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Title: The Sheep Look Up by John Brunner, David Brin, James John Bell ISBN: 1-932100-05-9 Publisher: BenBella Books Pub. Date: 01 June, 2003 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $28.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.4 (15 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: Brunner dates his novel about 75 years too early!
Comment: Brunner tells of a future -- the 1970's -- filled with environmental horrors, the reemergence of obscure diseases, and a vast eco conspiracy. Change the date to 2050 or so and the Sheep world can be real. Interesting that the Cape Cod fisheries are about dead; "dead" diseases such as TB have re-emerged as antibiotic resistant! Not to mention newer viruses such as ebola, marburg, rift valley, HIV, etc. The book is still relevant. Although the US focus on the environment during the last 30 years or so has helped slow down its destruction, there aren't many other countries doing the same.
Rating: 5
Summary: Lost classic
Comment: Publishers have shown some intelligence by keeping both Stand on Zanzibar and The Shockwave Rider still in print but still show odd lapses of judgement by keeping this book relegated to used book stores instead of reissuing it for all to read. This is definitely better than Shockwave Rider, and more focused than Zanzibar (though not better). It is probably one of the grimmer books to emerge from any genre, I thought On the Beach was depressing, this is even more so. Brunner takes threads and weaves them together to show you a world where the ecology is falling apart, the people who have the money to fix it also have the money to keep themselves above it while the normal people just live with it and can't think that anything will be better. There is a plot, per se, involved with environmental leader Austin Train and his emergence from hiding but mostly the novel is concerned with showing the slow inexorable decline of the world into a polluted and chaotic mess. If you keep reading it looking for some last minute save, some ray of hope, you might as well stop reading because that isn't the point. Brunner isn't showing us how to get out of it (other than an ironic comment made by a character at the very end) but showing us what he thought would happen if we didn't change things. Giving it a specific date dilutes the impact of the book but his message is still as strong as ever and even though we've taken steps to prevent that future, there's still a way to go. Brunner isn't with us anymore and his voice is surely missed, moreso when we read about an oil spill or a forest being cut down for development. Reading his books keeps that voice alive today.
Rating: 5
Summary: eerily prescient
Comment: Many people nowadays look back on the brief burst of environmental awareness (alarm) and criticism of corporate power which occurred in the 1970's as quaint,naive, slightly ridiculous. One prior reviewer of this work refers to the "hysteria" of the period.
What strikes me most strongly about _The Sheep Look Up_, billed as a 'sequel' to his big hit _Stand on Zanzibar_, is not its quaintness but its frightening accuracy. While Brunner guessed wrong on a number of counts -- for example, we haven't *quite* killed all the whales yet! -- there were trends which he read astutely and forecast correctly.
In particular he forecast increasing solipsism and isolationism in American politics and cultural life; he predicted a decline in the quality of political life, to the point where the American presidency would be occupied by a semi-literate figurehead whose job is to recite comforting and irrelevant platitudes into a microphone on his way from one glamorous gig to the next. His "Prexy" character seemed like a good fit for Reagan a while back, but the current Bush (the 2nd of that name) is an even closer match.
Brunner forecast the dumbing down of media, the intrusion of advertising into the most intimate spaces of daily life. He forecast the sidelining of "healthy lifestyle" products and choices into a yuppie trend (organic food becoming a boutique item) and the demonisation of environmentalists as "terrorists" and criminals. He forecast a degradation of community life, the rise of private security forces, and an increasing gap between (very) rich and (powerless) poor people.
He forecast the multiplication of resistant strains of pathogens, though he did not specifically call out the abuse of antibiotics in agriculture as a prime cause. He did not foresee the consequences of synthetic estrogens; and his view of genetic engineering is by and large more positive than it would have been if he had been writing today with the legal shenanigans of Monsanto, Syngenta and their ilk in view (Brunner would have loved the story of Percy Schmeiser -- he might almost have written it himself). He forecast the ubiquitous use of tranquilizers in daily life, but he did not foresee the current fad for pathologizing ordinary behaviours (particularly in childhood) and administering psychotropics to children. The rise to enormous power of the pharmaceutical companies was not on his radar (Mike McQuay, however, took notice of that trend in his own grimly dystopian future private-eye novels).
When I first read _Zanzibar_ and _Sheep_ I was just a kid. Now, almost half a lifetime later, I find that the concerns, the anger and grief and bitterness that Brunner articulated so fluently in the 1970's are far from dated. If anything, his work seems fresher and more poignant now than it did then -- I have witnessed 30 additional years of the indiscriminate damage and vandalism we call "growth" in the interim.
Many things "date" Brunner's work -- in particular his thoughtless, stereotypically "Seventies" sexism, which becomes wearying to the modern reader after only a few chapters. The core issues of his work, however, have worn well; clearly it was possible as long as 30 years ago to predict many of the negative consequences of a deeply dysfunctional way of life -- overconsumption, overpopulation, concentration of power in the hands of large corporations, irresponsible use of finite resources, and so forth. His work serves as a depressing reminder that even though we may know we are heading in a wrong direction -- and even have writers able to point out the possible consequences -- and even publish those writers -- we can and do continue in happy denial towards the very dystopia that our "out there" novelists predict for us.
Today our dystopian science fiction writers, notably the able satirist Bruce Sterling, paint for us possible futures resulting from a world economy destabilized by finance capital, a world climate irrevocably altered by global warming and the irresponsible release of GMOs, and so on. These possibilities will be selectively ignored, one feels, just as Brunner's predictions were ignored in his time. He was considered a raving pessimist, not to be taken seriously. Which of our prophets are we ignoring today, whom we might do better to take seriously?
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Title: Stand on Zanzibar by John Brunner ISBN: 1857988361 Publisher: Orion Audio Pub. Date: 1999 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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Title: The Shockwave Rider by John Brunner ISBN: 0345467175 Publisher: Del Rey Pub. Date: 03 January, 1995 List Price(USD): $19.00 |
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Title: Altered Carbon by Richard Morgan ISBN: 0345457684 Publisher: Del Rey Pub. Date: 04 March, 2003 List Price(USD): $13.95 |
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Title: Kiln People by David Brin ISBN: 0765342618 Publisher: Tor Science Fiction Pub. Date: 07 January, 2003 List Price(USD): $7.99 |
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Title: The Dragons of Springplace: Stories by Robert Reed ISBN: 096559016X Publisher: Golden Gryphon Pr Pub. Date: March, 1999 List Price(USD): $23.95 |
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