The Shockwave Rider (Mass Market Paperback)

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Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

This book has always been popular with the techy-geeky crowd, but, since it was first published in the '70s, it missed out on the cyberpunk revolution of the '80s. It's too bad, because this is a compelling story of a future world tied together by a universal data network, a world that could be our tomorrow. It's a tense place filled with information overload and corporate domination, and nearly everything is known about everybody. Except Nickie Haflinger, a prodigy whose talents allow him to switch identities with a phone call. Nickie plans to change the world, if only he can keep from getting caught.

Product Description

A Science Fiction Book Club Selection

"When John Brunner first told me of his intention to write this book, I was fascinated -- but I wondered whether he, or anyone, could bring it off. Bring it off he has -- with cool brilliance. A hero with transient personalities, animals with souls, think tanks and survival communities fuse to form a future so plausibly alive it has twitched at me ever since."

-- Alvin Toffler

Author of Future Shock

He Was The Most Dangerous Fugitive Alive, But He Didn't Exist!

Nickie Haflinger had lived a score of lifetimes...but technically he didn't exist. He was a fugitive from Tarnover, the high-powered government think tank that had educated him. First he had broken his identity code -- then he escaped.

Now he had to find a way to restore sanity and personal freedom to the computerized masses and to save a world tottering on the brink of disaster.

He didn't care how he did it...but the government did. That's when his Tarnover teachers got him back in their labs...and Nickie Haflinger was set up for a whole new education!

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Product Details

• Mass Market Paperback: 288 pages
• Publisher: Del Rey Books (October 12, 1984)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0345324315
• ISBN-13: 978-0345324313
• Product Dimensions: 6.7 x 4.2 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (25 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,337,608 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars One of the 5 I'd take on a desert island, February 16, 1997

By A Customer

The title comes from Alvin Toffler's "FutureShock." In the best of his books (Stand on Zanzibar, The Sheep Look Up, and Shockwave Rider), Brunner takes one problematic element of modern society and extrapolates into the future. In Stand on Zanzibar it is population pressure; in The Sheep Look Up it is environmental pollution; in Shockwave Rider it is the increasing rate of change and its effect on us. (BTW, the rest of his books are very different; and he's written some of the most depressing SF I've ever read; it might have been therapy for him but his "Total Eclipse" might send me into it!)

The increasing rate of change has sent most Americans into mental distress. The most obvious cause (i.e. the most identifiable thing with an increasing rate of change) is the internet (Brunner doesn't call it that, but he has it right nonetheless) -- everything one does is subject to scrutiny by the Feds and by anyone who can hack the net. The flip side is that oneself is rarely able to find out important information. In other words: there are those around one who know things they shouldn't, are improperly profiting from it, and one can't do anything about it. The protagonist is a goverment-trained programmer who becomes hacker extraordinaire.

The structure of the book takes getting used to, but is also the reason its a desert island book. Shockwave Rider is arranged in short sections, the shortest only a paragraph, the longest rarely more than a few pages. The scene jumps around and there seems to be no continuity. Stick with it! It will become clear soon enough, and it worth plowing on till it does. One hint: one type of section is commentary, not plot. Each section has a heading -- a quote or a reference. I would spend my time on my hypothetical desert island reading this book; but most importantly tracking down the references and discovering the relevance of the heading and commentary to the plot.

Writing about Shockwave Rider makes me want to reread it; I think I'll do that now.

15 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars I demand a reprint, November 27, 2001

By A Customer

Little is to be added to the other reviews. This 28-year old book not only decribed the internet as it will become very soon long before its inception, but computer viruses (called "worms" by Brunner) before the first PC too, plus a few other things and issues not even mentioned yet.
Since a friend gave it to me to read many years ago, I've bought every copy of it I could find. I have kept one German and one English version and as I will not let them out of my bookshelf under no circumstances I gave all others away as gifts, still looking for more copies to give away.
It has been sold out so often and for such a long time, each time and in each of those two languages available to me, that if one were to be a follower of conspiracy theories, well, the fact that this book is not reprinted as often as some other books of Brunner are would be reason for suspicion.

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Foresight into the Future!, October 26, 2001

By	JW "jascha18" (Chicago) - See all my reviews

This is a great great book! It was first published in 1975 with was a year before the first personal computer! Before the internet! But it forsaw all of these things and more. This book is also rumored to the inspiration for the first computer "worm" written by Robert Morris. It is in my opinion one of the greatest sci-fi books ever written. And equal to Neuromancer in terms of cyber genera books in greatness.