BRUNNER, John (Kilian Houston)

(1934-)

   UK writer, mostly of sf, though he has published several thrillers, contemporary novels and volumes of poetry (see listing below). He began very early to submit sf stories to periodicals, and when he was 17 published his first novel, Galactic Storm (1951) under the house name Gill HUNT. Even in a field noted for its early starters, his precocity was remarkable. His first US sale, "Thou Good and Faithful" as by John Loxmith, was featured in ASF in early 1953, and in the same year he published in a US magazine the first novel he would later choose to acknowledge; it was eventually to appear in book form as The Space-Time Juggler (1953 Two Complete Science-Adventure Books as "The Wanton of Argus" as by Kilian Houston Brunner; 1963 chap dos US) which, with its sequel, The Altar on Asconel (1965 dos US), plus an article on SPACE OPERA and "The Man from the Big Dark" (1958), was much later assembled as Interstellar Empire (omni 1976 US). This Interstellar Empire sequence takes place in the twilight of a Galactic Empire - a time rather favoured by JB in his space operas - when barbarism is general, though the Rimworlds (GALACTIC LENS) hold some hope for adventurers and mutants, who may eventually rebuild civilization. But the series terminates abruptly, before its various protagonists are able to begin their renaissance, almost certainly reflecting JB's ultimate lack of interest in such stories, which he has since registered in print - though certainly he subsequently revised many of them, not necessarily to their betterment as "naive" adventures.In any case, this lessening of interest evinced itself only after very extensive publication of stories and novels describable as literate space opera. From 1953 to about 1957 JB's activity was intermittent, mainly through difficulty in making a living from full-time writing, a problem about which he has always been bitterly articulate. In the mid-1950s he was working full-time with a publishing house and elsewhere, writing only occasionally. In 1955 he published one story under the pseudonym Trevor Staines. A little later he sold two novels, again first to magazines: Threshold of Eternity (1959 dos US) and The Hundredth Millennium (1959 dos US; rev vt Catch a Falling Star 1968 US); they are two of the first novels he placed with ACE BOOKS. With the signing of the contract for the first, JB took up full-time freelancing once again.Over the next six years he published under his own name and as Keith Woodcott a total of 27 novels with ACE BOOKS, in addition to work with other publishers. For some readers, this spate of HARD-SF adventure stories still represents JB's most relaxed and fluent work as a writer. Two from 1960 are typical of the storytelling enjoyment he was able to create by applying to "modest" goals the formidable craft he had developed. The Atlantic Abomination (1960 dos US) is a genuinely terrifying story about a monstrous ALIEN, long buried beneath the Atlantic, who survives by mentally enslaving "inferior" species, rather like the thrint in Larry NIVEN's World of Ptavvs (1966). Sanctuary in the Sky (1960 dos US) is a short and simple SENSE-OF-WONDER tale, set in the FAR FUTURE in a star cluster very distant from Earth. Various conflicting planetary cultures (all human) can meet in peace only on the mysterious Waystation, which is a synthetic world. A ship full of squabbling passengers docks; with them is a mild-mannered stranger who immediately disappears. Soon it turns out that he's an Earthman, that Waystation is a colony ship owned by Earth, and that he's come to retrieve it. Mankind needs the ship: though this Galaxy is full, "there are other galaxies". Decades later, JB would rework the thematic concerns of this short novel at much greater length in A Maze of Stars (1991 US).The mass of Ace novels contains a second series, also truncated, though its structure is more open-ended than that of the earlier one. The Zarathustra Refugee Planets sequence, made up of Castaways' World (1963 dos US; rev vt Polymath 1974 US), Secret Agent of Terra (1962 dos US; rev vt The Avengers of Carrig 1969 US) and The Repairmen of Cyclops (1965 dos US; rev 1981 US), all later assembled as Victims of the Nova (omni 1989), deals over a long timescale with the survivors of human-colonized Zarathustra; when the planet's sun goes nova, 3000 spaceships carry a few million survivors into exile on a variety of uninhabited worlds. 700 years later, the Corps Galactic has the job of maintaining the isolation of these various cultures, so that, having reverted to barbarism, they can develop naturally; their separate histories constitute an experiment in cultural evolution. Despite these two series, and in contrast to some of his older peers, JB has only rarely attempted to link individual items into series or fixups. Both his space operas and his later, more ambitious works are generally initially conceived in the versions which the reader sees on book publication. Further Ace titles of interest include The Rites of Ohe (1963 dos US), To Conquer Chaos (1964 US; rev 1981 US) and Day of the Star Cities (1965 US; rev vt Age of Miracles 1973 US).As the 1960s progressed, more space operas appeared as well as several story collections, including Out of My Mind (coll 1967 US; the UK coll with the same name is a different selection, 1968) and Not Before Time (coll 1968), which include outstanding items like "The Last Lonely Man" (1964) and "The Totally Rich" (1963). JB's stories are generally free in form, sometimes experimental. By 1965, with the publication of THE WHOLE MAN (1958-9 Science Fantasy; fixup 1964 US; vt Telepathist 1965 UK) and The Squares of the City (1965 US), it was evident that JB would not be content to go on indefinitely writing the sf entertainments of which he had become master, and that he was determined to transform his sf habitat. THE WHOLE MAN, comprising fundamentally rewritten magazine stories and much new material, and generally considered to be one of JB's most successful novels, is an attempt to draw a psychological portrait of a deformed human with telepathic powers (ESP) who gradually learns how to use these powers in psychiatrically curative ways (for to communicate is to be human). The Squares of the City is a respectable try at a chess novel in which a chosen venue (in this case a city) serves as the board and characters as the various players. The stiffness of the resulting story may have been inevitable.JB's magnum opus, STAND ON ZANZIBAR (1968 US), perhaps the longest GENRE-SF novel to that date, came as the climax of the decade. The dystopian vision of this complex novel rests on the assumption that Earth's population will continue to expand uncontrollably; the intersecting stories of Norman House, a Black executive on a mission to the Third World to facilitate further economic penetration, and of Donald Hogan, a White "synthesist" and government agent, whose mission involves gaining control of a eugenics discovery, provide dominant strands in an assemblage of narrative techniques whose function of providing a social and cultural context points up their resemblance to the similar techniques used by John Dos Passos in USA (1930-36), but which (as John P. Brennan has noted) fail to conceal the underlying storytelling orthodoxy of the tale. It is perhaps for this reason that the resulting vision has a cumulative, sometimes overpowering effect, while at the same time the triumphalist logic of its pulp plotting (which descends from HOMER) urgently conveys a sense that answers will be forthcoming, and that the protagonists will win through. Through its density of reference, and through JB's admirable (though sometimes insecure) grasp of US idiom, the book's anti-Americanism has a satisfyingly US ring to it, so that its tirades do not seem smug; it won the 1968 HUGO and the 1970 BRITISH SCIENCE FICTION AWARD, and its French translation won the Prix Apollo (AWARDS) in 1973.Three further novels, all with some of the the same pace and intensity, make together a kind of thematic series of DYSTOPIAS. The Jagged Orbit (1969 US) conflates medical and military industrial complexes with the Mafia in a rather too tightly plotted, though occasionally powerful, narrative. The Sheep Look Up (1972 US), perhaps the most unrelenting and convincing dystopia of the four, and depressingly well documented, deals scarifyingly with POLLUTION in a plot whose relative looseness allows for an almost essayist exposition of the horrors in store for us. THE SHOCKWAVE RIDER (1975 US) employs similar reportage techniques in a story about a world enmeshed in a COMMUNICATIONS explosion. Unsurprisingly (with hindsight), though these novels received considerable critical attention, they in no way made JB's fortune. He has always been extremely open about his finances and his hopes for the future, and has made no secret of the let-down he felt on discovering himself, after these culminating efforts, still in the position of being forced to produce commercially to survive.In his decreasingly frequent publications since 1972, JB has tended to return to a somewhat more flamboyant version of the space-opera idiom he had used earlier. For some years his health remained uncertain, with a consequent severe slowing down of his once formidable writing speed. The relative lack of fluency and enthusiasm of novels like Total Eclipse (1974 US), The Infinitive of Go (1980 US) and Children of the Thunder (1989) cannot easily be denied. There is a sense in these novels that skill wars with convictions, and that, as a consequence, JB cannot any longer allow himself the orthodox delights of pure storytelling. Even The Great Steamboat Race (1983), an associational novel, set on the Mississippi River, which he devoted years to writing, shows some signs of a nagging dis-ease. But JB has undeniably made significant contributions to the sf space-opera redoubt, and has written several intellectually formidable tract-novels about the state of the world. The opinions extractable from these works are closer to left-wing than usual with US sf writers of his generation (these opinions, which he has articulated publicly many times, may be in part responsible for his failure to acquire a secure US marketing niche, as well as contributing to his loss of belief in the naive victories endemic to generic fiction), and in the end he may claim to have constituted a significant dissenting voice in the West's increasingly urgent debate about humanity's condition as the 20th century draws to a close.

   JC

   Other works: The Brink (1959); Echo in the Skull (1959 chap dos US; rev vt Give Warning to the World 1974 US); The World Swappers (1959); The Skynappers (1960 dos US); Slavers of Space (1960 dos US; rev vt Into the Slave Nebula 1968 US); Meeting at Infinity (1961 dos US); The Super Barbarians (1962 US); Times without Number (fixup 1962 dos US; rev 1969 US); No Future in It (coll 1962); The Astronauts Must Not Land (1963 dos US; rev vt More Things in Heaven 1973 US); The Dreaming Earth (1963 US); Listen! The Stars! (1963 chap dos US; rev vt The Stardroppers 1972 US); Endless Shadow (1964 chap dos US; rev vt Manshape 1982 US); Enigma from Tantalus (1965 dos US); The Long Result (1965); Now Then (coll 1965); A Planet of Your Own (1966 chap dos US); No Other Gods but Me (coll 1966); Born under Mars (1967 US); The Productions of Time (1967 US; text restored 1977 US); Quicksand (1967 US); Bedlam Planet (1968 US); Father of Lies (1962 Science Fantasy; 1968 chap dos US); Not Before Time (coll 1968); Double, Double (1969 US); Timescoop (1969 US); The Evil that Men Do (1966 NW; 1969 chap dos US); The Gaudy Shadows (1960 Science Fantasy; exp 1970), a technofantasy about psychotropic drugs; The Dramaturges of Yan (1972 US); The Wrong End of Time (1971 US); The Traveler in Black (coll of linked stories 1971 US; with 1 story added vt The Compleat Traveler in Black 1986 US), his best fantasy; Entry to Elsewhen (coll 1972 US); From this Day Forward (coll 1972); Time-Jump (coll 1973 US); The Stone that Never Came Down (1973 US); Web of Everywhere (1974 US); The Book of John Brunner (coll 1976 US); Foreign Constellations (coll 1980 US); Players at the Game of People (1980 US); While There's Hope (1982 chap); a series comprising The Crucible of Time (fixup 1983 US) and The Tides of Time (1984 US); The Shift Key (1987); The Best of John Brunner (coll 1988 US); A Case of Painter's Ear (1987 in Tales from the Forbidden Planet anth ed Roz KAVENEY; 1991 chap US); Muddle Earth (1993 US).

   As Keith Woodcott:I Speak for Earth (1961 dos US); The Ladder in the Sky (1962 dos US); The Psionic Menace (1963 dos US); The Martian Sphinx (1965 dos US).Non-genre novels: Of most interest are perhaps The Crutch of Memory (1964), A Plague on Both your Causes (1969; vt Blacklash 1969 US), Black is the Color (1956 as "This Rough Magic"; rev 1969 US), which is a thriller involving black MAGIC, The Devil's Work (1970), and Honky in the Woodpile (1971).

   Poetry: Trip: A Cycle of Poems (coll 1966 chap; rev 1971 chap); Life in an Explosive Forming Press (coll 1970 chap); A Hastily Thrown-together Bit of Zork (coll 1974 chap); Tomorrow May be Even Worse (coll 1978 chap US), an "alphabet" of sf CLICHES; A New Settlement of Old Scores (coll 1983 chap US).

   About the author: The Happening Worlds of John Brunner (critical anth 1975) ed Joseph W. de Bolt; John Brunner, Shockwave Writer: A Working Bibliography (latest edn 1989 chap) Gordon BENSON Jr and Phil STEPHENSEN-PAYNE.

   See also: ALTERNATE WORLDS; ANDROIDS; ARTS; COLONIZATION OF OTHER WORLDS; COMPUTERS; CYBERPUNK; DISASTER; FUTUROLOGY; GALACTIC EMPIRES; GAMES AND SPORTS; GENERATION STARSHIPS; INVASION; MATTER TRANSMISSION; MONEY; NEW WAVE; NEW WORLDS; OVERPOPULATION; POLITICS; PSEUDO-SCIENCE; PSI POWERS; PSYCHOLOGY; SUPERMAN; TIME PARADOXES; TRANSPORTATION.