Philip K Dick discussion

I just read John Brunner's "Times Without Number". It has a similar premise to Dick's award winning "Man in the High Castle". Both are alternate history worlds that turn into multiverses when the main character finds a way from their alternate world to our normal one. In Dick's case, it was an alternate history where Allies lost WWII. In Brunner's case, the Spanish Armada defeated England and by 1980s we all live in the Spanish Empire.

Brunner's and Dick's books both came out in 1962. It's possible they communicated (they exchanged letters at times and admired each other's writing) or maybe there was "something in the water" that gave them similar ideas?

Was the book any good? Love those kind of premises...

Themistocles wrote: "Was the book any good? Love those kind of premises..."

I enjoyed it. It's a "fix-up" novel - 3 novellas set in the same world with same main character - that get progressively deeper into time travel and alternate history paradoxes.

I've read 2 books by John Brunner, "Telepathist" and "Stand on Zanzibar".

The first is very interesting and insanely ahead of its time, there are many things in the plot that were clear influences on Katsuhiro Otomo's "Akira" for instance, but it goes through so many audacious ideas in such a short length that few of them were explored in any satisfying depth.

"Stand on Zanzibar" I really liked, basically a futuristic take on the type of epic social realist novel that was really popular in the late 19th/early 20th century (in particular John Dos Passos' USA trilogy) and managed to predict much of the world's political landscape in the 21st century for a book written in the 1960's.

Simon wrote: "I've read 2 books by John Brunner, "Telepathist" and "Stand on Zanzibar".

The first is very interesting and insanely ahead of its time, there are many things in the plot that were clear influence..."

"Stand on Zanzibar" made Brunner a darling of the 1970s New Wave SF movement, along with "Shockwave Rider" and "The Sheep Look Up". "Times Without Number" is a much earlier work (1961) with a more traditional style, but still has an imaginative alt-history premise.

Brunner is someone I've been meaning to read for some time. I have 'The Sheep Look Up' ready to read after hearing good things. Now I know that Brunner also did alt-history, I'll definitely check it out as I do like that sub-genre if done cleverly like Man in the High Castle.

There are times where "Stand on Zanzibar" feels like it takes place in the same universe as Anthony Burgess' "A Clockwork Orange", just told from more different cultures' and social classes' viewpoints than that of the lower class in the UK.