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Out of My Mind
Thirteen stories of the past, present, and future from the Hugo Award-winning author of Stand on Zanzibar.
In Out of My Mind, John Brunner, in mid-career, selects a double-handful and more of what he considers his best work to date, thirteen stories that represent--under the three categories in which he classifies them: Past, Present, Future--his most challenging and entertaining stories, from present-day fear of nuclear annihilation to a loving, yet also terrifying infinite loop in time that includes a sideways step outside the universe as we know it. Put yourself in the hands of a master and take your imagination for a series of thrill-rides.
"One of the most important science fiction authors. Brunner held a mirror up to reflect our foibles because he wanted to save us from ourselves." --SF Site
In Out of My Mind, John Brunner, in mid-career, selects a double-handful and more of what he considers his best work to date, thirteen stories that represent--under the three categories in which he classifies them: Past, Present, Future--his most challenging and entertaining stories, from present-day fear of nuclear annihilation to a loving, yet also terrifying infinite loop in time that includes a sideways step outside the universe as we know it. Put yourself in the hands of a master and take your imagination for a series of thrill-rides.
"One of the most important science fiction authors. Brunner held a mirror up to reflect our foibles because he wanted to save us from ourselves." --SF Site
128 pages, Mass Market Paperback
First published January 1, 1967
About the author
John Brunner
562 books507 followersJohn Brunner was born in Preston Crowmarsh, near Wallingford in Oxfordshire, and went to school at St Andrew's Prep School, Pangbourne, then to Cheltenham College. He wrote his first novel, Galactic Storm, at 17, and published it under the pen-name Gill Hunt, but he did not start writing full-time until 1958. He served as an officer in the Royal Air Force from 1953 to 1955, and married Marjorie Rosamond Sauer on 12 July 1958
At the beginning of his writing career Brunner wrote conventional space opera pulp science fiction. Brunner later began to experiment with the novel form. His 1968 novel "Stand on Zanzibar" exploits the fragmented organizational style John Dos Passos invented for his USA trilogy, but updates it in terms of the theory of media popularised by Marshall McLuhan.
"The Jagged Orbit" (1969) is set in a United States dominated by weapons proliferation and interracial violence, and has 100 numbered chapters varying in length from a single syllable to several pages in length. "The Sheep Look Up" (1972) depicts ecological catastrophe in America. Brunner is credited with coining the term "worm" and predicting the emergence of computer viruses in his 1975 novel "The Shockwave Rider", in which he used the term to describe software which reproduces itself across a computer network. Together with "Stand on Zanzibar", these novels have been called the "Club of Rome Quartet", named after the Club of Rome whose 1972 report The Limits to Growth warned of the dire effects of overpopulation.
Brunner's pen names include K. H. Brunner, Gill Hunt, John Loxmith, Trevor Staines, Ellis Quick, Henry Crosstrees Jr., and Keith Woodcott.
In addition to his fiction, Brunner wrote poetry and many unpaid articles in a variety of publications, particularly fanzines, but also 13 letters to the New Scientist and an article about the educational relevance of science fiction in Physics Education. Brunner was an active member of the organisation Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and wrote the words to "The H-Bomb's Thunder", which was sung on the Aldermaston Marches.
Brunner had an uneasy relationship with British new wave writers, who often considered him too American in his settings and themes. He attempted to shift to a more mainstream readership in the early 1980s, without success. Before his death, most of his books had fallen out of print. Brunner accused publishers of a conspiracy against him, although he was difficult to deal with (his wife had handled his publishing relations before she died).[2]
Brunner's health began to decline in the 1980s and worsened with the death of his wife in 1986. He remarried, to Li Yi Tan, on 27 September 1991. He died of a heart attack in Glasgow on 25 August 1995, while attending the World Science Fiction Convention there
aka
K H Brunner, Henry Crosstrees Jr, Gill Hunt (with Dennis Hughes and E C Tubb), John Loxmith, Trevor Staines, Keith Woodcott
Winner of the ESFS Awards in 1980 as "Best Author" and 1n 1984 as "Novelist"..
At the beginning of his writing career Brunner wrote conventional space opera pulp science fiction. Brunner later began to experiment with the novel form. His 1968 novel "Stand on Zanzibar" exploits the fragmented organizational style John Dos Passos invented for his USA trilogy, but updates it in terms of the theory of media popularised by Marshall McLuhan.
"The Jagged Orbit" (1969) is set in a United States dominated by weapons proliferation and interracial violence, and has 100 numbered chapters varying in length from a single syllable to several pages in length. "The Sheep Look Up" (1972) depicts ecological catastrophe in America. Brunner is credited with coining the term "worm" and predicting the emergence of computer viruses in his 1975 novel "The Shockwave Rider", in which he used the term to describe software which reproduces itself across a computer network. Together with "Stand on Zanzibar", these novels have been called the "Club of Rome Quartet", named after the Club of Rome whose 1972 report The Limits to Growth warned of the dire effects of overpopulation.
Brunner's pen names include K. H. Brunner, Gill Hunt, John Loxmith, Trevor Staines, Ellis Quick, Henry Crosstrees Jr., and Keith Woodcott.
In addition to his fiction, Brunner wrote poetry and many unpaid articles in a variety of publications, particularly fanzines, but also 13 letters to the New Scientist and an article about the educational relevance of science fiction in Physics Education. Brunner was an active member of the organisation Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and wrote the words to "The H-Bomb's Thunder", which was sung on the Aldermaston Marches.
Brunner had an uneasy relationship with British new wave writers, who often considered him too American in his settings and themes. He attempted to shift to a more mainstream readership in the early 1980s, without success. Before his death, most of his books had fallen out of print. Brunner accused publishers of a conspiracy against him, although he was difficult to deal with (his wife had handled his publishing relations before she died).[2]
Brunner's health began to decline in the 1980s and worsened with the death of his wife in 1986. He remarried, to Li Yi Tan, on 27 September 1991. He died of a heart attack in Glasgow on 25 August 1995, while attending the World Science Fiction Convention there
aka
K H Brunner, Henry Crosstrees Jr, Gill Hunt (with Dennis Hughes and E C Tubb), John Loxmith, Trevor Staines, Keith Woodcott
Winner of the ESFS Awards in 1980 as "Best Author" and 1n 1984 as "Novelist"..
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Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
September 26, 2014
review of
John Brunner's Out of my Mind - from the Past, Present and Future
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - September 25, 2014
I recently reviewed the 1st collection of Brunner short stories that I've read & I was very pleased w/ it: From This Day Forward ( https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2... ). In that review I noted that "I usually avoid reading short stories" so I've put off reading the Brunner ones by relegating them to near the bottom of Brunners-I-have-lying-around-to-be-read pile. So, even tho the last collection of Brunner short stories was great, I was loathe to read another collection of them.
That sd, I hereby announce that this collection is also great! I prefer creative people who don't just explore the same territory over & over, who're capable of some variety, & Brunner scores w/ this collection:
From This Day Forward is a sequence of stories organized in a conventional fashion w/o sections or introductions. Out of my Mind is organized into "Past", "Present" and "Future" & each story has an intro from Brunner. The 1st intro states "On consideration of the stories finally chosen for this collection, I'm struck by the prevailing pessimism of the whole." (p 9) & I think that such dystopian warnings are typical of probably all SF if not just largely of the SF I like. Much has been made of how many SF writers reacted to the possibility of large scale annihilation as a result of the invention of nuclear weapons.
These warnings are based in real concern about real scientific & socio-political developments. Isn't it possible to also write utopian SF based on real scientific & socio-political developments? Sometimes I think writers avoid that out of fear that they'll be pegged 'idealistic dreamers'. If one predicts a positive outcome to a particular development - let's say the ongoing popularity of Rainbow Gatherings - one takes the risk of looking the fool if these gatherings gradually deteriorate into something very different from what their founders have envisioned. It's 'safer' to be a doom-sayer - then, if the prediction doesn't come true one can say that the warnings helped prevent the disasteer(s) & be relieved.
The stories collected here once again meet the 'requirements' of a good short story: great premise, exciting progress to a satisfying ending. Brunner takes it further by adding the intros wch sometimes pseudo-'give away' a development not at all obvious from the beginning of the story. That wasn't the case w/ this next intro but I still like quoting from it anyway: "It's reported that every time an executioner dies—the public hangman in Britain, for example—there are scores and scores of applications for this vacant post." (p 17) So what's that about? Are the applicants only-in-it-for-the-money? That's hard to imagine b/c you'd have to be even more unfeeling than the average capitalist to do executions b/c it's an 'easy job for good pay' (is it?).
Are the applicants people who feel a self-righteous urge to avenge society against evil-doers? It's quite possible that many of the murderers felt the same way about their victims. Have executioners historically ever killed anyone outside of the job? It seems likely - maybe by at least being soldiers. Executioners might just be people who want to kill safely, ie: safely to themselves, safely w/in the parameters of the law. Do they read about the cases of the condemned & get themselves worked up over 'how much the person deserves to die'? Does it make them feel superior in violence to people notorious for violence?
The executioner in this story laments that he was unable to kill people during the Spartacus-led slave revolt: "["]Ever hear tell of the Slave Revolt? When they cleared that one up, they put more than five thousand slaves alongside the roads—as a lesson, so to speak." He swapped nails and began to file another. "I often wish I'd been there. I'll lay a denarius to a fish-scale that there was sloppy work done on that occasion. It isn't everyone who has the knack of it, boy!"" (p 19) This particular executioner is like the nazi Adolph Eichmann, proud to do his job 'properly' & completely uncaring about the broader implications.
& speaking of Eichmann, has anyone noticed a recent upsurge of anti-Semitism? For fuck's sake, this is the 21st century, can't we get over that shit once & for all?! Brunner peripherally touches on the subject in "Prerogative":
""Uh—are you Jewish, Dr. Blankenberg?" the coroner suggested, wondering whether there was any book in the building suitable for administering a Jewish oath. The audience seemed to gather its concentration, menacingly.
""By race, but not by persuasion." said Dr. Blankenberg. "I am an agnostic and prefer to make an affirmation rather than take an oath."
"This time the response from the public seats was a gasp. A Jew was bad enough; a Jew who had renounced his faith was one step beyond the limit. Someone said, "Shame!"" - p 43
"Such Stuff" is a story that resonated w/ my own personal life. the intro begins: "Of all the quarries in pursuit of which scientists have set out, determined to wiehg and measure whatever they can catch, surely the most elusive must be—a dream." (p 50) I'm reminded of one of the 2 guys who constituted HOPCAS, the [Johns] Hopkins Conceptual Art Society that existed in the late 1970s &/or early 1980s. There's work by them on one of the tapes my label, WIdémoUTH, publishes - a tape edited by Patti Karl called "Laughingstock", an excellent compilation. One of the HIPCAS guys was studying at Hopkins b/c he wanted to record dreams (or some such). That seemed like a wonderful goal to me at the time but somewhat far-fetched. I wonder what he's doing now?
In the story, sleepers have electrodes attached to their eyelids that detect rapid-eye mvmt as an indicator of the onset of dreaming & sound a buzzer to awaken the sleeper enuf to prevent dreams.
"Starling lay like a corpse because he had grown used to not pulling loose the leads taped to his head—that's all! that's all! that's all!"
[..]
"He breathed naturally. Everything was normal.
"Except that he had done it for months, which was incredible and not in the least natural." - p 51
I was a non-patient volunteer research subject at a mental institution outside of BalTimOre. Such volunteers were part of what was called, &, yes, I'm not making this up, the "Board of Normals". The largely (entirely?) schizophrenic patients were subjected to the same tests as the Board & the results were compared to try to find what the differences were between those of us were functional in society & those who weren't.
One of the tests was one where I slept on my back w/ electrodes attached to my head that were connected by wires to an EEG. These wires went from the electrodes into a partially pulled open drawer. Sleeping w/ them on was incredibly uncomfortable. As I recall, one might've had to sleep on one's back, wch I usually don't do, in order to avoid pulling the electrodes off. There was no way I, or anyone else IMO, cd have a 'normal' night's sleep w/ the things on. Imagine such things attached to yr eyelids. No fuckin' way.
""Well—all our other cases suggest that serious mental disturbance results from interference with the dreaming process. Even the most resistant of our other volunteers broke down after less than 2 weeks. We've prevented Starling from dreaming every night for five months now, and even if there are no signs of harm it's probable that we are harming him."" - p 55
YES. I wonder where sleep/dream researchers are at now. This story was 1st published in 1962. Surely much has happened in the last 52 yrs! Imagine being manic, having chemistry in yr body that doesn't let you sleep. Imagine yr relationship to the outer world becoming more & more dreamlike. Imagine yr speech getting the incoherence that it has when you're very, very tired - in this case still having other qualities of being wide-awake. But what if it's more involved than just counterbalancing the awake-chemicals w/ some go-to-sleep-chemicals?
"See what I mean!" begins w/ an intro quote that sums up the source of many a problem: ""My mind's made up. Don't try and confuse me with facts."" (p 99) Propaganda works as well as it does, when it does, by providing the most oversimplistic life-saver for an intellectually-challenged person to hang onto: 'It's all the fault of _____!'
Brunner was an anti-nuclear activist. Many of these stories reflect that:
"I wrote this in a fourth-floor flat in Brussels towards the end of a four-month tour my wife and I made around Europe with an exhibition about nuclear weapons, visiting in all seven countries. It was an experience which had brought vividly home to me the fact that although we have shrunk the world spatially we have expanded it temporally—for instance, I'm told it would be possible for a man to step off a Boeing 707 jet airliner, get into a Cadillac, and go off to buy a slave in one of the Arab sheikhdoms." - p 107
Bringing me back to another ongoing concern of mine: are Arabic countries still the main place in the world to endorse slavery? If so, how can anyone anti-slavery in good conscience defend such a culture?
"The Fourth Power" introduces the idea of a "synthesist". I'm my own attempt at being such a person.
""Now Smith here has his head very nearly as full of knowledge as is conceivably possible. He's a synthesist. We've taken him and stuffed his mind full by every technique we can imagine: hypnosis, sleep-learning, tachistoscopic acceleration of uptake, drugs . . . . He's good. They're all good. But they aren't good enough.["]" - p 113
Wch leads to something else I write about often enuf: the brain is not a computer:
""Now the ordinary neuron connections in the brain operate in our customary three dimensions. It's a hell of a sight more complex than that, but you can picture a kind of conventional cybernetic switching system if you like. Only while most such systems are used to store fact, in the shape of binary digits, our storage system is full of referents to events and processes. We don't yet understand the coding system the brain employs to break down the sensory stimuli into 'memories'—but we're on the edge of it. With me so far?"" - p 113
P 115 mentions something I've never heard tell of - always a good sign:
"The master-slave society of the day had prevented the adoption of Hero's turbine as a useful device; how many other curiosities were there in this twentieth century of which posterity would say the same?"
SO, I looked up "Hero's turbine" online & got this from an article by Dr. Greg Latta:
"Hero or Heron of Alexandria is credited with the first written record of a steam engine between 10 and 70 A.D. Hero's Aeolipile is actually a reaction steam turbine. In a reaction steam turbine, the steam is ejected from several jets, which operate like little jet or rocket engines." - http://faculty.frostburg.edu/phys/lat...
It wasn't until 1,700 yrs or so later that steam engines 'became a thing'. What exists NOW that won't be in widespread use until 1,700 yrs from now?!
"The Last Lonely Man" is truly one of the creepiest things I've ever read. Like so much horror, I was thinking "No! Don't do it! It's going to be a disaster!" but, as usual, the protagonist goes ahead & 'does it' anyway.
"Single-Minded"'s intro states:
"To be able to read other people's minds . . . a wonderful dream! Think of the intimacy of communication this would make possible; think of the advantages of gaining insight into the mental processes of an Einstein or a Shakespeare, without the blurring intervention of crude words!
"Well, all right. Think about those things, But think also of the fact that there are some three thousand million of us now, and all of us to some extent are neurotic, greedy, selfish, jealous, sadistic, quarrelsome, and busy." - p 154
Yeah, right, but what if 'thinking' is only partially verbal? The "mental processes of an Einstein or a Shakespeare" are going to be even more incomprehensible to people if experienced 'telepathically' than what's provided by "the blurring intervention of crude words". At any rate, the only telepathy that wd be bearable wd have to be consciously filterable. It's bad enuf being bombarded by right-wing talk show radio when one walks into a store - imagine those forces figuring out a way to amplify a propagandist's mind so that no other person's thoughts wd get thru. Ya just KNOW it wd happen!
I always find it funny when astronaut stories have them smoking cigarettes - something that today wd be highly improbable.
"["]my acceleration unit came away in one piece and I was still in it when it hit the ground."
""I'm so glad!" the pilot cried. She turned and felt along a shelf under the exiguous bank of controls; the machine was obviously when bound for a known destination. She produced a large box of candy and some packs of cigarettes, and offered them to him as he sat down." - p 160
In the same story, "Single-Minded", the male American astronaut in distress on the moon is rescued by a woman Russian astronaut named Olga who's been isolated from her fellow astronaut community & the 2 live together:
"Aside from that, Olga talked. Months of pent-up conversation flooded from her—childhood memories, description of what it was like to be infected with the resonating virus, funny stories, accounts of books she had read and shows she had seen, word-portraits of people here at the station before they became as they were. . . . Don closed his mind to it firmly as he had been taught. Once could never tell when insidious, pro-Soviet propaganda might come through the harmless-seeming words." - p 168
"Single-Minded" was written in 1963. It shows the destructiveness on human intelligence of US propaganda. To a 21st century reader who wasn't alive at the time, the critique of America might seem heavy-handed & unlikely. I can attest that in my own personal experience it seems spot-on. I wd've been 9 when this story came out. I still vividly remember being indoctrinated on a regular basis by my mom that in the USSR all 'news' was propaganda & that we in the USA were completely free from that. Even as a kid I realized that such a viewpoint as my mom's was the result of propaganda in the US & that she was totally brainwashed.
Brunner's intro to "A Better Mousetrap" pleasantly surprised me by referencing that philosophical & observational pioneer Charles Fort:
"There was, of course, Charles Fort. Some of my fellow SF writers loved him for his iconoclasm, his dogmatic nonconformity, and his writing style. I always found him exasperating.
"Perhaps his most celebrated statement was this one, simple and devastating. After sifting for years through stories of scientifically impossible happenings, he decided that the only explanation covering them all was to assume that we inhabit an artificial environment and summed the entire hypothesis into this brief phrase: "I think we're property."
"Eric Frank Russell made a classic novel out of that: Sinister Barrier. But even when I first read it, many years ago, I was struck by a nagging thought. That suggestion implies a shred of unjustifiable vanity. Our masters, presumably, would be superintelligent beings—and what superintelligent creature would want to own a race like us?
"I think we're more likely to be a bloody nuisance." - p 175
In "Round Trip" he uses a term I only previously recall running across as the title of a piece of music by Karlheinz Stockhausen: "This point, this theoretical location in space, is on the empty world-line once occupied by the primal ylem." (p 213)
"The composer [Stockhausen] (from the CD booklet):
""Theory of the oscillating universe: every 80 000 000 000 years the universe explodes, unfolds, and draws together again. The word YLEM is used by some people to designate the periodic explosion, by others to designate the essential material. […]
""At the beginning, 10 of the 19 players stand on the stage around the piano; after a sound explosion they walk playing into the hall and take up position to the left and right of the audience (the remaining 9 players stay on stage). Towards the end they go back onto the stage, stand around the piano, and after a second explosion, all 19 players walk off the stage and out of the building, while continuing to play (the 9 players who were playing on stage have small portable instruments)."" - http://home.earthlink.net/~almoritz/y...
John Brunner's Out of my Mind - from the Past, Present and Future
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - September 25, 2014
I recently reviewed the 1st collection of Brunner short stories that I've read & I was very pleased w/ it: From This Day Forward ( https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2... ). In that review I noted that "I usually avoid reading short stories" so I've put off reading the Brunner ones by relegating them to near the bottom of Brunners-I-have-lying-around-to-be-read pile. So, even tho the last collection of Brunner short stories was great, I was loathe to read another collection of them.
That sd, I hereby announce that this collection is also great! I prefer creative people who don't just explore the same territory over & over, who're capable of some variety, & Brunner scores w/ this collection:
From This Day Forward is a sequence of stories organized in a conventional fashion w/o sections or introductions. Out of my Mind is organized into "Past", "Present" and "Future" & each story has an intro from Brunner. The 1st intro states "On consideration of the stories finally chosen for this collection, I'm struck by the prevailing pessimism of the whole." (p 9) & I think that such dystopian warnings are typical of probably all SF if not just largely of the SF I like. Much has been made of how many SF writers reacted to the possibility of large scale annihilation as a result of the invention of nuclear weapons.
These warnings are based in real concern about real scientific & socio-political developments. Isn't it possible to also write utopian SF based on real scientific & socio-political developments? Sometimes I think writers avoid that out of fear that they'll be pegged 'idealistic dreamers'. If one predicts a positive outcome to a particular development - let's say the ongoing popularity of Rainbow Gatherings - one takes the risk of looking the fool if these gatherings gradually deteriorate into something very different from what their founders have envisioned. It's 'safer' to be a doom-sayer - then, if the prediction doesn't come true one can say that the warnings helped prevent the disasteer(s) & be relieved.
The stories collected here once again meet the 'requirements' of a good short story: great premise, exciting progress to a satisfying ending. Brunner takes it further by adding the intros wch sometimes pseudo-'give away' a development not at all obvious from the beginning of the story. That wasn't the case w/ this next intro but I still like quoting from it anyway: "It's reported that every time an executioner dies—the public hangman in Britain, for example—there are scores and scores of applications for this vacant post." (p 17) So what's that about? Are the applicants only-in-it-for-the-money? That's hard to imagine b/c you'd have to be even more unfeeling than the average capitalist to do executions b/c it's an 'easy job for good pay' (is it?).
Are the applicants people who feel a self-righteous urge to avenge society against evil-doers? It's quite possible that many of the murderers felt the same way about their victims. Have executioners historically ever killed anyone outside of the job? It seems likely - maybe by at least being soldiers. Executioners might just be people who want to kill safely, ie: safely to themselves, safely w/in the parameters of the law. Do they read about the cases of the condemned & get themselves worked up over 'how much the person deserves to die'? Does it make them feel superior in violence to people notorious for violence?
The executioner in this story laments that he was unable to kill people during the Spartacus-led slave revolt: "["]Ever hear tell of the Slave Revolt? When they cleared that one up, they put more than five thousand slaves alongside the roads—as a lesson, so to speak." He swapped nails and began to file another. "I often wish I'd been there. I'll lay a denarius to a fish-scale that there was sloppy work done on that occasion. It isn't everyone who has the knack of it, boy!"" (p 19) This particular executioner is like the nazi Adolph Eichmann, proud to do his job 'properly' & completely uncaring about the broader implications.
& speaking of Eichmann, has anyone noticed a recent upsurge of anti-Semitism? For fuck's sake, this is the 21st century, can't we get over that shit once & for all?! Brunner peripherally touches on the subject in "Prerogative":
""Uh—are you Jewish, Dr. Blankenberg?" the coroner suggested, wondering whether there was any book in the building suitable for administering a Jewish oath. The audience seemed to gather its concentration, menacingly.
""By race, but not by persuasion." said Dr. Blankenberg. "I am an agnostic and prefer to make an affirmation rather than take an oath."
"This time the response from the public seats was a gasp. A Jew was bad enough; a Jew who had renounced his faith was one step beyond the limit. Someone said, "Shame!"" - p 43
"Such Stuff" is a story that resonated w/ my own personal life. the intro begins: "Of all the quarries in pursuit of which scientists have set out, determined to wiehg and measure whatever they can catch, surely the most elusive must be—a dream." (p 50) I'm reminded of one of the 2 guys who constituted HOPCAS, the [Johns] Hopkins Conceptual Art Society that existed in the late 1970s &/or early 1980s. There's work by them on one of the tapes my label, WIdémoUTH, publishes - a tape edited by Patti Karl called "Laughingstock", an excellent compilation. One of the HIPCAS guys was studying at Hopkins b/c he wanted to record dreams (or some such). That seemed like a wonderful goal to me at the time but somewhat far-fetched. I wonder what he's doing now?
In the story, sleepers have electrodes attached to their eyelids that detect rapid-eye mvmt as an indicator of the onset of dreaming & sound a buzzer to awaken the sleeper enuf to prevent dreams.
"Starling lay like a corpse because he had grown used to not pulling loose the leads taped to his head—that's all! that's all! that's all!"
[..]
"He breathed naturally. Everything was normal.
"Except that he had done it for months, which was incredible and not in the least natural." - p 51
I was a non-patient volunteer research subject at a mental institution outside of BalTimOre. Such volunteers were part of what was called, &, yes, I'm not making this up, the "Board of Normals". The largely (entirely?) schizophrenic patients were subjected to the same tests as the Board & the results were compared to try to find what the differences were between those of us were functional in society & those who weren't.
One of the tests was one where I slept on my back w/ electrodes attached to my head that were connected by wires to an EEG. These wires went from the electrodes into a partially pulled open drawer. Sleeping w/ them on was incredibly uncomfortable. As I recall, one might've had to sleep on one's back, wch I usually don't do, in order to avoid pulling the electrodes off. There was no way I, or anyone else IMO, cd have a 'normal' night's sleep w/ the things on. Imagine such things attached to yr eyelids. No fuckin' way.
""Well—all our other cases suggest that serious mental disturbance results from interference with the dreaming process. Even the most resistant of our other volunteers broke down after less than 2 weeks. We've prevented Starling from dreaming every night for five months now, and even if there are no signs of harm it's probable that we are harming him."" - p 55
YES. I wonder where sleep/dream researchers are at now. This story was 1st published in 1962. Surely much has happened in the last 52 yrs! Imagine being manic, having chemistry in yr body that doesn't let you sleep. Imagine yr relationship to the outer world becoming more & more dreamlike. Imagine yr speech getting the incoherence that it has when you're very, very tired - in this case still having other qualities of being wide-awake. But what if it's more involved than just counterbalancing the awake-chemicals w/ some go-to-sleep-chemicals?
"See what I mean!" begins w/ an intro quote that sums up the source of many a problem: ""My mind's made up. Don't try and confuse me with facts."" (p 99) Propaganda works as well as it does, when it does, by providing the most oversimplistic life-saver for an intellectually-challenged person to hang onto: 'It's all the fault of _____!'
Brunner was an anti-nuclear activist. Many of these stories reflect that:
"I wrote this in a fourth-floor flat in Brussels towards the end of a four-month tour my wife and I made around Europe with an exhibition about nuclear weapons, visiting in all seven countries. It was an experience which had brought vividly home to me the fact that although we have shrunk the world spatially we have expanded it temporally—for instance, I'm told it would be possible for a man to step off a Boeing 707 jet airliner, get into a Cadillac, and go off to buy a slave in one of the Arab sheikhdoms." - p 107
Bringing me back to another ongoing concern of mine: are Arabic countries still the main place in the world to endorse slavery? If so, how can anyone anti-slavery in good conscience defend such a culture?
"The Fourth Power" introduces the idea of a "synthesist". I'm my own attempt at being such a person.
""Now Smith here has his head very nearly as full of knowledge as is conceivably possible. He's a synthesist. We've taken him and stuffed his mind full by every technique we can imagine: hypnosis, sleep-learning, tachistoscopic acceleration of uptake, drugs . . . . He's good. They're all good. But they aren't good enough.["]" - p 113
Wch leads to something else I write about often enuf: the brain is not a computer:
""Now the ordinary neuron connections in the brain operate in our customary three dimensions. It's a hell of a sight more complex than that, but you can picture a kind of conventional cybernetic switching system if you like. Only while most such systems are used to store fact, in the shape of binary digits, our storage system is full of referents to events and processes. We don't yet understand the coding system the brain employs to break down the sensory stimuli into 'memories'—but we're on the edge of it. With me so far?"" - p 113
P 115 mentions something I've never heard tell of - always a good sign:
"The master-slave society of the day had prevented the adoption of Hero's turbine as a useful device; how many other curiosities were there in this twentieth century of which posterity would say the same?"
SO, I looked up "Hero's turbine" online & got this from an article by Dr. Greg Latta:
"Hero or Heron of Alexandria is credited with the first written record of a steam engine between 10 and 70 A.D. Hero's Aeolipile is actually a reaction steam turbine. In a reaction steam turbine, the steam is ejected from several jets, which operate like little jet or rocket engines." - http://faculty.frostburg.edu/phys/lat...
It wasn't until 1,700 yrs or so later that steam engines 'became a thing'. What exists NOW that won't be in widespread use until 1,700 yrs from now?!
"The Last Lonely Man" is truly one of the creepiest things I've ever read. Like so much horror, I was thinking "No! Don't do it! It's going to be a disaster!" but, as usual, the protagonist goes ahead & 'does it' anyway.
"Single-Minded"'s intro states:
"To be able to read other people's minds . . . a wonderful dream! Think of the intimacy of communication this would make possible; think of the advantages of gaining insight into the mental processes of an Einstein or a Shakespeare, without the blurring intervention of crude words!
"Well, all right. Think about those things, But think also of the fact that there are some three thousand million of us now, and all of us to some extent are neurotic, greedy, selfish, jealous, sadistic, quarrelsome, and busy." - p 154
Yeah, right, but what if 'thinking' is only partially verbal? The "mental processes of an Einstein or a Shakespeare" are going to be even more incomprehensible to people if experienced 'telepathically' than what's provided by "the blurring intervention of crude words". At any rate, the only telepathy that wd be bearable wd have to be consciously filterable. It's bad enuf being bombarded by right-wing talk show radio when one walks into a store - imagine those forces figuring out a way to amplify a propagandist's mind so that no other person's thoughts wd get thru. Ya just KNOW it wd happen!
I always find it funny when astronaut stories have them smoking cigarettes - something that today wd be highly improbable.
"["]my acceleration unit came away in one piece and I was still in it when it hit the ground."
""I'm so glad!" the pilot cried. She turned and felt along a shelf under the exiguous bank of controls; the machine was obviously when bound for a known destination. She produced a large box of candy and some packs of cigarettes, and offered them to him as he sat down." - p 160
In the same story, "Single-Minded", the male American astronaut in distress on the moon is rescued by a woman Russian astronaut named Olga who's been isolated from her fellow astronaut community & the 2 live together:
"Aside from that, Olga talked. Months of pent-up conversation flooded from her—childhood memories, description of what it was like to be infected with the resonating virus, funny stories, accounts of books she had read and shows she had seen, word-portraits of people here at the station before they became as they were. . . . Don closed his mind to it firmly as he had been taught. Once could never tell when insidious, pro-Soviet propaganda might come through the harmless-seeming words." - p 168
"Single-Minded" was written in 1963. It shows the destructiveness on human intelligence of US propaganda. To a 21st century reader who wasn't alive at the time, the critique of America might seem heavy-handed & unlikely. I can attest that in my own personal experience it seems spot-on. I wd've been 9 when this story came out. I still vividly remember being indoctrinated on a regular basis by my mom that in the USSR all 'news' was propaganda & that we in the USA were completely free from that. Even as a kid I realized that such a viewpoint as my mom's was the result of propaganda in the US & that she was totally brainwashed.
Brunner's intro to "A Better Mousetrap" pleasantly surprised me by referencing that philosophical & observational pioneer Charles Fort:
"There was, of course, Charles Fort. Some of my fellow SF writers loved him for his iconoclasm, his dogmatic nonconformity, and his writing style. I always found him exasperating.
"Perhaps his most celebrated statement was this one, simple and devastating. After sifting for years through stories of scientifically impossible happenings, he decided that the only explanation covering them all was to assume that we inhabit an artificial environment and summed the entire hypothesis into this brief phrase: "I think we're property."
"Eric Frank Russell made a classic novel out of that: Sinister Barrier. But even when I first read it, many years ago, I was struck by a nagging thought. That suggestion implies a shred of unjustifiable vanity. Our masters, presumably, would be superintelligent beings—and what superintelligent creature would want to own a race like us?
"I think we're more likely to be a bloody nuisance." - p 175
In "Round Trip" he uses a term I only previously recall running across as the title of a piece of music by Karlheinz Stockhausen: "This point, this theoretical location in space, is on the empty world-line once occupied by the primal ylem." (p 213)
"The composer [Stockhausen] (from the CD booklet):
""Theory of the oscillating universe: every 80 000 000 000 years the universe explodes, unfolds, and draws together again. The word YLEM is used by some people to designate the periodic explosion, by others to designate the essential material. […]
""At the beginning, 10 of the 19 players stand on the stage around the piano; after a sound explosion they walk playing into the hall and take up position to the left and right of the audience (the remaining 9 players stay on stage). Towards the end they go back onto the stage, stand around the piano, and after a second explosion, all 19 players walk off the stage and out of the building, while continuing to play (the 9 players who were playing on stage have small portable instruments)."" - http://home.earthlink.net/~almoritz/y...
April 24, 2015
I want to like Brunner more than I do. The first book of his I read, Time-jump, was a collection of short stories interspersed with consumer reports reviewing various future technologies such as time travel machines and wish-granting machines. It was darkly comic satire, spot-on, delightful, and brilliant. However, as I read other works of his--such as the overrated The Compleat Traveller in Black--I've begun to notice that not only do his politics drive the story, but his characterization tends to be terrible (not to mention terribly sexist). I should mention that I tend to agree with his politics, but many of his stories read like thinly veiled rants against human superstition and self-destructiveness, lurking beneath a thin veneer of poorly drawn characters. And even his ideological bent tends to be simplistic, as one-dimensional as his characters. I do tend to be drawn to authors who have something to say about the world, and Brunner definitely fits this category; however, in fiction, I want that purposeful element to be embedded in the story, rather than the driving force to the story. (Ursula K. LeGuin comes to mind as one of the standout authors who writes such stories effectively.)
October 25, 2011
I like this Brunner guy. This is the second book of short stories I've read and they didn't disappoint me. Though classified as 'classic science fiction' there was little science to it... I'd just call it classic fiction. Obviously Brunner was a jazz fan. Many of the short stories were about jazz players. 'When Gabriel...' was a pretty cool story. This jazz cat ends up with a trumpet that has special abilities. Lucky for him the owner came to relieve him of it.
Some of the stories bordered on horror. A few had a bit of technology thrown in to call it science fiction. The others were just about people with troubled minds or living in a troubled world or screwed up by troubled philosophy.
Some of the stories bordered on horror. A few had a bit of technology thrown in to call it science fiction. The others were just about people with troubled minds or living in a troubled world or screwed up by troubled philosophy.
March 6, 2022
A strong early collection from SF stalwart John Brunner. Here he is still in his 'pulp' mode, but the seeds of his later literary accomplishments are already apparent. Stand outs: The Totally Rich, Single-Minded, Eye of the Beholder.
August 29, 2020
These stories are from the mid-1950s to mid-1960s (mostly 1960 and later), so they were written before Brunner's literary ambitions really blossomed. Unsurprisingly, therefore, these are, with perhaps one or two exceptions, at best competent Sf or Fantasy stories. Many are badly dated (e.g. "The Totally Rich," in which a woman commits suicide because she won't be able to stay beautiful long enough to still be a beauty when her dead love is brought back to life). The most egregious clanger is this sentence, from "Eye of the Beholder" (1956, admittedly): "Christy, of course, being a woman, was blaming both of them for not organizing the universe properly to suit her convenience." Many of these are predictable, even if moderately effective (e.g. "A Better Mousetrap," which the reader will almost certainly have figured out long before the story explains it, but which I still found mildly amusing, in a "Nine Billion Names of God" sort of way--though without that story's quiet power). Some I already can't remember well enough to comment on one way or another. The best is also the final story (and one of the earliest), which posits how the universe might be cyclically reborn over and over again, due to human intervention--though its central conceit is just weird (no spoilers). Anyway, this is probably a book for Brunner completists more than for general genre fans.
July 31, 2024
This collection of short stories dates back to the 1960's, and it shows in some of the background assumptions about politics or society, as well as in the general style. But for all of that, Brunner has some interesting and thought provoking ideas which feel fresh and original in spite of the 60 year old presentation.
Brunner does not seem to be very interested in how scientific or technological advances might work. Instead, he makes assumptions about what might be possible and then considers what differences this would make in society or to individuals. In some of the stories, it's not even science: it's more like 'What if this magical or even divine artifact were to come into human hands?'
Science and technology move on, societies and cultures change, but human beings are endlessly fascinating, and even old stories can still have some relevance.
Brunner does not seem to be very interested in how scientific or technological advances might work. Instead, he makes assumptions about what might be possible and then considers what differences this would make in society or to individuals. In some of the stories, it's not even science: it's more like 'What if this magical or even divine artifact were to come into human hands?'
Science and technology move on, societies and cultures change, but human beings are endlessly fascinating, and even old stories can still have some relevance.
April 7, 2021
A collection of science fiction stories on a psychological theme, plus some fantasy and horror, written between 1955 and 1965. All are good, some are great. The SF chiller "The Last Lonely Man" is outstanding; I also loved the trio of comic fantasy yarns written in a 1950s jazzer idiom, "The Man Who Played the Blues", "When Gabriel...", and "Whirligig".
(Review refers to the NEL edition with ten stories.)
(Review refers to the NEL edition with ten stories.)
June 9, 2025
This is actually a pretty solid short stories book. This is the 3rd or 4th I've read from Brunner, and this has been the best one so far. I am a big Brunner fan and have read many of his books, so it is interesting to read his short stories, a true art form. This book has a number of really good ones in it, like "Single Minded", "Such Stuff", "A Better Mousetrap", and "Round Trip". It's worth checking out.
February 7, 2024
Science Fiction from the golden age. These fantastic little stories come with an epigraph explaining how you might like to consider each one. I didn't necessarily understand all of them, but they are all intriguing without being heavy. This is the decent dessert section in a high tea. Individually satisfying, and there is always room for another.
September 20, 2019
A pretty good short collection of Brunner's writing in the early sixties
February 18, 2023
Loved these when I first read them more than forty years ago, now they look a little dated and the twist endings are a little predictable when you know the genre.
January 9, 2014
Strong collection by a writer that, in my opinion, needs to be rediscovered.
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