The Jagged Orbit [Paperback]

John Brunner (Author)

Book Description

Series: Gollancz Sf Collectors Edition | Publication Date: 2000

Matthew Flamen, the last of the networks' sppolpigeons, is desperate for a big story. And there's no shortage of possibilities: the Gottschalk cartel is fomenting trouble among the knees in order to sell their latest armaments to the blanks; which ties in nicely with the fact that something big is brewing with the X Patriots. And then there's the story that just falls into his lap: the one that suggests that the respected director of the New York State Mental Hospital is a charlatan...

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

John Brunner (1934-95) published his first novel when he was seventeen and also made his first sale to US magazines at the same age. After serving in the RAF, he worked for a while as a technical abstractor and a publisher's editor before becoming a full-time writer in 1958. Among his many novels are The Squares of the City, The Telepathist, The Sheep Look Up, The Shockwave Rider and Stand on Zanzibar, universally recognized as his magnum opus.

Product Details

• Paperback: 397 pages
• Publisher: Victor Gollancz Sf (2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0575070528
• ISBN-13: 978-0575070523
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.3 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,452,733 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Interesting for the fan of Brunner's more serious work, February 18, 2003

By 

Glen Engel Cox (Columbus, Ohio) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Jagged Orbit (Paperback)

I cannot recall what I was reading at the time, but the gist of it was that Brunner wrote four challenging and experimental novels in the late 60s/early 70s. Of those four, I had read three and considered two of them to be among my top 20 of all time (Stand on Zanzibar and The Sheep Look Up; the other that I had read was The Shockwave Rider, which I like and which should be mandatory reading for cybergeeks, but I don't think if has the same impact of the other two). The fourth was this novel, The Jagged Orbit.

Of the four it is by far the weakest and suffers much by time. However, you can see in the characters of Matthew Flamen and Elias Mogshack the seeds of later ones, especially Chad C. Mulligan of Stand on Zanzibar. (I also sense a similarity with Norman Spinrad's Jack Barron, but I cannot recall who come first.) The stylistic changes from his earlier work, and that would make Stand on Zanzibar such a landmark work in SF, are present here mainly in the chapter titles and the structure of the beginning and end. While I hesitate to recommend this to anyone, it proved interesting to me.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars 1969 Disaster of the Year, April 6, 2005

By 

J. Bradley Hicks (St Louis, MO USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Jagged Orbit (Paperback)

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, it seemed to me that you could tell which "oh my god we're all going to die" best seller John Brunner had just read, because every year he cranked out another fictional adaptation of the previous year's coming-disaster best seller. This book is his take on the predictions (in the wake of the Martin Luther King assassination and resulting riots in the US) that rising crime and increasing racial tensions would lead to a breakdown of society, and a general war of all-against-all.

Now, obviously that didn't happen, and the jargon used to describe racial issues seems awfully dated at this late a date, but the rest of this story is the fascinating part, and why it's still one of my favorites of his, and why so much of it now seems eerily prescient. The lead character mentioned above, Matthew Flamen, is a "spool pigeon." What they don't tell you above is that a "spool pidgeon" is a gossip columnist and political analyst who specializes in creating fake digital film footage of real news figures doing and saying what he thinks they said or did; even if the film couldn't possibly have been really shot, in his world he can't get sued if the event (or something substantially similar) actually happened. And if the network's computerized analysis of the news and other gossip sources says that the probability of his guess being right is at 90% or higher and he does get sued, they'll pay for it out of their lawsuit insurance.

The charlatan state mental health director mentioned above? The big revalation about him is that he considers all of society to be insane in some way or other, and aspires to have the entire state of New York (and eventually the world) under psychiatric treatment and control.

So for all that this book was written in 1969, and the main disaster predicted in the book didn't come true, it's still a book that has fascinating things to say about human society, and some of those things are more relevant now than they ever were.

2 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars John Brunner - need i say more, June 14, 2000

By 

Mr R Stanley (UK) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Jagged Orbit (Paperback)

Jagged Orbit would be a frightening book if it were written now; that it was written 30 years ago ays a lot for Brunner's exceptionalism. Like the sheep look up and stand on zanzibar, Brunner cuts to the heart of society, with a style all of his own. I love Brunner, and would recommend him to anyone who can read.