I'd like to start this off by saying that a book, like anything else, can be seen in its day as a grand, forward thinking, piece of work. As time passes its glory fades and doesn't hold up well. This is one of those books.
I had to put this book away and read something else on so many occasions that it took me three months to complete it.
Written in 1968 it focuses mostly on overpopulation which was a big deal back then. In 1968 there were 3.53 billion people in the world. In 2010, when the book takes place there were 6.9, so it doubled. As of the end of 2017 there are 7.6 billion and none of the prognostications about calamity have come true.
To be fair there are some things that Brunner got right, such as corporations becoming so large that they're wealthier than some, even many countries or massive centralized databases.
My problem with this book started on page one, and continued page upon page of nonsensical jargon. As I understand it Brunner intentionally wrote it this way. After the real book starts and we get an actual story, Brunner stops and inserts more pages of garbage that come in the form of excerpts for future books, commentary, news, and incoherent rambling of the SCANALYZER.
This disjointed writing pulled me out of the story every couple of chapters it seemed and in the end, I didn't care about any of the characters or the social commentary, or the story at all. Now I'm not pulling the plug on Brunner as this is the first of his books I've read and I hear great things about his other works and he's certainly written plenty.
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