books

Pick up The Shockwave Rider expecting a relic of 1975, and the queasy recognition starts within pages. Brunner saw it all, or near enough: a vast data network you log into from your home, your office, even something pocket-sized you carry around; a cashless economy where payment flows through that network; an itinerant plug-in society in which jobs and addresses change every couple of years and consumer products look the same in every town; therapy services on tap for traumatised children; a "silent listener" service for stressed-out adults to vent at. Set the book down, pick up your phone, and try not to wince.

The plot, such as it is, follows Nick Haflinger, a non-person who has escaped from Tarnover, a secret government academy that takes gifted children and tries to engineer geniuses out of them as part of a national "brain race" that has replaced the old arms race. Nick's particular gift is the data net: he can dive into it, rewrite his own records, and surface elsewhere as a completely different person with a verifiable history. When the novel opens, he has been caught after six years on the run and is being interrogated, under medication, by a sharp government man called Paul Freeman. Most of the book alternates between this present-tense interrogation and Nick's memories of the identities he wore on the way down. A long middle section detours through Precipice, a small Pennsylvania town that survived the Great Bay Quake and built itself into a kind of distributed-democracy commune, and which holds research, suppressed by the authorities, on why American society is unravelling.

What Brunner does best here is technological imagination. The terminology dates him in places - he writes about "tapeworms" rather than viruses, and his net feels a little phone-system-shaped - but the underlying ideas are uncanny. The worm Nick eventually unleashes, an unkillable program that propagates across the network exposing classified information, is essentially the modern leak in conceptual form, written two decades before WikiLeaks and four before Snowden. The Delphi boards, in which citizens collectively predict and price the future, prefigure prediction markets so cleanly it's startling. And the social diagnosis lifted from Alvin Toffler's Future Shock - that people will cope with the pace of change by either burrowing into commune life or chasing every new sensation - reads like a one-paragraph précis of the next fifty years of Western culture.

The novel works less well as a novel. The Nick-and-Freeman duel is the engine, and the two men make compelling sparring partners; their exchanges have real force, with arguments and counter-arguments laid out vigorously enough to keep the long static scenes alive. But everyone else is thin. Kate Lilleberg, the woman Nick falls for in Precipice, exists mostly so he has someone to be clever at, and an early act of betrayal on his part is dispatched in a couple of pages of guilt and a quick forgiveness that feels more like 1970s wish-fulfilment than character work. The supporting cast outside Precipice barely outgrow their archetypes.

The ending is the bigger problem. After several hundred pages of meticulous worldbuilding establishing how thoroughly the system has locked itself in, Brunner reaches for a resolution that is both rushed and improbably upbeat: one man takes down the apparatus, exposes the corruption, gets the girl, and the nation votes online on propositions to abolish poverty. The closing pages have the slightly hallucinated quality of a fantasy assembled by someone in desperate straits, and they sit uncomfortably with the bleakness of everything that came before. There's a tonal mismatch too. Brunner means the book as a warning, but he also writes it with a satirist's hyperbole, and the two registers undercut each other; you finish unsure whether you've been cautioned or entertained.

None of which quite dulls the recommendation. This is a foundational text - cyberpunk before cyberpunk had a name, with Gibson and Stephenson visible on the horizon - and it earns its place in the SF Masterworks series on prescience alone. If you come to it expecting the prose density of Stand on Zanzibar or the apocalyptic precision of The Sheep Look Up, you'll find something looser and more uneven. If you come to it as an artefact, a fifty-year-old novel that somehow describes your week, it remains genuinely strange and worth the trip.