog guarding society from corruption & hypocrisy is that to a small extent - but using Manufactured Consent means (to paraphrase Noam Chomsky) to create the damning 'evidence':
""Very well then. Let's find out what stock we have available for Uys. I don't have to ask about Mayor Black; he's vain, and we have tape on him we could lasso the moon with." Flamen moved to a computer on the wall at right angles to the first one.
"More or less what I thought," he muttered when the data were screened in response to his question. "Practically nothing! Black-and-white 2-D material and that's it. Well, we can make do with that. This is a recent one, comparatively speaking." The screen blurred, cleared, showed Uys coming down the steps from a plane door, presumably at home in South Africa, being greeted by his family and gesturing away a group of reporters.
""Let's have color . . . holographic depth . . . yes, that's better . . . good . . . we can abstract from that and blend it with Mayor Black and let's see now . . . American location and b.g., better have some macoots . . . Ah, that's not bad for a start, is it?"" - pp 186-187
"He struck some codes on the keyboard. "Voices—we're bound to have something on tape, I guess, even for Uys, and even if we haven't the machines will fake a South African accent. Characteristic phrase-weighting—let's spice it with a few choice Afrikaner slogans . . . And here we go."" - p 187
Now, apartheid, the racist legally imposed separatism in South Africa was in full force in 1969 when The Jagged Orbit was published. As such, it's no wonder that one of the villains here is an Afrikaner, one of the 'whites' who maintains, enforces, & benefits from South African racism. I'd like to hope that such self-preventing prophesy on the part of creative anti-racists was one of the factors that led to the downfall of apartheid in 1994. Good riddance.
I'm sure that Brunner had fun envisaging the fashion 45 yrs in the future but, alas, such extravagances are few & far in between in the actual 2014: "Conroy hesitated, looking over the array of students and taking especial note of the girls. About a quarter of them were in street yashes, like Alice who had just spoken; the remainder wore a fantastic galaxy of costumes ranging from a height-of-last-year-fashion oversuit with inflated bosom and buttocks to a waist-length orange wig and a pair of shabby Nix." (p 58)
In Brunner's 2014, racism is an undiluted or even more intensified version of what he saw in 1968. 'Black' & 'white' people seen together are at risk just for the association. Racist profiling by the police is the norm. &, alas, racist 'white' cops have far from disappeared in the actual 2014. Look at the case of the police beating the innocent Jordan Miles in Pittsburgh & getting away w/ it. &, of course, similar instances are abundant. Perhaps the main difference between 2014 & 1968 is that at least Miles cd get a civil suit settlement of $119,000 even tho the cops went free on the "excessive force" charges. Anyone who's seen pictures of Miles's face after the cops beat him will know that excessive force was used - beating a person's face until it's swollen almost beyond recognition is hardly 'necessary' force - esp considering that the person being beaten was innocent in the 1st place. On the brighter side, 'blacks' & 'whites' seen together these days is considerably less likely to elicit a massive racist outburst than it was 45 yrs ago.
""What thin partitions sense from thought divide," she murmured as she came abreast of the watchful police at the head of the escalator.
""Talking to yourself, hm?" said one of them with a harsh laugh. "Watch it, darl, or you'll be booked for a one-way ride to the Ginsberg!"
""Here comes a knee," said one of his companions. "Let's work him over, huh? We didn't get anyone yet today, but there's always a chance. You! You kneeblank there!"
"On the firm ground, Lyla turned to look, and yes it was Harry Madison they'd chosen to drag aside and search: five tall policemen so armored and masked that one could not have told whether they themselves were light- or dark-skinned, with helmets and body-shields and pistols and lasers and gas-grenades. But there was no future in arguing. It would only make things worse if she said she and Madison were together." - pp 228-229
Harry Madison, perhaps the most sympathetic character in the novel, is a "kneeblank", a 'black' soldier who was put in the "Ginsberg" mental institution & kept there apparently overlong for unclear reasons. Why did Brunner call it the "Ginsberg"? What doing so evokes for me is Allen Ginsberg's poem "Kaddish" in wch he expresses his responses to his mother's 'schizophrenia' & its broader implications.
"What did they put you in there for, anyway—if you don't mind my asking?"
""For too many questions," Madison said. "That kind of question you just asked. They put a gun in my hand and said go kill that naked savage with a stone spear, he's the enemy, and I said why is he the enemy and they said because he's been got at by communists and I said does he even have a word in his language for 'communism' and they said if you don't kill him you'll be under arrest. So they arrested me. I went on asking questions and I never got an answer, and I didn't feel inclined to stop until I did. So, they discharged me and put me in the Ginsberg["]" - pp 241-242
For the complete review, go here: https://www.goodreads.com/story/show/...
October 6, 2015
Brillante, compleja, deslumbrante..., como todas las obras de Brunner, principalmente su llamada "trilogía del desastre" (Todos sobre Zanzíbar -Stand on Zanzibar-, Órbita Inestable -The Jagged Orbit- y El rebaño ciego -The Sheep Look Up-), resaltando desde un punto de vista sociológico y sicológico los defectos sociales que ya se destacaban desde finales de le década de 1960:
* Todos sobre Zanzíbar - sobrepoblación y extremismos políticos.
* Órbita inestable - racismo y segregación extrema, miedo social alimentado por los medios y evolución de la ignorancia sobre la racionalidad.
* El rebaño ciego - Desastre ecológico.
En "Órbita inestable", Brunner nos muestra un futuro (el libro fue escrito en 1969 y está situado en 2014 en EUA, lo que era el futuro para él es el pasado para nosotros. Muy cienciaficcioñero) donde la segregación racial es extrema: la sociedad está dividida en blancs (blancos) y nigblancs (no-blancos). El tejido social está totalmente dominado por el miedo racial de la sociedad blanc hacia los probables disturbios violentos nigblancs a tal grado que los nigblancs tienen sus propias ciudades donde los blancs no son bienvenidos. Este miedo está alimentado y fomentado por la poderosa y amafiada familia Gottschalk cuyo objetivo es venderle armas a ambos bandos, fomentar el odio en los nigblancs para que hagan disturbios y ataques exigiendo “sus derechos” y fomentar el miedo entre los blancs para que compren armas más poderosas (y caras) que las de los nigblancs, aparte de todos sus sistemas de alarma, defensa y hasta agentes que forman cuadrillas y ejercicios autodefensa para saber qué hacer en caso de ataque.
También se nos describe un estatus cultural de la sociedad realmente espeluznante (supongo que porque eso es realmente lo que nos está pasando): a pesar de los avances tecnológicos, la sociedad ha preferido replegarse a la ignorancia, creencias y tradiciones: otra de las empresas más poderosas de este futuro se dedica a vender ídolos de plástico llamados Lar, ofreciéndolos a la gente como “dioses personalizados” después de un análisis detallado de su personalidad y costumbres. Otro aspecto social es la creencia en los oráculos ofrecidos por pitonisas, que llegan a tener el estatus de estrellas del espectáculo.
Pero el aspecto más triste es el sicológico: toda la sociedad debe ser igual, es decir, cada individuo debe comportarse uniformemente, de manera ordenada y predecible, cuidando exclusivamente sus intereses como individuo; cualquier rasgo de originalidad, responsabilidad social, pensamiento independiente o solidaridad es castigado con el internamiento a un hospital de “salud mental” donde los análisis computarizados son los que indican si uno es “normal” o no.
Todo este contexto es presentado y explicado poco a poco en la trama, por la forma en que actúan los personajes y lo que dicen. El ambiente está perfectamente integrado en el desarrollo dramático de la trama y la interacción de los personajes, una novela muy bien trabajada literariamente.
La trama empieza presentándonos a uno de los personajes principales: Matthew Flamen, un presentador de televisión (a este tipo de reporteros se les llama “hurgones”, palabra derivada de “hurgar”, a la TV se le conoce como Tri-V dado que hace tiempo ya se maneja la holografía). A diferencia de lo que ocurre con el mundo real, los hurgones ya están a punto de desaparecer. En la spciedad se ha fomentado tanto la apatía y el individualismo que a nadie le interesan los escándalos. Flamen tiene que ser muy cuidadoso y perspicaz en sus investigaciones para mantenerse del lado de la verdad y causar un impacto social lo bastante fuerte para seguir al aire. Con él conocemos la importancia de los Gottschalk, la sospecha de sus luchas internas por el poder y los indicios de que quieren introducir a un agitador racial, el inglés Morton Lenigo a Estados Unidos con fines desconocidos y oímos de la empresa Lares & Penates Inc., responsables de los Lar.
Otro de los personajes principales de la novel es Lyla Clay, una jovencita (casi adolescente) que trata de ganarse la vida en esta sociedad y futuro atemorizador y horrible, con ella conocemos el ambiente de terror e incertidumbre de los blancs hacia los nigblanc, la Tri-V y la violencia extrema de le sociedad al grado que tienen que usar trampas mortales en las entradas de sus departamentos. Las mujeres tienen que usar yashes (Brunner no los explica, pero queda claro su uso, son una especie de burkas (vestido para las mujeres, se ve como si se pusieran una sábana encima para disfrazarse de fantasmas, excepto que las burkas tienen una rejilla de tela en la cara para que las mujeres puedan ver y respirar). Lyla trabaja como pitonisa mientras su pareja, Dan trabaja como su mackero (diciéndolo educadamente: su representante artístico).
El tercer personaje principal es James Reedeth, sociólogo - sicólogo de hospital de salud mental de Ginsberg, con él se presentan diversos aspectos sociales: a importancia y dependencia absoluta de las computadoras, inclusos para saber si somos normales o no, el manejo de las leyes y tendencias sociales.
Con estos tres personajes, la cosas que hacen, con todas sus relaciones, sucesos nos vamos enterando del estado de la sociedad en el s. XXI y se nos presentan muchos otros personajes, la mayoría son secundarios, pero algunos llegan a tener trascendencia en la trama como:
*Pedro Diablo: también hurgón, pero de la Tri-V nigblanc, expulsado de Blackbury, la ciudad nig más importante debido a extremismos raciales (si hubo un blanc en tu familia hace, digamos 3 generaciones, tú ya no eres un nigbanc “puro”).
*Harry Madison: nigblanc internado en el hospital Ginsberg para “recuperar” su sanidad mental, aunque Reedeth sospecha que en realidad está ahí porque está más cuerdo que la mayoría. No pueden darlo de alta debido a papeleo burocrático.
*Elías Mogshack: Director del hospital Ginsberg y proponente del individualismo social donde todos somos iguales y cortados con la misma tijera, al grado que las máquinas deben poder procesarnos estadísticamente. Si no encajamos, somos anormales. Para eso está el Hospital Estatal Memorial Ginsberg para los desarreglos Mentales.
* Xavier Conroy: Profesor de sociología refugiado en una universidad de segunda clase en Canadá. Enemigo de Mogshack y sus teorías individualista. Él defiende la idea de que la solidaridad, unión, creatividad e inteligencia definen a un ser humano y que es casi un pecado el dejar que las máquinas nos clasifiquen.
La trama se va desarrollando lenta y dolorosamente, mostrando los aspectos más tristes y desalmados del futuro, pero toda la narración y la acción van en crescendo, es decir, cada vesz más rápido y de más impacto: varios acontecimientos (a primera vista sin importancia) hacen que todos los personajes principales y algunos secundarios (que aquí muestran su trascendencia en la trama) confluyan e interactúen en un mismo lugar, dando a conocer situaciones que logran un clímax que desata la esperanza para la humanidad.
Una de las subtramas que conducen a este clímax:
El Mayor Black es el dirigente de la ciudad de Blackbury, en un arranque de megalomanía hace traer a Herman Uys, el mayor experto racial sudafricano que determina que Pedro Diablo no es un nig “puro” y por lo tanto el Mayor Black lo expulsa. Por contratos legales entre la población nigblanc y el gobierno Federal, Pedro Diablo no puede quedarse sin trabajo, así que es reasignado para trabajar con uno de lo últimos hurgones: Matthew Flemen.
Cuando todos los personajes están juntos, intercambian los fragmentos de información que tienen y se dan cuente del diabólico plan general de los Gottschalk: ellos facilitaron la entrada del agitador y fanático racial Morton Lenigo a Estados Unidos para organizar disturbios utilizando a los nigblancs para dar un golpe de estado y recuperar lo que “por derecho les pertenece”.Pero en realidad a los Gottschalk sólo les interesa que llos nigblanc estén alborotados para venderles armas de última generación, causarles un pánico absoluto a la población blanc y venderles así un arma (una especie de tanque urbano) capaz de resistir ataques y con el poder destructivo suficiente para acabar con una ciudad; claro, esta arma es cara y se las venderían a lo blancs a plazos.
Para lograr tener estadísticas y tendencias sociales (y pronósticos de ventas) reales, la poderosa familia Gottschalk desarrolla una computadora increíblemente compleja y que es capaz de hacer algo digno de ciencia ficción: ocupar una parte de la conciencia de un humano con personalidad en ruinas y que no se puede reconstruir, y convivir con humanos reales. Al final de la novela nos enteramos que esta computadora (conocida por el nombre de Robert Gottschalk) ha ocupado la mente de Harry Madison (que originalmente sí ha sufrido impactos sicológicos tan fuertes que prácticamente es un retrasado mental), a partir de esta ocupación (una especie de control remoto) es que Harry muestra una mente clara, enfocada, sólida y grandes habilidades con los aparatos electrónicos, aparte de habilidades casi sobrehumanas (a duras penas explicables por un excelente estado físico y un entrenamiento militar digno del mejor soldado). Él es el que explica todos sus análisis estadísticos, llena los huecos e incógnitas acerca del plan Gottschalk, y todo lo hace para tratar de hacer un cambio de rumbo debido a que los pronósticos de ventas son nulos: las estadísticas indican que los blancs van a estar tan asustados, que les van a tener miedo incluso a otros blancs que compren el nuevo armamento, los van a linchar incluso por el hecho de que tengan el poder económico suficiente para comprar el armamento.
Robert Gottschalk (o Robot Gottschalk o Harry Madison) les da esta información para evitar el desastre financiero y después se desconecta dejando a Harry Madison como una humano que apenas y puede reconocer dónde está y que sí necesita estar en el hospital de desarreglos mentales, mientras los demás tienden a actuar conforme a lo que acaban de concluir:
*Pedro Diablo regresa a Blackbury donde les explica a los cabecillas de los disturbios que todo es un plan de los Gottschalk para usar a todos los nigblanc como peones, incluso desenmascara a Morton Lenigo como un fanático embaucador que quiere seguidores para que la sociedad funcione con él quiere.
*Matthew Flemen decide seguir como hurgón desenmascarando el plan de los Gottschalk y la teorías individualistas y deshumanizantes de Elías Mogshack.
*Xavier Conroy regresa a dar clases en su universidad en Canadá, satisfecho por enterarse de que muchas personas clave están convencidas de que la verdadera humanidad no es el individualismo y la desunión, sino la solidaridad, la creatividad y el respeto a la inteligencia.
*Lyla Clay decide dejar de ser pitonisa y regresar a estudiar bajo la tutoría de Conroy.
Es de destacar que el fin de la novela presenta un diálogo entre Clay y Conroy donde se exponen los puntos de vista del propio John Brunner ante los retos de desunión de la sociedad. Muy bien trabajado literariamente, aunque en dos o tres ocasiones se le van las patas.
Como decía yo a principio de este escrito: es una novela brillante y compleja que no le otorga concesiones al lector. Quizá en una primera lectura se revele confusa e impenetrable, pero una segunde lectura muestra el brillo escondido tras la complejidad.
* Todos sobre Zanzíbar - sobrepoblación y extremismos políticos.
* Órbita inestable - racismo y segregación extrema, miedo social alimentado por los medios y evolución de la ignorancia sobre la racionalidad.
* El rebaño ciego - Desastre ecológico.
En "Órbita inestable", Brunner nos muestra un futuro (el libro fue escrito en 1969 y está situado en 2014 en EUA, lo que era el futuro para él es el pasado para nosotros. Muy cienciaficcioñero) donde la segregación racial es extrema: la sociedad está dividida en blancs (blancos) y nigblancs (no-blancos). El tejido social está totalmente dominado por el miedo racial de la sociedad blanc hacia los probables disturbios violentos nigblancs a tal grado que los nigblancs tienen sus propias ciudades donde los blancs no son bienvenidos. Este miedo está alimentado y fomentado por la poderosa y amafiada familia Gottschalk cuyo objetivo es venderle armas a ambos bandos, fomentar el odio en los nigblancs para que hagan disturbios y ataques exigiendo “sus derechos” y fomentar el miedo entre los blancs para que compren armas más poderosas (y caras) que las de los nigblancs, aparte de todos sus sistemas de alarma, defensa y hasta agentes que forman cuadrillas y ejercicios autodefensa para saber qué hacer en caso de ataque.
También se nos describe un estatus cultural de la sociedad realmente espeluznante (supongo que porque eso es realmente lo que nos está pasando): a pesar de los avances tecnológicos, la sociedad ha preferido replegarse a la ignorancia, creencias y tradiciones: otra de las empresas más poderosas de este futuro se dedica a vender ídolos de plástico llamados Lar, ofreciéndolos a la gente como “dioses personalizados” después de un análisis detallado de su personalidad y costumbres. Otro aspecto social es la creencia en los oráculos ofrecidos por pitonisas, que llegan a tener el estatus de estrellas del espectáculo.
Pero el aspecto más triste es el sicológico: toda la sociedad debe ser igual, es decir, cada individuo debe comportarse uniformemente, de manera ordenada y predecible, cuidando exclusivamente sus intereses como individuo; cualquier rasgo de originalidad, responsabilidad social, pensamiento independiente o solidaridad es castigado con el internamiento a un hospital de “salud mental” donde los análisis computarizados son los que indican si uno es “normal” o no.
Todo este contexto es presentado y explicado poco a poco en la trama, por la forma en que actúan los personajes y lo que dicen. El ambiente está perfectamente integrado en el desarrollo dramático de la trama y la interacción de los personajes, una novela muy bien trabajada literariamente.
La trama empieza presentándonos a uno de los personajes principales: Matthew Flamen, un presentador de televisión (a este tipo de reporteros se les llama “hurgones”, palabra derivada de “hurgar”, a la TV se le conoce como Tri-V dado que hace tiempo ya se maneja la holografía). A diferencia de lo que ocurre con el mundo real, los hurgones ya están a punto de desaparecer. En la spciedad se ha fomentado tanto la apatía y el individualismo que a nadie le interesan los escándalos. Flamen tiene que ser muy cuidadoso y perspicaz en sus investigaciones para mantenerse del lado de la verdad y causar un impacto social lo bastante fuerte para seguir al aire. Con él conocemos la importancia de los Gottschalk, la sospecha de sus luchas internas por el poder y los indicios de que quieren introducir a un agitador racial, el inglés Morton Lenigo a Estados Unidos con fines desconocidos y oímos de la empresa Lares & Penates Inc., responsables de los Lar.
Otro de los personajes principales de la novel es Lyla Clay, una jovencita (casi adolescente) que trata de ganarse la vida en esta sociedad y futuro atemorizador y horrible, con ella conocemos el ambiente de terror e incertidumbre de los blancs hacia los nigblanc, la Tri-V y la violencia extrema de le sociedad al grado que tienen que usar trampas mortales en las entradas de sus departamentos. Las mujeres tienen que usar yashes (Brunner no los explica, pero queda claro su uso, son una especie de burkas (vestido para las mujeres, se ve como si se pusieran una sábana encima para disfrazarse de fantasmas, excepto que las burkas tienen una rejilla de tela en la cara para que las mujeres puedan ver y respirar). Lyla trabaja como pitonisa mientras su pareja, Dan trabaja como su mackero (diciéndolo educadamente: su representante artístico).
El tercer personaje principal es James Reedeth, sociólogo - sicólogo de hospital de salud mental de Ginsberg, con él se presentan diversos aspectos sociales: a importancia y dependencia absoluta de las computadoras, inclusos para saber si somos normales o no, el manejo de las leyes y tendencias sociales.
Con estos tres personajes, la cosas que hacen, con todas sus relaciones, sucesos nos vamos enterando del estado de la sociedad en el s. XXI y se nos presentan muchos otros personajes, la mayoría son secundarios, pero algunos llegan a tener trascendencia en la trama como:
*Pedro Diablo: también hurgón, pero de la Tri-V nigblanc, expulsado de Blackbury, la ciudad nig más importante debido a extremismos raciales (si hubo un blanc en tu familia hace, digamos 3 generaciones, tú ya no eres un nigbanc “puro”).
*Harry Madison: nigblanc internado en el hospital Ginsberg para “recuperar” su sanidad mental, aunque Reedeth sospecha que en realidad está ahí porque está más cuerdo que la mayoría. No pueden darlo de alta debido a papeleo burocrático.
*Elías Mogshack: Director del hospital Ginsberg y proponente del individualismo social donde todos somos iguales y cortados con la misma tijera, al grado que las máquinas deben poder procesarnos estadísticamente. Si no encajamos, somos anormales. Para eso está el Hospital Estatal Memorial Ginsberg para los desarreglos Mentales.
* Xavier Conroy: Profesor de sociología refugiado en una universidad de segunda clase en Canadá. Enemigo de Mogshack y sus teorías individualista. Él defiende la idea de que la solidaridad, unión, creatividad e inteligencia definen a un ser humano y que es casi un pecado el dejar que las máquinas nos clasifiquen.
La trama se va desarrollando lenta y dolorosamente, mostrando los aspectos más tristes y desalmados del futuro, pero toda la narración y la acción van en crescendo, es decir, cada vesz más rápido y de más impacto: varios acontecimientos (a primera vista sin importancia) hacen que todos los personajes principales y algunos secundarios (que aquí muestran su trascendencia en la trama) confluyan e interactúen en un mismo lugar, dando a conocer situaciones que logran un clímax que desata la esperanza para la humanidad.
Una de las subtramas que conducen a este clímax:
El Mayor Black es el dirigente de la ciudad de Blackbury, en un arranque de megalomanía hace traer a Herman Uys, el mayor experto racial sudafricano que determina que Pedro Diablo no es un nig “puro” y por lo tanto el Mayor Black lo expulsa. Por contratos legales entre la población nigblanc y el gobierno Federal, Pedro Diablo no puede quedarse sin trabajo, así que es reasignado para trabajar con uno de lo últimos hurgones: Matthew Flemen.
Cuando todos los personajes están juntos, intercambian los fragmentos de información que tienen y se dan cuente del diabólico plan general de los Gottschalk: ellos facilitaron la entrada del agitador y fanático racial Morton Lenigo a Estados Unidos para organizar disturbios utilizando a los nigblancs para dar un golpe de estado y recuperar lo que “por derecho les pertenece”.Pero en realidad a los Gottschalk sólo les interesa que llos nigblanc estén alborotados para venderles armas de última generación, causarles un pánico absoluto a la población blanc y venderles así un arma (una especie de tanque urbano) capaz de resistir ataques y con el poder destructivo suficiente para acabar con una ciudad; claro, esta arma es cara y se las venderían a lo blancs a plazos.
Para lograr tener estadísticas y tendencias sociales (y pronósticos de ventas) reales, la poderosa familia Gottschalk desarrolla una computadora increíblemente compleja y que es capaz de hacer algo digno de ciencia ficción: ocupar una parte de la conciencia de un humano con personalidad en ruinas y que no se puede reconstruir, y convivir con humanos reales. Al final de la novela nos enteramos que esta computadora (conocida por el nombre de Robert Gottschalk) ha ocupado la mente de Harry Madison (que originalmente sí ha sufrido impactos sicológicos tan fuertes que prácticamente es un retrasado mental), a partir de esta ocupación (una especie de control remoto) es que Harry muestra una mente clara, enfocada, sólida y grandes habilidades con los aparatos electrónicos, aparte de habilidades casi sobrehumanas (a duras penas explicables por un excelente estado físico y un entrenamiento militar digno del mejor soldado). Él es el que explica todos sus análisis estadísticos, llena los huecos e incógnitas acerca del plan Gottschalk, y todo lo hace para tratar de hacer un cambio de rumbo debido a que los pronósticos de ventas son nulos: las estadísticas indican que los blancs van a estar tan asustados, que les van a tener miedo incluso a otros blancs que compren el nuevo armamento, los van a linchar incluso por el hecho de que tengan el poder económico suficiente para comprar el armamento.
Robert Gottschalk (o Robot Gottschalk o Harry Madison) les da esta información para evitar el desastre financiero y después se desconecta dejando a Harry Madison como una humano que apenas y puede reconocer dónde está y que sí necesita estar en el hospital de desarreglos mentales, mientras los demás tienden a actuar conforme a lo que acaban de concluir:
*Pedro Diablo regresa a Blackbury donde les explica a los cabecillas de los disturbios que todo es un plan de los Gottschalk para usar a todos los nigblanc como peones, incluso desenmascara a Morton Lenigo como un fanático embaucador que quiere seguidores para que la sociedad funcione con él quiere.
*Matthew Flemen decide seguir como hurgón desenmascarando el plan de los Gottschalk y la teorías individualistas y deshumanizantes de Elías Mogshack.
*Xavier Conroy regresa a dar clases en su universidad en Canadá, satisfecho por enterarse de que muchas personas clave están convencidas de que la verdadera humanidad no es el individualismo y la desunión, sino la solidaridad, la creatividad y el respeto a la inteligencia.
*Lyla Clay decide dejar de ser pitonisa y regresar a estudiar bajo la tutoría de Conroy.
Es de destacar que el fin de la novela presenta un diálogo entre Clay y Conroy donde se exponen los puntos de vista del propio John Brunner ante los retos de desunión de la sociedad. Muy bien trabajado literariamente, aunque en dos o tres ocasiones se le van las patas.
Como decía yo a principio de este escrito: es una novela brillante y compleja que no le otorga concesiones al lector. Quizá en una primera lectura se revele confusa e impenetrable, pero una segunde lectura muestra el brillo escondido tras la complejidad.
February 3, 2019
This is set in a near future where personal protection is a priority. Home protection systems have lethal capability. Which is necessary because the armament out on the streets is what we would think of as military grade. Speaking of guns and blasters, Gottschalks are quite persistent with their annoying sales pitches. There are quite a few coined words. Spoolpigeon, pythoness, yash, mackero, macoot, etc. It took me a while to realize that a knee referred to a black person, but it was before chapter eighty-three where kneeblank is defined. From Afrikaans nieblanke for a non-white person. Society isn't totally segregated but there are many black enclaves.
Matthew Flamen does a report every weekday at noon where he exposes frauds and such. He is the last of the spoolpigeons, and Holocosmic would like to cancel his show but PCC rules requires them to have a break from advertising. He neglected his wife, she took drugs and is now in Ginsberg asylum. When he visits Celia he meets a couple of the doctors, Jim Reedeth and Ariadne Spoelstra. It turns out that they've scheduled Lyla Clay, a pythoness, to give an oracle. This is great, he got permission to record the performance and could use some of it on his next show.
Flamen doesn't think the treatment is helping Celia, but can't afford the early discharge penalty to move her to a different facility. It isn't long after his visit that a riot in New York causes an influx of patients giving Jim and Ariadne an excuse to discharge Celia and also Harry Madison.
Meanwhile Pedro Diablo is exiled from Blackbury. He did for the knee community what Flamen does for the blanks. A contract between Blackbury and the government leads to him getting a job with Flamen. After sounding each other out they find a mutual respect.
The first half of the book was interesting, but maybe a bit confusing and choppy. It had a lot of ideas to set up and terms to define, most by context. Once it got going it was exciting through to the end. I think the idea is that we have to learn to live together peacefully, if not everyone is going to get a bigger and bigger gun, until eventually it leads to a preemptive strike. In 1969 there was an arms race on a national scale, in this book it's at an individual level.
Matthew Flamen does a report every weekday at noon where he exposes frauds and such. He is the last of the spoolpigeons, and Holocosmic would like to cancel his show but PCC rules requires them to have a break from advertising. He neglected his wife, she took drugs and is now in Ginsberg asylum. When he visits Celia he meets a couple of the doctors, Jim Reedeth and Ariadne Spoelstra. It turns out that they've scheduled Lyla Clay, a pythoness, to give an oracle. This is great, he got permission to record the performance and could use some of it on his next show.
Flamen doesn't think the treatment is helping Celia, but can't afford the early discharge penalty to move her to a different facility. It isn't long after his visit that a riot in New York causes an influx of patients giving Jim and Ariadne an excuse to discharge Celia and also Harry Madison.
Meanwhile Pedro Diablo is exiled from Blackbury. He did for the knee community what Flamen does for the blanks. A contract between Blackbury and the government leads to him getting a job with Flamen. After sounding each other out they find a mutual respect.
The first half of the book was interesting, but maybe a bit confusing and choppy. It had a lot of ideas to set up and terms to define, most by context. Once it got going it was exciting through to the end. I think the idea is that we have to learn to live together peacefully, if not everyone is going to get a bigger and bigger gun, until eventually it leads to a preemptive strike. In 1969 there was an arms race on a national scale, in this book it's at an individual level.
February 28, 2013
If you've at all heard of John Brunner, it's probably by way of his masterpiece (and masterpiece of 1970s SF) "Stand on Zanzibar", which managed the neat trick of creating a book about overpopulation that actually felt clastrophobic while taking a cross-section of its overstuffed expanse and spraying it at the reader all at once. It remains an extraordinarily visceral experience and probably works better as a multi-faceted depiction of a broken world than its more famous cousin Harry Harrison's "Make Room! Make Room!" (the basis for a movie about the most notorious food ever). But Brunner didn't limit himself to just discussing one way we could mess up the world in the future, he decided to depress even further and force us to make our children feel guilty for years to come with three other novels along the same trajectory. The best of those "other ones" is probably "The Sheep Look Up", which I remember finding brutally savage and unsettling (plus the original cover of the people with sheep heads wearing gas masks I found inexplicably frightening, something the new "Doctor Who" television show would take advantage of years later) but I recall "The Shockwave Rider" being pretty decent. Which only leaves one more.
So here we are. Unlike the other novels, this one doesn't seem utterly obsessed with a single dire topic, instead propelling us to a future where pretty much everything is going wrong on various levels. In the not too distant future we've experienced some variation of race riots (somewhat quaint now, with divisions seemingly more centered around religious differences) so that black and white people have sectioned themselves off into various cities, with very little crossover between the two and what does exist winding up being newsworthy. Which is convenient because "spoolpigeons" use their media shows to report their versions of investigative journalism. Meanwhile people can ingest drugs and have unconscious visions of where the world is going, and one man thinks we're all just a little crazy inside, but it can be okay.
The structure of the novel takes on some forms of the techniques that Brunner would later, especially the fractured cross-section feel of events, especially in the beginning where it seems like you're stuck to a camera hopped up on speed, zipping through impressionistic scenes of this new future with all the focus of a hyperactive toddler. We're treated to snippets of narrative, news reports, essays and other clips that help to give this world some shape, although all it really does is highlight how strange everything is and how out of place we feel. All the jargon seems warped, the landscape feels familiar in a way that bad dreams do and we're aware that all of this has some basis in a world we once knew but there's nothing really to cling to or use to launch ourselves into understanding. About the only real similarity this world has to the one we know is that its written in English. Which makes it gleefully disorienting at first, probably the closest I'll ever come to knowing how a man from the 1500s would feel if he were suddenly dropped into the present day. The level of culture shock is intense and while I don't like to actively fight with the books I'm reading, I did enjoy having to spend time trying to find my footing, especially since the world itself feels so assured.
The plot leaps between several characters of varying importance, from the efforts of spoolpigeon Matthew Flamen to figure out who keeps interrupting his broadcasts and also get his wife out of the asylum, to the doctors in the asylum wanting to deposit everyone in their crazy bank, to the young lady who likes to see the future. The threads variously bundle and disperse, often interrupted by the politics going on in the background, which seems tangential to all the vastly smaller problems that are infesting the characters, until all of that starts having an effect as well.
When the book works, its startlingly effective, layering extrapolations of Things That Have Gone Wrong on top of each other until you really start to wonder what year he wrote this in. Part of its power comes from the fact that we're probably a lot closer to his version of the world in its jagged timbre than he was back in the seventies and while he was exaggerating the potentcies of the world's problems as both warning and narrative, a lot of this stuff doesn't seem like a huge leap. And while he's still figuring out his grand style, the bones of it here are still fertile ground, especially in all the jumping about, the snippets of chapters and especially the often hilariously sardonic chapter headings, which are both Greek chorus and MST3K, underlining and mocking all at the same time.
As for the plot itself . . . well, as I said, he's still trying to figure it out. He has all the elements in place but isn't quite able to integrate them properly, which means the book mostly coasts on feel, skimming the surface of this busted up world and depending on our affinity for the new and desire to explore to carry us along. It isn't clear what the plot is until very late into it and part of that is because the book somewhat lacks focus. "Stand on Zanzibar" was able to take a single dire issue, overpopulation, and craft a whole world around it. Here he has a world without a core, which means its a variety of issues all intersecting with each other but lacking a strong central premise to really grab us. If you're going to go with "everything is wrong" we can forgive the scattershot approach if the characters and/or the plot are really gripping. Here, too much feels ancillary, just a way to color in the blanks and when the real menace rears its ugly and less than abstract head, you wonder what the point of wasting time with all the other stuff was (for one, I'm not even sure how all the pythoness stuff fits in). When the plot finds itself direction (strongly, when Xavier Conroy shows up to explain all the stuff that the slow members of class haven't gotten yet in the best Heinleinan mouthpiece fashion) you get bit of a sense of the stakes at play here. But with so many elements competing to be The Most Important Thing (evil corporations! robots! race riots! drugs! corrupt health system!) its a question of too many targets and not enough bullets, so to speak.
His style almost redeems all of this though, and gives the work an impression that to make functions as high praise: if you lived here, it would all make sense. The fast clipping snark underlying a savage sense of impending doom colors nearly every page but never gives way to sheer desperation the way a lazy writer might. Unlike for us, who can exit the book at any time it becomes too stifling, there's no real way out for the people inside. But when its your home, you don't go looking for an escape, not when the real bravery is to look for ways to make it better.
So here we are. Unlike the other novels, this one doesn't seem utterly obsessed with a single dire topic, instead propelling us to a future where pretty much everything is going wrong on various levels. In the not too distant future we've experienced some variation of race riots (somewhat quaint now, with divisions seemingly more centered around religious differences) so that black and white people have sectioned themselves off into various cities, with very little crossover between the two and what does exist winding up being newsworthy. Which is convenient because "spoolpigeons" use their media shows to report their versions of investigative journalism. Meanwhile people can ingest drugs and have unconscious visions of where the world is going, and one man thinks we're all just a little crazy inside, but it can be okay.
The structure of the novel takes on some forms of the techniques that Brunner would later, especially the fractured cross-section feel of events, especially in the beginning where it seems like you're stuck to a camera hopped up on speed, zipping through impressionistic scenes of this new future with all the focus of a hyperactive toddler. We're treated to snippets of narrative, news reports, essays and other clips that help to give this world some shape, although all it really does is highlight how strange everything is and how out of place we feel. All the jargon seems warped, the landscape feels familiar in a way that bad dreams do and we're aware that all of this has some basis in a world we once knew but there's nothing really to cling to or use to launch ourselves into understanding. About the only real similarity this world has to the one we know is that its written in English. Which makes it gleefully disorienting at first, probably the closest I'll ever come to knowing how a man from the 1500s would feel if he were suddenly dropped into the present day. The level of culture shock is intense and while I don't like to actively fight with the books I'm reading, I did enjoy having to spend time trying to find my footing, especially since the world itself feels so assured.
The plot leaps between several characters of varying importance, from the efforts of spoolpigeon Matthew Flamen to figure out who keeps interrupting his broadcasts and also get his wife out of the asylum, to the doctors in the asylum wanting to deposit everyone in their crazy bank, to the young lady who likes to see the future. The threads variously bundle and disperse, often interrupted by the politics going on in the background, which seems tangential to all the vastly smaller problems that are infesting the characters, until all of that starts having an effect as well.
When the book works, its startlingly effective, layering extrapolations of Things That Have Gone Wrong on top of each other until you really start to wonder what year he wrote this in. Part of its power comes from the fact that we're probably a lot closer to his version of the world in its jagged timbre than he was back in the seventies and while he was exaggerating the potentcies of the world's problems as both warning and narrative, a lot of this stuff doesn't seem like a huge leap. And while he's still figuring out his grand style, the bones of it here are still fertile ground, especially in all the jumping about, the snippets of chapters and especially the often hilariously sardonic chapter headings, which are both Greek chorus and MST3K, underlining and mocking all at the same time.
As for the plot itself . . . well, as I said, he's still trying to figure it out. He has all the elements in place but isn't quite able to integrate them properly, which means the book mostly coasts on feel, skimming the surface of this busted up world and depending on our affinity for the new and desire to explore to carry us along. It isn't clear what the plot is until very late into it and part of that is because the book somewhat lacks focus. "Stand on Zanzibar" was able to take a single dire issue, overpopulation, and craft a whole world around it. Here he has a world without a core, which means its a variety of issues all intersecting with each other but lacking a strong central premise to really grab us. If you're going to go with "everything is wrong" we can forgive the scattershot approach if the characters and/or the plot are really gripping. Here, too much feels ancillary, just a way to color in the blanks and when the real menace rears its ugly and less than abstract head, you wonder what the point of wasting time with all the other stuff was (for one, I'm not even sure how all the pythoness stuff fits in). When the plot finds itself direction (strongly, when Xavier Conroy shows up to explain all the stuff that the slow members of class haven't gotten yet in the best Heinleinan mouthpiece fashion) you get bit of a sense of the stakes at play here. But with so many elements competing to be The Most Important Thing (evil corporations! robots! race riots! drugs! corrupt health system!) its a question of too many targets and not enough bullets, so to speak.
His style almost redeems all of this though, and gives the work an impression that to make functions as high praise: if you lived here, it would all make sense. The fast clipping snark underlying a savage sense of impending doom colors nearly every page but never gives way to sheer desperation the way a lazy writer might. Unlike for us, who can exit the book at any time it becomes too stifling, there's no real way out for the people inside. But when its your home, you don't go looking for an escape, not when the real bravery is to look for ways to make it better.
February 7, 2024
2024 Book #4:
The Jagged Orbit (1969) by John Brunner
I’m torn on this one. On the positive side, Brunner’s prose is snappy, his dialogue energetic and engrossing. This compelled me to keep reading even as (on the negative side) the characters were thin and the plot was either incomprehensible or immaterial. Like Neuromancer, The Jagged Orbit drops you into its world and expects you to figure out its technobabble with almost no exposition. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. But the book is so overstuffed with themes and it never thoroughly explores any one of them. A partial selection of these themes would include racial tensions, predatory corporations, rampant advertising, mental health, hyper-individualism and its detriments to society, drugs, and mystical oracles. Brunner just keeps throwing shit at the reader with such vivacity that you can’t help but keep going. It’s like watching a strangely aesthetic train derailment. I appreciate the facility of the writing and the experimental formatting (some chapters reproduce actual news clippings from the 1960s), and I must say that I was entertained in a moment-to-moment way. But on reflection, I didn’t get very much out of the story. (high 3/5)
The Jagged Orbit (1969) by John Brunner
I’m torn on this one. On the positive side, Brunner’s prose is snappy, his dialogue energetic and engrossing. This compelled me to keep reading even as (on the negative side) the characters were thin and the plot was either incomprehensible or immaterial. Like Neuromancer, The Jagged Orbit drops you into its world and expects you to figure out its technobabble with almost no exposition. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. But the book is so overstuffed with themes and it never thoroughly explores any one of them. A partial selection of these themes would include racial tensions, predatory corporations, rampant advertising, mental health, hyper-individualism and its detriments to society, drugs, and mystical oracles. Brunner just keeps throwing shit at the reader with such vivacity that you can’t help but keep going. It’s like watching a strangely aesthetic train derailment. I appreciate the facility of the writing and the experimental formatting (some chapters reproduce actual news clippings from the 1960s), and I must say that I was entertained in a moment-to-moment way. But on reflection, I didn’t get very much out of the story. (high 3/5)
August 16, 2024
Like in all John Brunner's books, I've read so far, the vision of future society on its way to self destruction is so strong and so scary in a way. The fact that it feels inevitable makes it such a strong message.
This time the alienation of a human being in the community, destruction of relations and social structures with high dependency on psychotropics paints the vision of early XXI century. In the background of that humanity falls into dependency from computing algorithms of computers and their huge databases. And as always, greed leads to escalation of every negative aspect of that cocktail.
Have I mentioned racism? Let's say it's mentioned in the book as well.
Generally, after a little bit confusing start the book is really pleasing in reading and even thought provoking to some extend.
This time the alienation of a human being in the community, destruction of relations and social structures with high dependency on psychotropics paints the vision of early XXI century. In the background of that humanity falls into dependency from computing algorithms of computers and their huge databases. And as always, greed leads to escalation of every negative aspect of that cocktail.
Have I mentioned racism? Let's say it's mentioned in the book as well.
Generally, after a little bit confusing start the book is really pleasing in reading and even thought provoking to some extend.
Read
September 28, 20232nd reading after many years. Brunner impresses with his vision of the early 21st century as published (largely) in the 1960s. While there are lots of 'misses,' the number of conditions imagined by Brunner which currently exist are quite impressive. While he did not overtly predict the fall of the Soviet Union (at least not as I've seen), he does tend to feature an early 21st-century world in which international tension is more likely to be felt between the U.S. and China. In short, as speculative fiction goes, it is great fun to re-read this material from a calendar point at which much of each novel's future has become our own recent past.
April 2, 2025
Novela que ofrece un futuro de a la vuelta de la esquina, propensa a cometer fallos cronológicos pero que tiene tremendos aciertos, como la escalada armamentista doméstica, las enfermedades mentales modernas o la nefasta influencia de los medios. No tiene un hilo argumental sólido en la primera mitad, pero hay que darle tiempo a Brunner, siempre termina cuajando.
Ciencia ficción sociológica bien recomendable.
Ciencia ficción sociológica bien recomendable.
Read
March 4, 2022dnf
cuz i dont fucking care
cuz i dont fucking care
October 22, 2017
Perhaps one of the most important traits of science fiction is its ability to be prescient—the ability to be able to see trends in present day society and extrapolate them into plausible scenarios taking place in future societies or on alien worlds. What separates good science fiction from bad is this ability, for a good story can transcend the period from which it was written and feel as relevant today as in yesteryear. Jagged Orbit is one of these books.
Written in the 1960s, it feels as if it could have been written last year due to its themes of how racial animosity, the paradox of conformity yet being rational, fear of others among a few others can actually destroy societal bonds and alienate people from one another. Told through the lens of several characters, the story begins with Matthew Flannen, who works as a spoolpigeon—a sort of mix between investigative reporter and TV pundit. He is considered one of the best there is at his job. He is also one of the last as his parents company, Holocosmic, has begun to put pressure on him to produce great content. Complicating this is the fact that the company is paying for his wife's mental treatment at the prestigious Ginsberg clinic ran by Dr. Mogshack, a therapist who is widely celebrated in this society for his pro-rational, anti-emotional, individualistic views. Not to mention strange interruptions of his VUcast( think holographic tv broadcast) has led him to believe that the company is conspiring against him and that his partner, his brother-in-law Lionel Prior is in cahoots with the company.
From this beginning, we are ushered into a strange version of American society. A society where:
• Due to racial animosity and riots of the 1960s and a refusal by the government to address these issues, African-Americans(referred to as Knees in the book) have separated themselves from the mainstream American society, creating enclaves to protect themselves from Blanks( white people).
• In general, people are suspicious of others that are different from them.
• Emotions are considered a nuisance at best. Love has become clinical and marriage a mere contract of convenience.
• Gottschalks, a familial cabal of gun and weapons manufacturers, exploit and acerbate the fear of the Other people have to sell their weapons.
• No longer having direction in their lives, people turn to modern day oracles known as pythoness for direction.
Among other things. Now I have not delved into the plot too deeply in part because the plot is more of a vehicle for the exploration of the society depicted in the book and in a way critique our own society. The plot itself is good although it does take awhile for it to coalesce. The author wants one to understand the background of the society and through comparison, critique our own society, making it more of a meditative treatise on the nature of society and how cynicism can degrade communal bonds between people. Due to this, the plot does often take a back seat to the treatise, and perhaps because of this, some would argue that the ending may feel a bit too tidy given the events that happen in the story. But that may be intentional for one of the characters, Xavier Conroy, mentions how society has pushed away their emotions and become lesser- less optimistic, less human- due to this. And thus having the ending be one where it works out somewhat validates the themes present in the story….
In any case, it was definitely a good read and one that I enjoyed immensely.
Written in the 1960s, it feels as if it could have been written last year due to its themes of how racial animosity, the paradox of conformity yet being rational, fear of others among a few others can actually destroy societal bonds and alienate people from one another. Told through the lens of several characters, the story begins with Matthew Flannen, who works as a spoolpigeon—a sort of mix between investigative reporter and TV pundit. He is considered one of the best there is at his job. He is also one of the last as his parents company, Holocosmic, has begun to put pressure on him to produce great content. Complicating this is the fact that the company is paying for his wife's mental treatment at the prestigious Ginsberg clinic ran by Dr. Mogshack, a therapist who is widely celebrated in this society for his pro-rational, anti-emotional, individualistic views. Not to mention strange interruptions of his VUcast( think holographic tv broadcast) has led him to believe that the company is conspiring against him and that his partner, his brother-in-law Lionel Prior is in cahoots with the company.
From this beginning, we are ushered into a strange version of American society. A society where:
• Due to racial animosity and riots of the 1960s and a refusal by the government to address these issues, African-Americans(referred to as Knees in the book) have separated themselves from the mainstream American society, creating enclaves to protect themselves from Blanks( white people).
• In general, people are suspicious of others that are different from them.
• Emotions are considered a nuisance at best. Love has become clinical and marriage a mere contract of convenience.
• Gottschalks, a familial cabal of gun and weapons manufacturers, exploit and acerbate the fear of the Other people have to sell their weapons.
• No longer having direction in their lives, people turn to modern day oracles known as pythoness for direction.
Among other things. Now I have not delved into the plot too deeply in part because the plot is more of a vehicle for the exploration of the society depicted in the book and in a way critique our own society. The plot itself is good although it does take awhile for it to coalesce. The author wants one to understand the background of the society and through comparison, critique our own society, making it more of a meditative treatise on the nature of society and how cynicism can degrade communal bonds between people. Due to this, the plot does often take a back seat to the treatise, and perhaps because of this, some would argue that the ending may feel a bit too tidy given the events that happen in the story. But that may be intentional for one of the characters, Xavier Conroy, mentions how society has pushed away their emotions and become lesser- less optimistic, less human- due to this. And thus having the ending be one where it works out somewhat validates the themes present in the story….
In any case, it was definitely a good read and one that I enjoyed immensely.
March 8, 2015
While reading this, it struck me, since Brunner seems particularly Dick-influenced - how PKD's characters seem to be trapped in their roles. I suspect if you pick up any Dick novel at random you would find more than one character yearning to break away from a job, or a spouse or both and yet seems doomed to remain. PKD's characters, oddly much like Dick's are defined by their status and their place in society, and to a certain extent, so are Brunner's.
Brunner's work is more obviously satirical, extrapolating US society into a caricatured future of Mental Health gurus, psychic mediums, Watergate-style media reporters, race-riots, politics, corruption, big business and Artificial Intelligence.
It was a time of crisis when Brunner was writing this. America had been involved for some time in the Korean war, civil rights groups were rising and fighting for equality for all the usual causes - all of them just, and so it is not surprising that that this novel is laced with a healthy dose of cynicism for the concepts of equality, fair play and clean politics, on both sides of the divide.
The novel is divided into a hundred chapters, some of which are merely short quotes or excerpts from media reports. It's therefore a fast-paced, punchy, sometimes aggressive narrative which centres around a TV reporter, Matthew, whose exposees are transmitted once a week and who is currently investigating the Gosschalks, a multinational family who manufacture arms, amongst other things, and who may or may not be suffering from internal family tensions.
When Matthew visits the Mental Health Institute where his wife has been committed - and receiving some somewhat dubious treatment - he is drawn into slowly uncovering an international conspiracy where racial unrest is being actively encouraged, which could lead to world crises and the fall of civilisation.
Paradoxically enough, it's actually quite funny. One of Brunner's best.
Brunner's work is more obviously satirical, extrapolating US society into a caricatured future of Mental Health gurus, psychic mediums, Watergate-style media reporters, race-riots, politics, corruption, big business and Artificial Intelligence.
It was a time of crisis when Brunner was writing this. America had been involved for some time in the Korean war, civil rights groups were rising and fighting for equality for all the usual causes - all of them just, and so it is not surprising that that this novel is laced with a healthy dose of cynicism for the concepts of equality, fair play and clean politics, on both sides of the divide.
The novel is divided into a hundred chapters, some of which are merely short quotes or excerpts from media reports. It's therefore a fast-paced, punchy, sometimes aggressive narrative which centres around a TV reporter, Matthew, whose exposees are transmitted once a week and who is currently investigating the Gosschalks, a multinational family who manufacture arms, amongst other things, and who may or may not be suffering from internal family tensions.
When Matthew visits the Mental Health Institute where his wife has been committed - and receiving some somewhat dubious treatment - he is drawn into slowly uncovering an international conspiracy where racial unrest is being actively encouraged, which could lead to world crises and the fall of civilisation.
Paradoxically enough, it's actually quite funny. One of Brunner's best.
December 6, 2014
I cannot recall what I was reading at the time, but the gist of it was that John Brunner wrote four challenging and experimental novels in the late 60s/early 70s. Of those four, I had read three and considered two of them to be among my top 20 of all time (Stand on Zanzibar and The Sheep Look Up; the other that I had read was The Shockwave Rider, which I like and which should be mandatory reading for cybergeeks, but I don't think if has the same impact of the other two). The fourth was this novel, The Jagged Orbit.
Of the four it is by far the weakest and suffers much by time. However, you can see in the characters of Matthew Flamen and Elias Mogshack the seeds of later ones, especially Chad C. Mulligan of Stand on Zanzibar. (I also sense a similarity with Norman Spinrad's Jack Barron, but I cannot recall who come first.) The stylistic changes from his earlier work, and that would make Stand on Zanzibar such a landmark work in SF, are present here mainly in the chapter titles and the structure of the beginning and end. While I hesitate to recommend this to anyone, it proved interesting to me.
Of the four it is by far the weakest and suffers much by time. However, you can see in the characters of Matthew Flamen and Elias Mogshack the seeds of later ones, especially Chad C. Mulligan of Stand on Zanzibar. (I also sense a similarity with Norman Spinrad's Jack Barron, but I cannot recall who come first.) The stylistic changes from his earlier work, and that would make Stand on Zanzibar such a landmark work in SF, are present here mainly in the chapter titles and the structure of the beginning and end. While I hesitate to recommend this to anyone, it proved interesting to me.
December 23, 2015
I took a long time coming to this book, after finishing the hugely disappointing Stand on Zanzibar, but I had promised myself to give the author another chance and this is another of his highly acclaimed novels. This time I wasn't nearly so patient.
I gave up about 40 pages in. Presented again with a fragmented narrative with frequent and annoying digressions and the whiff of the same smug humour and didacticism, I just didn't have the patience to persevere. It was just going to be too much like hard work and life is too short. Perhaps I didn't really give it a fair crack of the whip but right now, with my reading appetite is waning anyway, I just don't have it in me.
I going to conclude that John Brunner is not for me and avoid his work in the future.
I gave up about 40 pages in. Presented again with a fragmented narrative with frequent and annoying digressions and the whiff of the same smug humour and didacticism, I just didn't have the patience to persevere. It was just going to be too much like hard work and life is too short. Perhaps I didn't really give it a fair crack of the whip but right now, with my reading appetite is waning anyway, I just don't have it in me.
I going to conclude that John Brunner is not for me and avoid his work in the future.
July 4, 2017
It's technically not cyberpunk because of when it was written, but it definitely does the high-tech-low-culture thing well, plus reads like an almost-contemporary novel given how presciently it describes the organization of society. I guess some things don't change (even though I wish they would). If you're not into the '60s psychedelic style you will not have fun with this book. Luckily for me I'm cool with hopping into word rivers and seeing where they take me.
Oh also now I'm thinking of a new category for a bookshelf: what's with all the dystopian SF with male protagonists with super checked out wives who embody all of the negative qualities of the society in question and depict why those qualities are addictive? I'm looking at you, Fahrenheit 451.
Oh also now I'm thinking of a new category for a bookshelf: what's with all the dystopian SF with male protagonists with super checked out wives who embody all of the negative qualities of the society in question and depict why those qualities are addictive? I'm looking at you, Fahrenheit 451.
March 8, 2018
The book was written nearly 50 years ago, with the locus of the story set around this time era. It depicts a US society divided by race, colour, and to lesser extent religion. Commercialism controls the media, and the sale of arms and weapons to the public is rampant, and controlled by a Mafia-like organisation. Civil unrest is widespread, and violence is worsening. The President is publicity seeking fool.
John Brunner must have been prescient.
John Brunner must have been prescient.
April 8, 2018
The Jagged Orbit may become one of my new favorite books.
The author doesn't just hand you the story; much like A Clockword Orange, eventually you'll understand the slang. Maybe.
This book is worth working for it though. The concept is slightly dated, but in the far distant year of 2014 black and white folks are still deeply segregated, still killing each other, and America is still obsessed with guns, technology, and macho posturing.
The author doesn't just hand you the story; much like A Clockword Orange, eventually you'll understand the slang. Maybe.
This book is worth working for it though. The concept is slightly dated, but in the far distant year of 2014 black and white folks are still deeply segregated, still killing each other, and America is still obsessed with guns, technology, and macho posturing.
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