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Bug Jack Barron Kindle Edition

by Norman Spinrad (Author), Michael Moorcock (Foreword) Format: Kindle Edition

4.1 45 ratings

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GET SET FOR THE BEST THING THAT EVER HAPPENED TO YOU!

The banned book is back! You've heard of it, now you can read it!

Lover and hero, Jack Barron, troubleshooter and media god of the Bug Jack Barron Show, has one last chance to hit it big when he meets Benedict Howards, the power-mad man with the secret to immortality. A Hugo and Nebula Award finalist!

With an Afterword by SFWA Grandmaster Michael Moorcock.

Norman Spinrad is the author of over twenty novels, including BUG JACK BARRON, THE IRON DREAM, CHILD OF FORTUNE, PICTURES AT 11, GREENHOUSE SUMMER, and THE DRUID KING.

He has also published something like 60 short stories collected in half a dozen volumes. The novels and stories have been published in about 15 languages.

He's written teleplays, including the classic Star Trek, "The Doomsday Machine," and two produced feature films DRUIDS and LA SIRENE ROUGE. He is a long time literary critic, sometime film critic, perpetual political analyst, and sometime songwriter.

He's also briefly been a radio phone show host, has appeared as a vocal artist on three albums, and occassionally performs live. He's been a literary agent, and President of the Science Fiction Writers of America and World SF. He's posted 21 YouTube videos to date.

He grew up in New York, has lived in Los Angeles, San Francisco, London, and Paris, and travelled widely in Europe and rather less so in Latin America, Asia, and Oceania.

Print length

386 pages
Language

English
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On Kindle Scribe
Publication date

May 13, 2011
File size

1377 KB
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Alfred Bester
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Customer reviews

4.1 out of 5

45 global ratings

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Wonderful Read, Wonderful Imagination

Reviewed in the United States on July 24, 2001

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Norman Spinrad is one of those authors who never "broke out" but not because of the quality of his work. I would rank him with Ellison and Dick for quality. In short, he should be one of the greats.
His imagination is so rich that you will spend as much, or more, time thinking about what you are reading as actually reading his work. This book is a tremendous example of his gift. Spinrad understands the direction our purient privacy denying society twenty years before we arrived in our current sorry state.
If anything, reading this book you often forget when he was writing because the society he describes is seemingly so famil

13 people found this helpful

Iconic 1960s New Wave Science Fiction, Imagining Politics as Reality Television

Reviewed in the United States on July 21, 2019

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In his Berkeley Baby Bolshevik days Jack Barron dreamt of power—power to change the world. Years later, he has power, but of a very different kind. As host of the weekly television show “Bug Jack Barron”, he sits in the catbird seat, taking carefully screened calls from those abused by impersonal organisations and putting those in charge in the hot seat, live via vidphone, with no tape delay. One hundred million people tune in to the show, so whatever bugs the caller, bugs Jack Barron, and immediately bugs America.

Jack's Berkeley crowd, veterans of the civil rights battles, mostly consider him a sell-out, although they have sold out in their own ways to the realities of power and politics. But when Jack crosses swords with Benedict Howards, he is faced with an adversary of an entirely different order of magnitude than any he has previously encountered. Howards is president of the Foundation for Human Immortality, which operates centres which freeze the bodies of departed clients and funds research into the technologies which will allow them to be revived and achieve immortality. Only the well-heeled need apply: a freezer contract requires one to deposit US$500,000 (this is in 1969 gold dollars; in today's phoneybucks, the equivalent is in excess of three million). With around a million people already frozen, Howards sits on half a trillion dollars (three trillion today), and although this money is nominally held in trust to be refunded to the frozen after their revival, Howards is in fact free to use the proceeds of investing it as he wishes. You can buy almost anything with that kind of money, politicians most definitely included.

Howards is pushing to have his foundation declared a regulated monopoly, forcing competitors out of the market and placing its governance under a committee appointed by the president of the United States. Barron takes on Howards with a call from a person claiming he was denied a freezer contract due to his race, and sets up a confrontation with Howards in which Barron has to decide whether his own integrity has a price and, if so, what it is. As he digs into Howards' foundation, he stumbles upon details which hint of secrets so shocking they might overturn the political landscape in the U.S. But that may only be the tip of the iceberg.

This is one of the iconic novels of “new wave” science fiction from the late 1960s. It is written in what was then called an “experimental”, stream of consciousness style, with paragraphs like:

“The undulating blue-green light writhing behind her like a forest of tentacles the roar of the surf like the sigh of some great beached and expiring sea animal, seemed to press her against the glass reality-interface like a bubble being forced up by decay-gas pressure from the depths of an oily green swamp pool. She felt the weight, the pressure of the whole room pushing behind her as if the blind green monsters that lurked in the most unknowable pits in the ass-end of her mind were bubbling up from the depths and elbowing her consciousness out of her own skull.”

Back in the day, we'd read something like this and say, “Oh, wow”. Today, many readers may deem such prose stylings as quaint as those who say “Oh, wow”.

This novel is a period piece. Reading it puts you back into the mindset of the late 1960s, when few imagined that technologies already in nascent form would destroy the power of one-to-many media oligopolies, and it was wrong in almost all of its extrapolation of the future. If you read it then (as I did) and thought it was a masterpiece (as I did), it may be worth a second glance to see how far we've come.

4 people found this helpful

After 46 years, it is still germane.

Reviewed in the United States on February 24, 2017

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I read this back in the early days, 1970 or 71, and it is one of a handful of "Hippy Style" novels that left me thinking about deeper meanings.

It still does.

2 people found this helpful

Michael G Kurilla

Heart warming underdog tale that hasn't aged well

Reviewed in the United States on June 26, 2021

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Norman Spinrad's Bug Jack Barron is an entertaining tale that unfortunately has not aged well in spite of the fact that its themes of racial injustice, economic inequality, and corrupt and captured political environment ring just as true today (if not more so) as back in the 60's. Jack Barron is the popular TV host of his own weekly show where he engages with regular people and draws attention to their plights - callers are encouraged to 'bug' Jack about an issue. Jack also has a history of having established a major political party back in his college days. The plot involves a wealthy tycoon (a Gates/Musk type) who is a multibillionaire (equivalent to trillionaire today) who is pushing for monopoly rights for 'freezing' people as part of his quest for immortality. Barron gets involved and learns that the treatment has already been perfected, but has some dark, nasty secrets the tycoon doesn't want to get out.

The basic plot has more of made for TV feel, but may have been sufficient for its time. The sci-fi aspect is a bit pulpy and it's hard to believe the degree of confidence in living millions of years after only a few months of the treatment. At the same time, it's hard to see how the whole process works could be kept secret when most of the people involved in the project were not going to benefit from it. Lastly, the tycoon was a megalomaniac and it was hard to imagine someone reaching that level without having a constant entourage of followers doing for him the activities that get him into trouble. Finally, the language is a bit crude, but most likely appropriate for the era, but it reads more like Huckleberry Finn today.

One person found this helpful

Dimitris Anastasiadis

Reviewed in the United States on September 22, 2017

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everything isOK

Cyberpunk, before Gibson & co...

Reviewed in the United States on May 5, 2000

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This is a great pre-cyberpunk novel. The main character, Jack Barron, is a TV journalist. His nemesis and arch-villain is one rich and ruthless industrial. He enjoys picking on that guy, and playing the part of the chivalrous, 1st amendment fanatic journalist. No problem...
Then, one day, he for a change decides to run with a different story: someone has apparently been ... hmm ... buying young children from poor, very poor families... Over the course of a few weeks, Jack Barron will discover how those events are connected, who is behind all that (you have one guess...) and what is the goal behind them (do you like the idea of dying? Just asking...)
Then, he will be face with the ultimate challenge... What exactly is the price of his silence?
A very good book, much better written than many other Spinrad books (he's a little bit too weird for my taste, at times...) A great read.

13 people found this helpful

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Paul

Love it or hate it

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 14, 2017

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This is a real sliding white hot acid stream of consciousness pop art experience as much as a book. If you remember the 60's through a haze, you'll probably like it. If you are a modern politically correct eunuch you'll probably be clawing at your chintz curtains within the first few pages.

No doubt it will offend those who want to bowdlerise classic literature to pretend the nasty old past never existed. So read it with an open mind. It is very much a product of its times. Science fiction on a baroque scale.

Geordie A.

Classic

Reviewed in Canada on September 28, 2013

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While not 1984 or brave new world it is one book that you should read. Pick up a copy, read and gift to other intelligent people.

jean-philippe Ray

Norman Spinrad en anglais, c'est autre chose ... ;)

Reviewed in France on June 26, 2013

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L'édition que j'ai reçue m'a révélé la possible adaptation par Costa Gavras. L'histoire tourne un peu court vers la fin, 'tain de moment grec...

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K. Morris

60s Classic

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on March 11, 2013

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This could only have been written in the 60s and is an eerie prediction of what has come to pass on television. Plus the search for eternal youth which today is as desperate as it was in this book but manifested by surgery and injections. One for the cultural historians.

Shropshire Lass

SF history

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on November 28, 2015

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A classic of SF perhaps not PC enough for today but worth a read if you like old time SF.

One person found this helpful

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