The Shockwave Rider

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The novel was written shortly after two pivotal events of the 1970s, the resignation of Richard Nixon and the overthrow of the Chilean President Salvador Allende, which are cited in the novel as examples, in Nixon's case, of a failed attempt by organised crime to suborn the Presidency, and in the second, of the consequences of working against multinational commercial interests. Brunner did well in exploring the question of what this increasing power of connectivity, the creating, recording and sharing of personal information, might do. His vision did not fully realized, he did not seem to have anticipated that corporations might make more use of this information than government (but aren’t we govern by corporations today anyways?) His solution is drastic. Every now and again, of course, there does come a hilarious misstep, as when it's suggested the cost of shutting down a particularly smart tapeworm would be the net losing "thirty or forty billion bits of data" - which must have sounded loads at the time, but which we'd now say was around four gigabytes, or somewhere around a seventh of the information I currently have stored on my 'phone. But as with Brunner's other great near-future dystopia, Stand On Zanzibar, the main problem is that he's far too optimistic. Brazil and the Philippines are specifically mentioned as being much better off for the new age of big data. Tarnover, the sinister institute squatting at the heart of the story, is a factory for disruptive young supergeniuses straight out of Dominic Cummings' wet dreams – but it does at least produce disruptive supergeniuses, instead of just corralling and empowering twatty edgelords. Most painful of all, despite being common to much of what was once considered paranoid fiction, there's that touching faith that exposing the truth about wrongdoing will make the least bit of difference. I genuinely winced at the line "Lots of things make people angry, but political graft and the notion of deliberately maltreating children are among the most powerful". Well, you say that, but it turns out that for the majority of the population, they don't make people nearly as angry as libs and the paramount importance of owning same.

John 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 And — no, it can’t be killed. It’s indefinitely self-perpetuating so long as the net exists. Even if one segment of it is inactivated, a counterpart of the missing portion will remain in store at some other station and the worm will automatically subdivide and send a duplicate head to collect the spare groups and restore them to their proper place. Incidentally, though, it won’t expand to indefinite size and clog the net for other use. It has built-in limits.” El libro, a pesar de estar escrito a retazos, no se hace difícil de comprender. Además, la acción sigue un ritmo creciente digna de cualquier película palomitera de calidad que lo hace superentretenido. How it ends is thus. It ends with a world on the brink of change – thanks to Haflinger’s worm that makes all information accessible to everybody from anywhere in the network.FOR many, science fiction is the literature of prophecy. I tend to disagree. I like to think of it as the literature of ideas, mostly about our future but not necessarily restricted to it. Press the Volume up and Volume down buttons together for 5 seconds will put the unit into pairing mode.

I continue to watch for disclosures about peak oil. Nothing so far, but apparently we’ve only seen a small part of what is to come. Already there have been revelations about the U.S. climate change strategy in Copenhagen, and Saudi influence on U.S. climate policy. I keep re-reading it, not to compare it against current tech, but because I always feel that I may be old enough to like it this time. I like most Brunner, and Stand on Zanzibar is a masterpiece. But although I continue to admire it and insist that it is a significant book, this wasn’t that time either. Oh well. 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. That this is a rich planet. Therefore poverty and hunger are unworthy of it, and since we can abolish them, we must.But it’s full of details—like the game of “fencing,” like an electronic form of Go. Or there are the identities he has taken: “lifestyle consultant, utopia designer, priest, data retrieval specialist”—that last is like being a systems analyst, but they didn’t have the name when the book was written. They barely had computers. But it has social networks, sort of. It has future slang that works. Every time I read it different bits of it have become relevant. (It’s wrong about “veephones” though. There’s a piece of tech we actually have and that nobody wants.) But everything will still run by, and on, the network which is poised to morph not just into a de facto government that will decide the worth of people based on what they do and what they contribute to society. The network will also serve as the primary financial system that will decide which way the money will flow, based on the needs of the people it’s supposed to serve. Whether this change (if at all), in systems and, ways of living will come to pass, depends on the result of a plebiscite where the people have to choose from two propositions: Mi pequeña cabecita alcanza a formular reflexiones pero no le da para desarrollarlas del todo; leyendo este libro me ha dado por preguntarme cómo es posible que alguien en los 70 fuera capaz de percibir la trampa y las falsas religiones que surgirían a partir del desarrollo de los ordenadores, pero no fuera más allá de imaginar un aparato que sería aún más engañoso: el smartphone. Moreover, for the first time in well over a generation, the mass of public opinion was in agreement with the students. Gratifying. If it didn’t heal the split, at least it moved the split to a healthier location. Brunner extrapolated forward the drug culture of the seventies—not the pot and acid culture, the “mother’s little helper” culture, where everyone is taking tranquilizers and uppers to deal with their work. He took the trend of interchangeable suburbs and extended it out to make everywhere interchangeable because people move about so much and don’t have roots, the “plug in lifestyle.”“Bounce or break,” and a lot of them do overload and break.