Tuesday, November 10, 2009

FORGOTTEN WRITERS: John Brunner




One of the real pleasures of my teenage years was reading the space operas of John Brunner, which mostly appeared in Ace Double Book form, sometimes taking up both sides.

Except for Leigh Brackett and some of Edmond Hamilton, I couldn't handle most space opera after I reached about age fifteen. But Brunner was both a superb writer of swift colorful action stories and a true citizen of the world, this last lending his tales a real sense of history which he projected into the future.

His characters were never standard pulp issue, either. They usually had problems unrelated to the plot some of which, realistically, were never resolved even as the curtain fell. He also had a somewhat baroque sense of humor. I recall one of his Ace novels opening with a parody of a very sophisticated party. I appreciated it even more when I saw the same thing a few years later in the then-shocking movie "Darling." Brunner had tucked his swipe at pre-Euro-trash into space opera. He got an early start on his action tales, selling his first novel at 17 as by Gil Hunt.

This was all in the Sixties. Came the Seventies and Brunner received the Hugo award, the British Science Fiction award and the French Prix Apollo. You don't get those babies writing space opera. From the Daily Telegraph, UK: "The Squares of the City (1965) was a study in mathematical psychology in which two ruthless politicians manipulate people in a real-life chess match. Brunner's more pessimistic stories included The Sheep Look Up (1972), a depressing look forward to the horrors of pollution; and The Shockwave Rider (1975), in which computers spread viruses and other evils. In this he was to prove wrong those experts who at the time dismissed the possibility of electronic viruses." These are his acknowledged masterpieces.
There were few science fiction writers as popular or influential as Brunner during the Seventies, especially after the appearance of The Shockwave Rider. He'd gone rather quickly from competent paperback man to bestselling genre master with a worldwide following.

What happened next has never been clear to me. Though I've heard various explanations, the one given most often is that he put several years research and writing into a historical novel called The Great Steamboat Race and that it flopped badly, shaking the confidence of author and publisher alike.

Something sure happened because when you look at the books he wrote in the Eighties, you see a writer essentially reverting to the work of his early days. Not outright space opera but definitely work far less ambitious than the novels that brought him awards and acclaim. His health got bad. His wife died. I'm told that at one convention he announced from the dais that he needed work and to please put him on their list. Any writer who pitches himself like that may get a contract but he sure isn't going to get much money.

He died at a convention, too. Heart attack.

As much as some readers admire The Traveler in Black (as it is a masterpiece of fantasy) , I think the better seldom-mentioned Brunner book is The Whole Man. Brunner creates not only a bleak future society unlike any I've ever encountered in sf but he also gives us a mutant-freak as a protagonist, a bitter, angry confused man who defies all the conventions of the form. A number of writers tried something like this previously--notably A.E. Van Vogt with Slan--but nobody brought the passion or dystopic poetry Brunner did to the theme.

Six months or so before his death I wrote a long retro review of The Whole Man for a sf magazine and sent a copy to Bluejay editor Jim Frenkel who was then republishing a few Brunner titles. He sent it on to Brunner and told me that Brunner was greatly pleased with it. I'm glad he got to see it. He deserved a lot more praise than my little review could have given him.

7 comments:

Todd Mason said...

And you didn't mention the one work which put him "over the top" in terms getting nearly everyone to take a second look at him, STAND ON ZANZIBAR. Of all the '50s generation of sf writers, it seemed Brunner, and Robert Silverberg and Kate Wilhelm, were the ones who were suddenly prollfic as hell and doing their best work to date, after a slow period in the early/mid '60s (less slow for Brunner perhaps, but STAND took a while, and of course Silverberg had turned mostly to other work, while still dropping a story from time to time before "Hawksbill Station" and along with his review comlumn in AMAZING). It was too easy to miss the new novels by these folks around 1971, as there were several a year from each, Brunner and Silverberg filling AMAZING and GALAXY with serials.

And it shows you how a streak can suddenly vanish...Silverberg had cannily invested, and could afford to lie back when he needed to quit; Wilhelm remained steadily productive, but continued to branch out into other sorts of fiction was well as doing Clarion and such; and Brunner's career took that tough spin (his fights with US publishers over fiddling clumsily with his books didn't help...THE SHOCKWAVE RIDER's famous ridiculousness, wherein two brothers were "corrected" into one character in the first US edition by the editorial team at Harper & Row being just the most egregious.

And, hey, Samuel Delany was winning awards with space opera...it could be done...before a certain set of films came along to give it a bad name again...

Ed Gorman said...

Yeah, God, Samuel Delaney, I still remember his first three halves of Ace Doubles. I have to say he lost me after awhile though. I had to plod through Dhalgren and in fact I think I gave up. But those early books and stories...

I still don't know how anybody who just got his driver's license can know all this stuff Todd. :)

Richard Prosch said...

I'm really enjoying your Forgotten Writer reviews. During the wknd. I pulled out my old SF book club edition of The Best of Henry Kuttner. Before I knew it, C.M. Kornbluth and Clifford Simak had joined in!

Deb said...

A prestige writer standing on the podium at a convention begging for work. There's a whole story in that one sentence.

Todd Mason said...

At least, Deb, it's more time-efficient than some of the hustling one can see in less public forms at those cons. But, yes, no justice.

As someone precise three times as old as the youngest licenced drivers in Hawaii, where I got my DL (at least when I got mine you could still get one at age 15), I can only say, I just try to keep up (is there middle-aged babyfat?). And I'm still catching up with all the Wilhelms, Silverbergs, and Brunners published around the turn of the '70s...

Todd Mason said...

Which SF magazine did you write the review of THE WHOLE MAN for, Ed?

Anonymous said...

Don't cry.