[close] The Sheep Look Up is a science fiction novel by British author John Brunner, first published in 1972. The novel's setting is decidedly dystopian, the book dealing with the deterioration of the environment in the USA. It was nominated for the Nebula Award for Best Novel in 1972. The title of the novel is a quotation from the poem Lycidas by John Milton.
With the rise of a corporation-sponsored government, pollution levels in big cities have reached extreme levels & public health has deteriorated. Continuing the style used in Stand on Zanzibar, there is a multi-strand narrative & many characters in the book never meet each other; some characters appear in one or two vignettes only. Similarly, instead of chapters, the book is broken up into sections which range from thirty words in length to several pages. The character of Austin Train in The Sheep Look Up serves a similar purpose to Xavier Conroy in The Jagged Orbit or to Chad Mulligan in Stand on Zanzibar: He is an academic who, despite predicting & interpreting social change, has become disillusioned by the failure of society to listen. This character is used both to drive the plot & to explain back-story to the reader.
Despite being nominated for a Nebula Award, the book fell out of print in the nineties, only later being republished. The new edition contains a foreword by David Brin & an afterword by environmentalist & social change theorist James John Bell. Brin places the book in the context of Brunner's time & other writings. In the afterword, Bell treats the book almost as prophecy, drawing parallels between events in the book & subsequent real world developments: "His words have a kind of Gnostic power embedded in them that gives his characters passage into our world". A couple specific examples are that "Brunner's puppet of a president, affectionately called Prexy, is a dead ringer for our Dubya & that sabotage done by the Earth Liberation Front is pulled directly from the pages of the novel. Writer William Gibson made a similar remark in a 2007 interview: "No one except possibly the late John Brunner, in his brilliant novel The Sheep Look Up, has ever described anything in science fiction that is remotely like the reality of 2007 as we know it."