54 of 60 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Lost classic, March 9, 2000
This review is from: The Sheep Look Up (Mass Market Paperback)
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.
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111 of 140 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
eerily prescient, July 8, 2002
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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17 of 21 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Stop, You're Killing Me, April 29, 2005
This classic from John Brunner is a fascinating and terrifying vision of a dysfunctional future in which the worst flaws of modern behavior lead to disastrous results for humanity. Dealing with environmental degradation, the book is surely a fractured masterpiece of human misery and social dementia. There are a few problems with the believability of this book though. Brunner's future is awkwardly projected directly from the Cold War and civil rights struggles of the late 60s, making much of this book's background action quite seem quite dated. Brunner's environmental catastrophes are frighteningly possible if current trends continue to their logical extreme. But the worldwide burning rivers, dead oceans, and poison smog would take centuries to develop and appear rather hysterical in hindsight, as Brunner envisioned these things happening a mere decade after the time he wrote the book. And one fundamental plotting problem here concerns the success of mysterious hero Austin Train in getting many millions of people behind his budding anti-corporate revolution. Brunner implies that Train operates only on charisma and the obvious truth of his message. It is hard to imagine this happening in the real world, regardless of how correct or compelling a revolutionary's message truly is. Brunner also has the tendency to kill off his characters just when they start to get interesting.
But with those problems aside, Brunner still lays out an absolutely brilliant analysis of how American society would deteriorate in the face of an obvious disaster, no matter how farfetched that disaster may be. Those in the political and economic elite will stack the deck in their favor, continuing their lives of comfort while regular people are left to fend for themselves. Anyone who points out obvious problems in the American system (in this case, catastrophic environmental degradation) will be branded as dissidents and traitors, while empty patriotic sloganeering will be the easy answer to those who can't face the truth. The minority will resort to repressive tactics to both reinforce its know-nothing point of view and to suppress the suffering but unorganized majority. Despite this book's particular problems in setting and plot development, Brunner's take on the resulting social and political collapse seems depressingly and terrifyingly possible, and that's what makes this book a winner. [~doomsdayer520~]
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