![]() Has she truly wandered out of her own familiar world & been cast adrift-the loneliest of all lonely people-in another branch of the universe? Inexorably, as he scrapes at the barriers of secrecy that surround Urchin, he finds his fate becoming linked to hers. They called her "Urchin." Himself haunted by visions of unrealized disaster, irrationally terrified by things he might have done wrong but escaped by chance, threatened by the failure of his marriage & with it his career, Paul sees in her a victim of his own fears made real. Most remarkable of all, commonplace objects like clothing & cars were a mystery to her. Of high intelligence, she spoke a language no one could be found to understand. Piquantly lovely, she belonged to no known racial type. Tiny, appearing harmless, she had half killed a man who tried to assault her. "The girl walked naked out of nowhere on a winter night & to psychiatrist Paul Fidler it was as if one of his own obsessive visions of disaster took human form, bringing nightmares to life. Many of these books are written under the shadow of the VietNam war."-Dani Zweig. In the late 60s & early 70s, he was writing near-future socially-oriented fiction, referred to as dystopias. In the 50s & early 60s, he was turning out numerous competent space adventures. ![]() "There are two particularly identifiable phases in his writing career. His peace-activism & left-leaning political views were perhaps factors in his sometimes disappointing US sales."-Dave Langford. John Brunner was cursed by sanity & a hatred of superstition & cant combined with wide-ranging erudition. It slightly overshadows its companion volumes 'The Jagged Orbit' ('69), 'The Sheep Look Up' ('72)-a scarifying polemic against pollution which ends with the stench of all America burning-& 'The Shockwave Rider' ('75), prophetically mapping problems of information overload, computer viruses, rampant hacking & the net. 'Stand on Zanzibar' ('68) with its focus on overpopulation was his recognized blockbuster. "Brunner was a giant of sf, dealing at his best with lived-in futures combining extrapolative exhilaration & the nightmare of future shock.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |