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The Stardroppers
From the back
A Stardropper got its name from the belief that the user was eavesdropping on the stars. But that was only a guess ... nobody really knew what the instrument did. The instrument itself made no sense scientifically. A conventional earpiece, an amplifier, a power source -- all attached to a small vacuum box, an alnico magnet, and a calibrated "tuner". What you got from all this was some very extraordinary noises and the conviction that you were listening to beings from space and could almost understand what you were hearing. What brought Special Agent Dan Cross into the stardropper problem was the carefully censored news that users of the instrument had begun to disappear. They popped out of existence suddenly -- and the world's leaders began to suspect that somehow the fad had lit the fuse on a abomb that would either destroy the world or change it forever.
A Stardropper got its name from the belief that the user was eavesdropping on the stars. But that was only a guess ... nobody really knew what the instrument did. The instrument itself made no sense scientifically. A conventional earpiece, an amplifier, a power source -- all attached to a small vacuum box, an alnico magnet, and a calibrated "tuner". What you got from all this was some very extraordinary noises and the conviction that you were listening to beings from space and could almost understand what you were hearing. What brought Special Agent Dan Cross into the stardropper problem was the carefully censored news that users of the instrument had begun to disappear. They popped out of existence suddenly -- and the world's leaders began to suspect that somehow the fad had lit the fuse on a abomb that would either destroy the world or change it forever.
- GenresScience FictionFiction
144 pages, Paper back
First published January 1, 1972
2 people are currently reading
135 people want to read
About the author
John Brunner
572 books480 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 - 22 of 22 reviews
June 1, 2020
DAW Collectors #23
Cover Artist: Jack Gaughan
Legal Name: Brunner, John Kilian Houston.
Alternate Names: K. Houston Brunner, Kilian Houston Brunner, Henry Crosstrees, Jr., Gill Hunt, John Loxmith, Ellis Quick, Keith Woodcott
Birthdate: 24 September 1934 - 25 August 1995
John Brunner was one of the leading British science fiction writers of the last four decades. He died in Glasgow while attending - among hundreds of other authors and publishers and nearly 5,000 fans of the genre - the World Science Fiction Convention in Glasgow, where he had been scheduled to speak on several panels.
Brunner sold his first novel at the age of 17, and was a prolific writer throughout the 1960s and 1970s. Much of his early work was "space opera", galactic adventure stories, which were distinguished from the "pulp" material of many other writers of the time by their literacy. He went on to write nearly 100 books, fiction and non-fiction, under a variety of names.
"The Stardroppers" concerns an undercover United Nations agent investigating a new fad, "stardropping", whereby physics-violating equipment is used to listen to sounds believed to be alien or paranormal signals. Superficially a harmless but expensive hobby, "stardropping" reigns in a fanaticism resembling addiction, where some users assemble in semi-social communes and spend all of their money on increasingly improved equipment. The fad gains an additional aspect of risk when users begin disappearing into thin air, in cases of increasing profile and witnessing.
Brunner also published "The Sheep Look Up" in 1972.
Cover Artist: Jack Gaughan
Legal Name: Brunner, John Kilian Houston.
Alternate Names: K. Houston Brunner, Kilian Houston Brunner, Henry Crosstrees, Jr., Gill Hunt, John Loxmith, Ellis Quick, Keith Woodcott
Birthdate: 24 September 1934 - 25 August 1995
John Brunner was one of the leading British science fiction writers of the last four decades. He died in Glasgow while attending - among hundreds of other authors and publishers and nearly 5,000 fans of the genre - the World Science Fiction Convention in Glasgow, where he had been scheduled to speak on several panels.
Brunner sold his first novel at the age of 17, and was a prolific writer throughout the 1960s and 1970s. Much of his early work was "space opera", galactic adventure stories, which were distinguished from the "pulp" material of many other writers of the time by their literacy. He went on to write nearly 100 books, fiction and non-fiction, under a variety of names.
"The Stardroppers" concerns an undercover United Nations agent investigating a new fad, "stardropping", whereby physics-violating equipment is used to listen to sounds believed to be alien or paranormal signals. Superficially a harmless but expensive hobby, "stardropping" reigns in a fanaticism resembling addiction, where some users assemble in semi-social communes and spend all of their money on increasingly improved equipment. The fad gains an additional aspect of risk when users begin disappearing into thin air, in cases of increasing profile and witnessing.
Brunner also published "The Sheep Look Up" in 1972.
December 30, 2018
Nouvel auteur favoris dont je lirai tous les livres !
February 27, 2017
Let's get this out of the way, up front: This is a cheesy science-fiction thriller from the 70s. If you don't like any of the words in that last sentence, this isn't the book for you.
Now, this is an Excellent cheesy sci-fi thriller. Brunner wrote some obscenely high number of books in his lifetime. I've read a bunch of them. This one is my favorite, by a long shot.
It's just so WEIRD. Some guy invents an impossible radio, it sparks a world wide craze, an also spies care? People are vanishing?
It's utterly unique, and a heck of a lot of fun.
(This is a longer//better version of a novella Brunner wrote called "Listen! The Stars" which was part of an Ace Double.)
Now, this is an Excellent cheesy sci-fi thriller. Brunner wrote some obscenely high number of books in his lifetime. I've read a bunch of them. This one is my favorite, by a long shot.
It's just so WEIRD. Some guy invents an impossible radio, it sparks a world wide craze, an also spies care? People are vanishing?
It's utterly unique, and a heck of a lot of fun.
(This is a longer//better version of a novella Brunner wrote called "Listen! The Stars" which was part of an Ace Double.)
July 28, 2025
A groovy ’70s sci-fi spy thriller where cosmic whispers fuel paranoia, are The Stardroppers onto something big, or just tuning in to nonsense?
February 28, 2019
I really enjoyed it, some are saying "not Brunner's best work" but I think this story is "different" enough that it's hard to compare to his other work (or to other authors'), and I think this stands well on its own. I'm a fan of hard SF and I enjoyed this one. As the story progresses, much more is learned about this "stardropping" craze, but I can't say too much lets I spoil it - the ending was surprising and unexpected to me, but suffice it to say the stardroppers master their abilities.
August 27, 2013
review of
John Brunner's The Stardroppers
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - August 27, 2013
Ah ha! This is the type of science fiction that helped form my young brain! &, yet, it didn't.. b/c I hadn't really read anything this good yet.. or had I? The early SF I remember being exposed to was by Heinlein, & Clarke, & Asimov, & many others.. none of whom do I remember being quite this sympatico w/ me.. But there must've been something I read akin to this b/c it resonates so much w/ me now that it's amazing!
According to the back of the title page, "A considerably shorter and different version of this novel appeared in 1963 under the title Listen! The Stars! and is copyright © 1963 by John Brunner." Perhaps I read that. This version of the story is copyrighted 1972. On Groundhog's Day of 1981, I performed a "Mad Scientist DidAction" called "attempt to undermine "reality" maintenance traps". You can read about that & see stills from it here: http://idioideo.pleintekst.nl/MereOut... or see a movie from it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ababbr... . It wasn't until I'd finished the novel that I realized that I'd (sortof) tried to do in 'real' life (in the form of the above-mentioned action) what the characters in this novel were doing.
I'm usually pleased to have my vocabulary expanded. Any writer I like is bound to introduce me to an interesting word. A popular writer will introduce them less often being restricted by the 'need' to keep their lesser-educated readership engaged. Brunner: "He moved it a little further, and a susurrus of noise began, like surf on a distant beach" (p 8): "susurrus" is a word I 1st remember encountering as the title of an electro-acoustic piece by my dear departed friend James "Sarmad" Brody. Merriam-Webster Online defines it as a "whispering or rustling sound" & cites its 1st known use as in 1826. Fascinating.
Brunner consistently satisfies my desire for details: "["]All in all I feel rather pleased with myself today, which is why I'm treating myself to this cigar. Oh, I'm sorry—I should have asked you if you'd like one. I imagine Havanas are something of a forgotten luxury as far as you people in the States are concerned."" (p 14) Yes, the famous Cuban cigars, unavailable to most people in the US b/c of the boycott on Cuban products - but, apparently, legally available to people in London. Nice touch, Brunner. Was it a Cuban cigar that Clinton used as a dildo w/ what's-her-face? Or is that an urban myth? Pretty funny either way.
In the novel, "Stardroppers" are devices used for eavesdropping on the stars - or so people believe, for tapping into signals from alien minds. Brunner is great at evoking their cultural omnipresence:
"In a drugstore window, as he approached Marble Arch, he saw single earplugs on sale, labeled TO AID CONCENTRATION WHILE STARDROPPING.
"Waiting to cross at a stoplight, he heard a boy in his late teens hailing a friend: "Dropped any good stars lately?"" - p 26
Not being sure what the original story is like & not being sure what LSD culture wd've been like in London as of the time of the original story, 1963, I don't know how much, if at all, Brunner is playing off of Acidheads. It seems like alot. I probably 1st took LSD in 1972, when this bk was published, & the lingo wd've been firmly in place by then. IE: a person "dropped" acid. I don't know when headphones became a common tool "TO AID CONCENTRATION" but they were still somewhat of a novelty, albeit widespread, in my teen yrs in the late 1960s. As such, both of these references wd've probably been pretty fresh at the time of this bk's release.
From the British policeman's perspective, the Stardropper craze is like the popularity of LSD from a time presented as being in the novel's past, but actually in its writing's present: "There hasn't been anything like it since that crazy outbreak of LSD addiction in the middle sixties. I was a brand-new detective-constable then, and I used to hate bringing those kids in—but what else could you do, when they were drooling and playing with their fingers?" (p 47) Brunner is subtle here, he has the sympathetically portrayed cop say "LSD addiction", a somewhat realistic representation of how a cop might see any drug use - w/o distinguishing between the various drugs's effects. William S. Burroughs references the harm that such blanket generalizations can do & did do in his own life by telling about how marihuana was lumped together in the anti-drug propaganda w/ heroin. Burroughs tried pot & found it fine & tried heroin & got addicted.
Perhaps I'm wrong, but it seems to me that Brunner recognized that amazing new insights cd be gained from what I prefer to call consciousness-expansion drugs (or experiences - I don't think drugs need be a part of it) & shifted it from LSD to Stardroppers. At the same time, he was trying not to be irresponsible, as so many people in the psychedelic subculture cd be, so he walks the reader thru the scenario carefully.
Anyone familiar w/ the culture of getting "high" has encountered the situation of someone playing guitar or drawing, eg, while tripping & thinking that their music & their art is profound. But can they explain why? & does anyone else agree w/ them? & does the product even seem to be that special when they come down? Now, I don't mean that the music & art can't be profound under such circumstances, what I do mean is that there's more to be done than to just only half-comprehendingly meander thru such experiences - esp when it's just treated as 'recreation' as so many people sadly do. Brunner captures the conundrum well:
"Making a helpless gesture, she closed her eyes and swayed a little. She said thinly, "Suppose you had a dream, a very important dream, in which you saw something you desperately wanted to remember—a bit of the future, say. And you woke up and you remembered you'd seen it, but not what it was. It's a little bit like that, except that what you can't quite remember is a matter of life or death. If you don't get back to it, you might as well cut your throat."" - p 30
If you have a truly profound experience, will you be able to express it adequately in words? IMO, probably NOT. What makes it PROFOUND is its very ineffableness. But I don't mean that in a religious sense, AT ALL, even tho that may very well be the way many people experience religion. Religion tends to make people stupid enuf to be manipulated by its unscrupulous leaders, consciousness-expansion tends to make people smart enuf to resist such manipulation. The important thing here is to try to make the ineffable comprehensible by understanding the significance of one's relationship to it. Hence, a great writer like Brunner, writes a great bk like The Stardroppers - he doesn't just scribble while he's high & then expect other people to get the same thing out of it that he did - he tries to bring the ineffable into the realm of the comprehensible w/o destroying it in the process - & I think he does a pretty good job. The ineffable is frequently brought up:
"Lilith made a frustrated gesture. "Things that don't go into words. And yet they make this weird kind of sense!" (p 31), "'It's so hard to capture in words—so remote from everyday experience—that I get the feeling it may really come from an alien mind.'" (p 45), "Others were struggling, their eyes haunted, to get across meanings they were convinced no words could properly express." (p 65)
Hypnosis is important again, as it was in Brunner's The Evil That Men Do (see my review here: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18... ) & his The Productions of Time (see my review here: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18... ) & its this emphasis on hypnosis that's one of the reasons why I brought up my "attempt to undermine "reality" maintenance traps" earlier insofar as I attempted to use autohypnosis in it.
"Next he had been made to learn the code, pumped into him under deep hypnosis. The Agency used hypnosis a great deal, having refined the traditional techniques with the aid of drugs." - p 62
"Well, it was notorious that in certain abnormal mental states, including a hypnotic trance, the human being was capable of improbable feats: displays of incredible strength, for example, or recollection of the minutest details of some otherwise long-forgotten past event." - p 108
I'm also reminded of the "Nuclear Brain Physics Surgery's cool" that I founded in 1978. This was/is a school to be slept thru. The lessons were created by the graduates & no-one was supposed to hear the lessons while awake. The curious can read a little about this in some Cognitive Dissidents posts here: http://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/1... . I intend to make all of the lessons available for awake (or asleep) listening on the Internet Archive SOON.
Of course, what can engage any reader in a story is a high quantity of points of intersection w/ their own lives. Brunner surprised me w/ this one: "I can think of where they're launching spacecraft—Kennedy, Woomera, Baikonur" (p 103) - well, motherfucker!, I've been to Woomera!! A scene in my "The Lab Rats Explain Their Veggie-Oil Powered Van" movie was shot at the dump there! You can witness this on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X0RsOO... . Woomera is an outback town where there's a US military base, the people drive on the right side of the road there instead of on the left like they do in the rest of Australia. It's also the place where refugees from Afghanistan were kept in a Detention Centre. There's a wonderful publication called "Desert Storm" by political activists exposing this Detention Centre. You can read about its closure here: http://peril.com.au/featured/10th-yea... .
Brunner is always prescient, astonishingly so, an excellent characteristic in anyone but one that's esp hoped for in SF writers. "thanks to the availability at long last of TV tubes no deeper than a picture frame": flat screen tvs are commonplace now but they certainly weren't when Brunner wrote this.
"This time he found a handwritten sheet he had previously disregarded, and on it he found what the abbreviation "CPF" stood for. The writer—Watson, presumably—had put:
""Straightforward enough. It's the cocktail-party factor, and there's no avoiding that."
"Dan frowned. That was a standard slang in information theory, the nickname for the process of sorting a particular series of data from a jumble of background noise, like carrying on a conversation with one other person in competition with fifty more talking at the top of their lungs." - p 117
This cd also be called the PBLF, the Penguin Baby Locating Factor - anyone who's seen the marvelous movie, March of the Penguins might get that one.
The main investigating character, Dan, is from "The Agency" in the US. One might conclude that this means the CIA. But Brunner's unlikely to have such a sympathetic character be associated w/ an agency notorious for inculcating the genocide that the CIA has, unfortunately, been associated w/. ""I'm an operative of the United Nations Special Agency."" (p 128) After all, Brunner was probably an Internationalist Optimist, as am I. Alas, as the movie The Whistleblower has revealed, even the UN can be used by corrupting forces - such as the members of the IPTF (International Police Task Force) who were involved in human trafficking in Bosnia under the protection of their UN status. Beware of PMCs (Private Military Contractors)!!
John Brunner's The Stardroppers
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - August 27, 2013
Ah ha! This is the type of science fiction that helped form my young brain! &, yet, it didn't.. b/c I hadn't really read anything this good yet.. or had I? The early SF I remember being exposed to was by Heinlein, & Clarke, & Asimov, & many others.. none of whom do I remember being quite this sympatico w/ me.. But there must've been something I read akin to this b/c it resonates so much w/ me now that it's amazing!
According to the back of the title page, "A considerably shorter and different version of this novel appeared in 1963 under the title Listen! The Stars! and is copyright © 1963 by John Brunner." Perhaps I read that. This version of the story is copyrighted 1972. On Groundhog's Day of 1981, I performed a "Mad Scientist DidAction" called "attempt to undermine "reality" maintenance traps". You can read about that & see stills from it here: http://idioideo.pleintekst.nl/MereOut... or see a movie from it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ababbr... . It wasn't until I'd finished the novel that I realized that I'd (sortof) tried to do in 'real' life (in the form of the above-mentioned action) what the characters in this novel were doing.
I'm usually pleased to have my vocabulary expanded. Any writer I like is bound to introduce me to an interesting word. A popular writer will introduce them less often being restricted by the 'need' to keep their lesser-educated readership engaged. Brunner: "He moved it a little further, and a susurrus of noise began, like surf on a distant beach" (p 8): "susurrus" is a word I 1st remember encountering as the title of an electro-acoustic piece by my dear departed friend James "Sarmad" Brody. Merriam-Webster Online defines it as a "whispering or rustling sound" & cites its 1st known use as in 1826. Fascinating.
Brunner consistently satisfies my desire for details: "["]All in all I feel rather pleased with myself today, which is why I'm treating myself to this cigar. Oh, I'm sorry—I should have asked you if you'd like one. I imagine Havanas are something of a forgotten luxury as far as you people in the States are concerned."" (p 14) Yes, the famous Cuban cigars, unavailable to most people in the US b/c of the boycott on Cuban products - but, apparently, legally available to people in London. Nice touch, Brunner. Was it a Cuban cigar that Clinton used as a dildo w/ what's-her-face? Or is that an urban myth? Pretty funny either way.
In the novel, "Stardroppers" are devices used for eavesdropping on the stars - or so people believe, for tapping into signals from alien minds. Brunner is great at evoking their cultural omnipresence:
"In a drugstore window, as he approached Marble Arch, he saw single earplugs on sale, labeled TO AID CONCENTRATION WHILE STARDROPPING.
"Waiting to cross at a stoplight, he heard a boy in his late teens hailing a friend: "Dropped any good stars lately?"" - p 26
Not being sure what the original story is like & not being sure what LSD culture wd've been like in London as of the time of the original story, 1963, I don't know how much, if at all, Brunner is playing off of Acidheads. It seems like alot. I probably 1st took LSD in 1972, when this bk was published, & the lingo wd've been firmly in place by then. IE: a person "dropped" acid. I don't know when headphones became a common tool "TO AID CONCENTRATION" but they were still somewhat of a novelty, albeit widespread, in my teen yrs in the late 1960s. As such, both of these references wd've probably been pretty fresh at the time of this bk's release.
From the British policeman's perspective, the Stardropper craze is like the popularity of LSD from a time presented as being in the novel's past, but actually in its writing's present: "There hasn't been anything like it since that crazy outbreak of LSD addiction in the middle sixties. I was a brand-new detective-constable then, and I used to hate bringing those kids in—but what else could you do, when they were drooling and playing with their fingers?" (p 47) Brunner is subtle here, he has the sympathetically portrayed cop say "LSD addiction", a somewhat realistic representation of how a cop might see any drug use - w/o distinguishing between the various drugs's effects. William S. Burroughs references the harm that such blanket generalizations can do & did do in his own life by telling about how marihuana was lumped together in the anti-drug propaganda w/ heroin. Burroughs tried pot & found it fine & tried heroin & got addicted.
Perhaps I'm wrong, but it seems to me that Brunner recognized that amazing new insights cd be gained from what I prefer to call consciousness-expansion drugs (or experiences - I don't think drugs need be a part of it) & shifted it from LSD to Stardroppers. At the same time, he was trying not to be irresponsible, as so many people in the psychedelic subculture cd be, so he walks the reader thru the scenario carefully.
Anyone familiar w/ the culture of getting "high" has encountered the situation of someone playing guitar or drawing, eg, while tripping & thinking that their music & their art is profound. But can they explain why? & does anyone else agree w/ them? & does the product even seem to be that special when they come down? Now, I don't mean that the music & art can't be profound under such circumstances, what I do mean is that there's more to be done than to just only half-comprehendingly meander thru such experiences - esp when it's just treated as 'recreation' as so many people sadly do. Brunner captures the conundrum well:
"Making a helpless gesture, she closed her eyes and swayed a little. She said thinly, "Suppose you had a dream, a very important dream, in which you saw something you desperately wanted to remember—a bit of the future, say. And you woke up and you remembered you'd seen it, but not what it was. It's a little bit like that, except that what you can't quite remember is a matter of life or death. If you don't get back to it, you might as well cut your throat."" - p 30
If you have a truly profound experience, will you be able to express it adequately in words? IMO, probably NOT. What makes it PROFOUND is its very ineffableness. But I don't mean that in a religious sense, AT ALL, even tho that may very well be the way many people experience religion. Religion tends to make people stupid enuf to be manipulated by its unscrupulous leaders, consciousness-expansion tends to make people smart enuf to resist such manipulation. The important thing here is to try to make the ineffable comprehensible by understanding the significance of one's relationship to it. Hence, a great writer like Brunner, writes a great bk like The Stardroppers - he doesn't just scribble while he's high & then expect other people to get the same thing out of it that he did - he tries to bring the ineffable into the realm of the comprehensible w/o destroying it in the process - & I think he does a pretty good job. The ineffable is frequently brought up:
"Lilith made a frustrated gesture. "Things that don't go into words. And yet they make this weird kind of sense!" (p 31), "'It's so hard to capture in words—so remote from everyday experience—that I get the feeling it may really come from an alien mind.'" (p 45), "Others were struggling, their eyes haunted, to get across meanings they were convinced no words could properly express." (p 65)
Hypnosis is important again, as it was in Brunner's The Evil That Men Do (see my review here: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18... ) & his The Productions of Time (see my review here: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18... ) & its this emphasis on hypnosis that's one of the reasons why I brought up my "attempt to undermine "reality" maintenance traps" earlier insofar as I attempted to use autohypnosis in it.
"Next he had been made to learn the code, pumped into him under deep hypnosis. The Agency used hypnosis a great deal, having refined the traditional techniques with the aid of drugs." - p 62
"Well, it was notorious that in certain abnormal mental states, including a hypnotic trance, the human being was capable of improbable feats: displays of incredible strength, for example, or recollection of the minutest details of some otherwise long-forgotten past event." - p 108
I'm also reminded of the "Nuclear Brain Physics Surgery's cool" that I founded in 1978. This was/is a school to be slept thru. The lessons were created by the graduates & no-one was supposed to hear the lessons while awake. The curious can read a little about this in some Cognitive Dissidents posts here: http://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/1... . I intend to make all of the lessons available for awake (or asleep) listening on the Internet Archive SOON.
Of course, what can engage any reader in a story is a high quantity of points of intersection w/ their own lives. Brunner surprised me w/ this one: "I can think of where they're launching spacecraft—Kennedy, Woomera, Baikonur" (p 103) - well, motherfucker!, I've been to Woomera!! A scene in my "The Lab Rats Explain Their Veggie-Oil Powered Van" movie was shot at the dump there! You can witness this on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X0RsOO... . Woomera is an outback town where there's a US military base, the people drive on the right side of the road there instead of on the left like they do in the rest of Australia. It's also the place where refugees from Afghanistan were kept in a Detention Centre. There's a wonderful publication called "Desert Storm" by political activists exposing this Detention Centre. You can read about its closure here: http://peril.com.au/featured/10th-yea... .
Brunner is always prescient, astonishingly so, an excellent characteristic in anyone but one that's esp hoped for in SF writers. "thanks to the availability at long last of TV tubes no deeper than a picture frame": flat screen tvs are commonplace now but they certainly weren't when Brunner wrote this.
"This time he found a handwritten sheet he had previously disregarded, and on it he found what the abbreviation "CPF" stood for. The writer—Watson, presumably—had put:
""Straightforward enough. It's the cocktail-party factor, and there's no avoiding that."
"Dan frowned. That was a standard slang in information theory, the nickname for the process of sorting a particular series of data from a jumble of background noise, like carrying on a conversation with one other person in competition with fifty more talking at the top of their lungs." - p 117
This cd also be called the PBLF, the Penguin Baby Locating Factor - anyone who's seen the marvelous movie, March of the Penguins might get that one.
The main investigating character, Dan, is from "The Agency" in the US. One might conclude that this means the CIA. But Brunner's unlikely to have such a sympathetic character be associated w/ an agency notorious for inculcating the genocide that the CIA has, unfortunately, been associated w/. ""I'm an operative of the United Nations Special Agency."" (p 128) After all, Brunner was probably an Internationalist Optimist, as am I. Alas, as the movie The Whistleblower has revealed, even the UN can be used by corrupting forces - such as the members of the IPTF (International Police Task Force) who were involved in human trafficking in Bosnia under the protection of their UN status. Beware of PMCs (Private Military Contractors)!!
April 19, 2020
I have not looked at a lot by John Brunner-the occasional short story I think. The Stardroppers is the first novel of his I've read. This book is blessed with both a pretty awful title and a cover that gives away entirely too much of the plot. (Why is Mean Gene Okerlund in a suit with a bowler hat and a tricorder?) Nonetheless if you can get past that, you'll find you have something really good in your hands. Stardropping is a corruption of the word eavesdropping. A machine has been made (one you can buy in any store or cobble together yourself) that should not work but does despite the laws of physics. No one is quite sure how it operates but the common consensus is that it allows the listener to receive alien signals...signals with a pattern that cannot be directly translated. Some claim that they can gain insight by listening though it is not able to be expressed in linguistic terms. And then some people start to vanish...Two reasons I liked this book: great concept (which I will not divulge) and Brunner's dialog. Brunner has his characters speak in such a natural way it is really refreshing. Of course he did win a Hugo award, as a friend of mine would say.
November 18, 2017
This was an enjoyable short sci-fi book. I would say that it is a sci-fi detective style story. Dan Cross has been sent to investigate the "Stardropper" craze over in England. These are radio-like devices that emit strange, but engaging sounds. People don't know where the sounds come from, but many get obsessed with the hobby. The story involves Dan going around London looking into this craze and finding an entire conspiracy behind it. It's a good Brunner book. I look forward to reading more of his selections.
August 13, 2025
First, shout out to the cover by Frank Kelly Freas. It’s certainly what drew me to the book in the first place.
This was such an interesting book, and was right up my alley in concept: Open mindedness and the acceptance of knowledge as it is, not what you believe.
Dan Cross is a great protagonist, and how Stardropping is likened to drug use is so well done. A good novel to read for fun and a quick stimulation of that heady sci-fi itch.
This was such an interesting book, and was right up my alley in concept: Open mindedness and the acceptance of knowledge as it is, not what you believe.
Dan Cross is a great protagonist, and how Stardropping is likened to drug use is so well done. A good novel to read for fun and a quick stimulation of that heady sci-fi itch.
June 18, 2023
Really neat 1960s sci-fi, drawing in elements of drug culture and anti-war attitudes for a very 60s feel...already in 1962! I'm not sure the science ideas were well constructed, but they weren't bad, convoluted enough that we can focus on the larger concepts. If you could hear aliens, what would it sound like?
December 22, 2019
Fantastic mid-60s optimist romp from Brunner. A magical device no one can make sense is causing a meltdown of the world order as we know it and only a UN special agent is there to make sense of all. Short and enjoyable.
August 4, 2019
Really more of 3.5 but I couldn't see giving it a 4. Interesting, well-written, at times captivating, with an odd conclusion.
August 10, 2020
The one where noise music saves the world.
July 30, 2023
Great premise, loved the language, loved the way the machines were described. TBH I think it was too much build up for a kind of lame and not well thought through ending. But... quite great! I liked it a lot. It's just fun!!!
Plus the connection to psychedelic culture was pretty entertaining.
Plus the connection to psychedelic culture was pretty entertaining.
June 7, 2024
Fast paced SF. A conceptual breakthrough* story with spycraft.
I have a lot of John Brunner paperbacks. This was enjoyable but inessential.
* I think I am using this correctly.
I have a lot of John Brunner paperbacks. This was enjoyable but inessential.
* I think I am using this correctly.
January 24, 2009
Just an old-school 70's science fiction book with all of the things you'd expect. Lots of drugged-out hippies except instead of drugs, they're all listening to alien transmissions and wasting their lives away!
It's an interesting read from both a sci-fi and a historical perspective, but it ends right as it seems to be just starting. Worth reading though, especially since it only takes a couple hours and I picked it up from the library book sale for 25 cents!
It's an interesting read from both a sci-fi and a historical perspective, but it ends right as it seems to be just starting. Worth reading though, especially since it only takes a couple hours and I picked it up from the library book sale for 25 cents!
October 3, 2014
First Brunner I've read, likely not his best work. I love the cover, as a side note, of this DAW edition. Anyway, what's good: concepts of language and a spy story. What's bad: concepts are sketchy and spy story eventually seems lame. I want a rewrite. The novel just seems to go nowhere for too long, and then when it does, it dumps a lot of info at the reader - which just made me dubious about the whole storyline.
October 17, 2007
One of those -70:s science-fiction novels, you know the kind I'm talking about...No deep or complicated story but the phenomenon (in this case the new invention "the stardropper") is interesting and the book is very easy to read.
January 17, 2018
Simple story based around being to intercept alien knowledge via a Stardropper, a radio type device that appears to pick up the static of the universe until some people learn how to extract ideas from it.
April 23, 2015
Brunner is a great scifi author, I've read several of his books, this is a fast, fun read.
February 1, 2017
Minor work by a major author.
August 2, 2025
Il primo libro della collana Urania che io abbia mai letto.. che cosa stavo aspettando?
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