John Brunner was the James Burke (Connections) of science fiction about the near future. Brunner was a polymath who used his diverse sources of knowledge to write four novels (Stand on Zanzibar (1968), The Jagged Orbit (1969), The Sheep Look Up (1972), and The Shockwave Rider (1975)) that extrapolated on everything he knew to envision the early 21st century. No one can predict the future, and Brunner gets all the details wrong in these novels, yet they eerily foretell the problems we face today. They are sometimes called Brunner’s Club of Rome Quartet, inspired by the famous Club of Rome from the 1960s, a think tank devoted to global problems of that day. Its most famous report, The Limits of Growth has been vilified over the decades, but time has proven it wasn’t wrong.
Brunner obviously wanted us to confront those problems before they happened. Of course, we haven’t. Even though some of Brunner’s novels won critical praise when they came out and Stand on Zanzibar won a Hugo, they were never popular. Brunner aimed as high as George Orwell, but his books never reached Nineteen Eighty-Four‘s impact. The Jagged Orbit was nominated for the Nebula and won the BSFA award, The Sheep Look Up was nominated for the Nebula, and The Shockwave Rider came in 2nd for the Locus Award for SF Novel. These four novels were mostly respected by critics, but they never became popular with science fiction readers. And as many brilliant science fiction writers know, science fiction gets no respect outside the genre.
I’ve always considered those Brunner novels to be adult science fiction and most science fiction fans don’t want adult literature. Most science fiction fans read science fiction for fun, for escape, and aren’t looking for serious speculation about present-day life or the near future.
When I use the term adult science fiction, I don’t mean Sci-Fi with X-rated content. Young adult fiction has become very popular and successful, even with adult readers. Young adult fiction usually means protagonists are in their teens. But I think the label should apply to any theme or subject that mostly appeals to young adults. Most science fiction is aimed at adolescent readers, or older readers who prefer not to grow up. And in our society, adolescence has extended into the twenties, and even later for many people. There are some awfully big kids still playing with their Star Wars toys.
To me, adult literature deals with the problems of being an adult in our current reality. That apparently doesn’t leave much territory for adult science fiction since it’s usually not set in our current reality. But let me give you an example of how a novel set in the future can be adult science fiction.
The Shockwave Rider came out in 1975, and its setting is the United States in the early 21st century. In other words, our current reality. Now I don’t mean adult science fiction is only stories set in our current day, the setting can be anytime or place in the universe so long as the reader finds something useful in the story that gives insight into being an adult. The Shockwave Rider was adult science fiction in 1975 and will probably continue to be for years to come. Unfortunately, after decades of knowing about the problems presented in the novel, we ignore them. We don’t want to grow up.
Brunner’s novel is extrapolation. He was inspired by the 1970 nonfiction book, Future Shock by Alvin Toffler. Brunner asked: how can humans survive in a world that is growing ever more complex and stressful, living with ever more information, coexisting with computers and automation, dealing with environmental decline, epic natural catastrophes, growing insanity, political corruption, constant surveillance, and ever-changing job requirements. Exactly, what we’re experiencing now. Brunner asks how society and citizens cope?
The plot of The Shockwave Rider deals with Nick Haflinger, who is a computer hacker on the run. He was a prodigy raised by the government to be an elite leader in the future, but he rejects that upbringing, and escapes. The plot is complicated by flashbacks. Part of the narrative deals with Nick being psychoanalyzed after being recaptured. While he is on the run he meets Kate Grierson, a brilliant young woman who gets Nick faster than he gets himself. While they are on the run they live in two different utopian communes that offer alternative lifestyles to what the cyber-controlled government wants.
Throughout the course of the novel, Brunner throws out concepts and gadgets he thinks will be developed by the early 21st century. He was right in imagining we’d have a gadget-oriented future, but for the most part, he pictured us with different kinds of gadgets. However, Brunner almost imagines the smartphone. He pictures a palm size with a flip-up screen. Nick does much of his hacking on such a device. People do have desktop-type computers too in The Shockwave Rider, but Brunner pictures them as smart network terminals. That’s because in the 1960s and early 1970s time sharing computers were all the rage. He doesn’t foresee the laptop.
Even though The Shockwave Rider was hard to read, confusing at times plotwise, and with less than fully developed characters, it is chock full of brilliant speculation. Reading it made me realize just how hard Brunner thought about the future, and how hard we should have been thinking about it too. The tragedy of our times is we knew all this bad stuff was coming and we didn’t do shit about it.
Cli-Fi is becoming more common now, but it’s not always handled in a serious way. Often it’s just a setting for young adult adventure. The best current example, which I would consider an adult science fiction novel is The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson.
The Shockwave Rider is not the kind of science fiction most science fiction fans want to read. They want adventure, rebellion, thrill rides, etc. Young people love blows against the empire stories. If you’re reading a story about zooming around the galaxy, then you’re reading young adult fiction. If you’re reading about surviving in dystopia, that’s not ours, then you’re reading young adult fiction. If you’re reading about being an old person whose mind is downloaded into a clone body, then you’re reading young adult fiction. Most far-out science fictional ideas are ones that appeal to the young adult in us. And I’m not being critical. I still love that stuff too, and I’m 71.
The Shockwave Rider is hard to read. Not just because it explores surviving in this reality, but because its storytelling structure is convoluted and hard to understand. Today, this novel is mostly unknown, but what little fame it does have, is because it’s credited as a work of proto-cyberpunk fiction. And Brunner gets credit for the term “computer worm.” But it’s much more than that.
Brunner was one of those writers who was way smarter than his readers. He was smarter than most people. Unfortunately, being smart doesn’t bring happiness. From 1968-1975, Brunner wrote a series of novels in which he seriously worried about life in the 21st century. There’s a monograph on Brunner in the Modern Masters of Science Fiction series called John Brunner by Jad Smith that I found rewarding. In some ways, Brunner comes across as a tragic figure in this study.
Brunner’s books are full of ideas, and reading about them made me want to read them. Unfortunately, they often fail to entertain. And I think that’s why most adult science fiction fails. It’s hard to pull off a serious book about serious problems and still be entertaining. It can be done. Nineteen Eighty-Four is an excellent example. So is Earth Abides by George R. Stewart.
True adult literature tends to come across as biographical because becoming an adult involves becoming mature. In adult novels, we learn so much about the main character and their growth that we feel we know them. Brunner never could bring this off. His characters are adults, and they struggle with adult problems, but we never feel them growing or even being real. They are puppets Brunner uses to act out situations he wants to intellectually explore.
Science fiction writers have the problem that they are seldom taken seriously by the literary world. They often complain that this lack of recognition keeps them from becoming financially successful. This was true of Brunner too. Despite winning awards and gaining a certain amount of respect and fame within the genre, his writing never provided the kind of money and respect he thought he deserved. I’ve wondered if it’s time to reevaluate Brunner’s work.
I found it very difficult to get into The Shockwave Writer. I had to try several times. I had to push myself to keep reading, but as I went along it became more rewarding. The Shockwave Writer is not a page-turner. But neither are Edith Wharton and Henry James. I don’t think his work will ever appeal to science fiction fans who crave young adult science fiction. And I don’t think there are many fans of adult science fiction. Kim Stanley Robinson writes adult science fiction and gets a certain amount of recognition. But his books just aren’t fun to read like the science fiction books that are popularly discussed on YouTube.
Ultimately, I’m not sure science fiction is the venue for adult literature. Brunner should have written speculative nonfiction. Science fiction works best at delighting our youthful sense of wonder. Aging makes us cynical and realistic.
For now, my favorite example of adult science fiction is Earth Abides. Its main character, Isherwood Williams, grows throughout the novel, and the ending is especially adult. But I’m open for you to leave comments about SF novels you think are adult in the comments.
James Wallace Harris, 7/18/23
Classics of Science Fiction 
JWH: ‘People do have desktop-type computers too in The Shockwave Rider, but Brunner pictures them as smart network terminals.’
Yes, but to cut Brunner a bit of a break here (and point out the obvious): is the way we use our desktops and laptops, mostly connected to the resources of the Internet, really that different from their being ‘smart network terminals’?
By the way, it might be interesting for you to look at the other SF novel from this period that looks forwards and tries to grapple with what a fully-networked world would look like, Algis Budrys’s MICHAELMAS.
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Mainly I pointed that out because a couple years ago I read A People’s History of Computing in the United States by Joy Lis Rankin. It’s a history of timesharing computers, and an alternate view of computer history that we get from books like Hackers by Steven Levy.
Actually, I’m already taking your suggestion. I’ve been going back and looking at science fiction books from the 1970s. It seems it was a time when science fiction writers were trying to write more serious SF, especially for the adult mind. And I’ve been getting into Algis Budrys. I haven’t read <Michaelmas year. Besides Brunner I’m also interested in D. G. Compton.
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JWH: ‘…the 1970s … was a time when science fiction writers were trying to write more serious SF, especially for the adult mind.’
It’s almost always that time and there’s almost always some writer(s) somewhere banging their head(s) against that wall. Recently, too, I’m noting more young mainstream lit writers trying SF — as well they should if they want to reflect the technology-driven, climate-afflicted world of 2023, which is right out of Brunner, as you say — and sometimes those mainstream writers doing better at it than the putative genre writers.
And yeah, I remember the mid-1970s. There were books like Brunner’s SHOCKWAVE RIDER, MICHAELMAS, Ian Watson’s THE EMBEDDING, Silverberg’s last two efforts before he gave up writing at his full reach as a losing cause. And then 1977 and STAR WARS happened, and it was moron time again, with Tolkien-clones and Del Rey also helping to push the level of what was published down into double-digits IQ level.
I didn’t read any SF again till the early 1980s, when Gibson, Sterling, Shepard, Robinson and that bunch all showed up.
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I’m going to quibble a bit with your assessment. Not all of it, but some aspects. I read these books in the late 70s, early 80s, and they blew me away.
They were by far the most impactful stories I’d ever read up to that time. I loved them. The Shockwave rider and Jagged Orbit in particular were mind blowing for me. It wasn’t until Vernor Vinge’s A Fire Upon the Deep and A Darkness in the Sky that I read books that blew me away like Brunner’s had.
So, for me they were impactful, and I really wanted to meet the author, which I finally did circa 1991/93. I had the pleasure of sharing a dinner table with him, which was not unfortunately pleasurable. He was a mess, pompius and rude.
At the time I could only see him through my disappointment, and not as the sick man he was, struggling with the discontent of his life. Now I remember this meeting with sadness.
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Ashley, we share something in common. I also got to spend time with John Brunner. My college roommate, Greg, got to chauffer John Brunner, Fred Pohl, and James Gunn when they came to our university to give talks, and I got to tag along. The three took us to lunch, and Greg and I got to listen to three science fiction writers talk about the old days, and sometimes answer our questions. Then we took Pohl and Gunn to the airport, and Brunner asked us to drive him around Memphis. He was then President of the Martin Luther King society in England and wanted to see the Lorraine Motel. This was around 1973 I think, long before it became a museum. After that Brunner took Greg and I out to dinner at a Mexican restaurant. I thought Brunner was smart and sophisticated. He was very gracious with Greg and I, telling us all kinds of things. Of course, this was during the peak of his success.
I’ve read about what happened to Brunner later in his life, near the time when you had dinner with him. That was after his wife had died, which was very hard on him. I also read that in later years he was disliked by fans and fellow writers. My guess is a long career decline, and a failure to get the recognition he thought he deserved made him much less gracious than when we got to meet him. My guess is Brunner was a bit of a prodigy when he was young, he expected a lot more success in life. I can easily picture such a person becoming pompous. Very smart people often become bitter when they get old and become far less patient with us ordinary people. It’s a shame he became what you got to witness. And I imagine, he was arrogant when he was younger too, he probably could just hide it better.
I was also blown away when I read Stand on Zanzibar in 1969, the year after it came out. It was just stunning. At the time I was 17-18 and I wanted the future to be like the Heinlein juveniles I grew up reading. Brunner’s future horrified me. I reread Stand on Zanzibar when it came out on audio in this century, and I realized Brunner had been more right about the future than any other writer I read growing up.
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I wish I could’ve met him in his prime. And, as you say, he was more right about the shape of the future than any other writer of his time.
It truly saddens me what happened to him.
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When and where did you get to meet Brunner? Did you ask him about his Club of Rome books? Did you ask him what he thought about the future now that it was twenty-years on from those books? And by any chance did you ask, “Why are you such an asshole?” He could have philosophized about that too, and it would have been very interesting.
Have you read other books by Brunner? Any later ones? I also admire the Vinge books you mention. What else do you like? Anything from the last ten years?
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I met John either at the 1991 British Eastercon in Glasgow, or the 1993 Eastercon on Jersey.
And no, I didn’t ask why he was being like he was. I’m British and we rarely confront our heroes in such a manner. And also no, I didn’t ask any relevant questions either.
He was all a bit too much for my younger self to handle at that time.
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Earth Abides is truly a moving and elegic novel. I’m not sure it is SF though but more like a pandemic bucolic. It is not clear to me that technology was the cause of the spread of the virus in the novel and not a natural event. The book reminded me somewhat of Simak and Bradbury and I have no objection to it being called SF. The boundaries of genre are becoming increasingly porous nowadays and I believe this was also the case with Stewart and Bradbury.
I will mention a few of my favorite writers both old and new. I think Lucius Shepard’s, John Crowley ( SF but mostly Fantasy) and Gene Wolfe’s work are adult. Older writers like Blish and Lem too. Further M. John Harrison and Ballard. Generally speaking was the pulp era SF not very mature. Though I love Robert E. Howard, C.L. Moore, Lovecraft and so forth. Was Leigh Brackett (in particular The Long Tomorrow) mature? Pat Frank’s Alas Babylon and Ward Moore’s Bring the Jubilee were. The last two were again more ‘slipstream’ like George R. Stewart.
It is difficult to define adult literature I guess. Content, style, narrative structure, character development and the overall message and political aspects may all be treated by the writer in a childish or mature fashion. Elements that constitute maturity are possibly a sense of alienation, ambiguïty, tragedy and maybe even sin and horror? Of course it is possible to expand this list!
These (post) postmodern days the question if SF is a proper venue for adult literature becomes mute because the genre boundaries are less fixed and sociiety as a whole is becoming science fictional. Is adult fiction still possible would be a better question.
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Post apocalyptic stories are the territory that science fiction has claimed, so I consider Earth Abides to be science fiction. But it was published as a mainstream novel. But then, so was Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Yes, it’s difficult to define adult fiction, and my definition is only mine. I expect people to disagree with it. But after being a science fiction fan for over sixty years, I realize most of it was aimed at people under thirty, or even under twenty. Not because of their maturity, but because that’s an age when we haven’t grown up and have so many dreams about the future. To me, adult fiction is what we read after we give up on those dreams and get down to Earth and do what’s needed.
But I must confess, I fought long and hard not to adultify And I think that’s true for many Baby Boomers and the generations that have come later. We just don’t want to grow up.
I agree that John Crowley writes adult science fiction. He was one of my weekly teachers at Clarion West. And Lucius Shepard spent a Saturday afternoon with us too. I haven’t read much Shepard, but what I have does seem more focused on adult life. I’ve been reading more Lem, Ballard, and Blish is recent years too.
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Thank you for your reply.
“Is adultification stultification” is the question I am pondering now while waging a losing battle approaching 70.
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Explain more about your concept of adultification stultification. I assume you mean the problem of getting old and jaded, but maybe not. How do you fight it? Have you found any books that helped, either science fiction or other kinds?
One TV show I’m currently admiring that I feel is positive and adult is Call the Midwife. I have a hard time finding film and TV science fiction that I admire. I really got into For All Mankind on AppleTV. And Sile is okay.
I also struggle with trying to stay positive and to find new sources of wonder. I can’t watch most TV shows anymore. However, I do stumble upon documentaries that inspire me. And I’m finding plenty to read. I’m looking forward to the new film about Oppenheimer.
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It was a joke that didn’t quite succeed. From the perspective of the youngster adulthood is stultifying, from the perspective of the adult it is both necessary and very limited. The past is accruing and the future is shrinking on a personal level. Much of the personal past is a dead weight and therefore stultifying. Not losing your sense of wonder is indeed a mode of countering a growing lack of flexibility to keep your mind open and hopefull. Gnawing and gnashing one’s teeth is not an option.
Lately I’m reading Conan the Barbarian comics from the seventies which is stultifying in a way. I’ve been selling off a lot of books that try my powers of concentration too much, mostly academic works that I loved to read in the past. The short story format is what I’m liking more and more. A recent discovery is T.F. Powys whose short story collections I find amazing. Less stultifying and more adultifying in this case I gather. The supernatural fiction and fantasy from this era is interesting as well. See Bleilers “Guide to Supernatural Fiction” and his “Supernatural Fiction Writers” for a better impression. Powys is definitely undervalued.
“For All Mankind” I liked too. Silo I have not yet seen. I like film noir a lot especially from the fourties and fifties but also the likes of “Blade Runner”.
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This is really a very good analysis with many insights worth noting. I agree on almost everything, and I wholeheartedly agree with this statement in particular: “Most science fiction novels are aimed at teenage readers or older readers who prefer not to grow up.” Rarely are those main characters adults and certainly not people our age (I’m year 1957).
Now for something completely different: If I remember correctly, you wrote a blog post a while back how science fiction has changed as a result of the knowledge gained from exploring the solar system with planetary probes. Unfortunately I can no longer find the post. Is it still available?
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I have the hardest time finding my old essays. I never can remember their titles, and often the keywords I search on have been used in dozens of my essays. However, are you thinking of this?
I have two blogs, and I often forget which one I wrote a particular essay for. I try to put the non-SF stuff on https://auxiliarymemory.com because my friends claim they don’t like reading about science fiction. I now use https://classicsofsciencefiction.com for all my thoughts on science fiction. Maybe it was this one:
If these aren’t the essays, I’ll keep looking.
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Probably both of them as I liked both. Thank you very much. Keep on writing!
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Sorry, forgot to answer these other questions too: “Have you read other books by Brunner? Any later ones? I also admire the Vinge books you mention. What else do you like? Anything from the last ten years?”
I’ve read all four of Brunner’s Club of Rome books, and Also The Squares of the City, but nothing else of his. Sorry.
Recent authors I’ve liked are Adrian Tchaikovsky, Martha Wells, Marko Kloos, Mike Herron (not SF), Peter Cawdron amongst many others.
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I recall when the cyberpunks, particularly Bruce Sterling, were feeling their oats, they talked about how their movement was going to save sf because they, unlike past works, extrapolated more than one trend into their futures. I asked at the time: what about John Brunner and The Jagged Orbit?
I see I have read The Shockwave Rider in 1990. Maybe I’ll get out my notes on it and post them.
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You point regarding whether or not Brunner would have been a more effective non-fiction writer has interesting implications for fiction too. Brunner tried to follow modernist authors like Dos Passos whose project was “metaliterary” in the sense that he can be considered broadly as a part of avant-garde trends in literature through the late 19th into the 20th century that called into question the relationship between the arts and everyday life. Some of this remains in Brunner, to the extent that his novel is so eerily real in its presentation of a fictional future. It really does seem like it could be our future minus many of the details insofar as he captured the essence of the subjective sense of our present–its *ambience*.
I love Brunner’s Club of Rome novels. I am most familiar with The Shockwave Rider, The Sheep Look Up and Stand on Zanzibar, in that order. I discovered them by way of cyberpunk writers like Gibson, Sterling and Shirley around 1990. This Brunner was a revelation. Even then you knew he got some stuff wrong, like computers, but it didn’t matter. The vision of a near future he presented was overwhelming in the same way people spoke of ‘culture shock’ and ‘information overload’. It was dazzling in its terrifying scale.
I might use all this talk as impetus to reread The Jagged Orbit, which I read once 30 years ago but barely recall.
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I read Stand on Zanzibar in the 80’s and was very impressed with it. As time goes by I’m more and more impressed (and usually horrified) by the things he got right: muckers, permanent insurrections, proxy wars, technoterrorists, evolving social mores and the reactions of older people to them.
On the other hand, Stand on Zanzibar was ultimately optimistic, or at least ended on a hopeful note. If it had not, I probably wouldn’t have liked it so much.
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I read Stand on Zanzibar in the 80’s and was very impressed with it. As time goes by I’m more and more impressed (and usually horrified) by the things he got right: muckers, permanent insurrections, proxy wars, technoterrorists, evolving social mores and the reactions of older people to them.
On the other hand, Stand on Zanzibar was ultimately optimistic, or at least ended on a hopeful note. If it had not, I probably wouldn’t have liked it so much.
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