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Children of the Thunder / The Tides of Time / The Crucible of Time
Three works by an award-winning science fiction novelist include The Crucible of Time, Children of the Thunder, and The Tides of Time.
- GenresScience Fiction
789 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1995
About the author
John Brunner
567 books488 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 of 1 review
November 25, 2018
Children of the Thunder
Dark, dystopian, and deeply flawed. And yet….
Author John Brunner’s late 20th century England is a mess: the economy is collapsing, environmental degradation is rampant, the government is corrupt, religious fundamentalists are taking over, and a renegade general is advocating xenophobia and racism at home and nuclear war abroad. Things in the U.S. are similar, minus the general. Meanwhile, Japan and continental Europe are doing fine, or better.
Peter Levin is a freelance reporter. Few newspapers will buy his work and they are in danger of closing. Claudia Morris is an American sociologist. She made her name with a provocative book, but she now thinks she might have gotten her thesis wrong, and has come to England on sabbatical to do research and write a new book. She and Levin had met previously, and they meet up again.
Meanwhile, a baker’s dozen of just past puberty children scattered across the British Isles and in Italy have discovered that they have the power to control the people around them, and they’re wielding that power to get everything they want, including the deaths of those who threaten them.
And here’s where the first flaw shows up. Brunner tells the story of all but one of the children while Levin and Morris meet. Levin fumbles around trying to find paying work while she struggles to keep the funding for her studies coming. There’s little evidence of a connection between the Levin/Morris story line and those of the children for well over half of the book. A science fiction reader will trust the author to eventually bring parallel story lines together, and Brunner eventually does, but even then, the children seem to be of secondary interest Levin and Morris. The early portions of the book are such a disjointed mess that it’s often tempting to put the book down.
Other flaws: Written in the mid-1980s, the book seems to have been created in haste for the domestic British market, and so was not “translated” into American English for this publication. (My copy of Children is the first of three books collected into one hardback.) For someone like me who’s worked with Britons, this isn’t much of a problem, but for others, even the non-slang terms will cause American readers to stumble.
Speaking of slang, Brunner chose to create a whole new set of slang and swear words for his characters. It turns out that he did not make up the words he chose, they were terms from previous eras, some quite obscene in their original usage. This wouldn’t be much of a problem except that Levin, the children, and even the American Dr. Morris, who, by the way, is also a Jewish lesbian, swear like sailors. It’s annoying and unnecessary.
As a writer, I notice dialogue tags. Writers today are taught to use very few: said, asked, thought, maybe one or two others. Brunner, however, resorts to what are called “Tom Swifties,” after the Tom Swift adventure novels, in which each dialogue tag is overdone and accompanied by an adverb to overdo them even more. Brunner’s characters shout angrily, exclaim excitedly, growl menacingly, and so on. It’s annoying tremendously.
And yet, for all this, I kept reading. The story picks up once Levin and Morris hear about the kids. With the help of Levin’s estranged teenage daughter, who comes to live with him after her mother is killed by a plane crash in her neighborhood, they start to investigate the children. One of the children brings all but two of the others to live with him. He kills the Italian boy because he’s a potential rival. The other child (spoiler alert) is Levin’s daughter, and she’s in cahoots with the rest of them.
Levin and Morris suspect that these children were all created via artificial insemination (referred to by the British slang term “artinsem”) with sperm from a single donor, so they try to find him. It turns out (more spoilers) that Levin, who was also a sperm donor as a young man, is that man, something that’s only revealed at the end of the book, when the children show him their amoral, power-mad nature and ultimate plans to take over the world, by among other things, making Levin father more of them, including with Morris.
In true dystopian fashion, the bad guys (the kids) win, and the person we thought was the good guy (Levin) is in fact at fault for the whole mess.
It’s a tribute to Brunner’s skill as a writer that he was able to keep me interested in such a flawed work all the way to the end, but in the end the flaws drive the rating down, although to a higher score than I first thought I would give it.
The Tides of Time
I’m really not sure how to respond to this odd little novel by John Brunner. For the first three-quarters, it seems like a different take on the standard time travel story. Then it gets weird.
Rich white girl Stacy and her black boyfriend Gene are fleeing something. Prejudice because they’re a biracial couple? Maybe. It’s never made clear. In any case, they have signed up to travel through time and space, and are initially sent back to a Sphinx-shaped Greek island called Oragalia in their present day or close to it. But the next morning, they have magically jumped back in time to something like the 1980s. They spend the day exploring the island and its one small town. The next morning, they’ve jumped again, this time back to WWII.
The pattern continues: in each “Part,” or chapter, of the story Gene and Stacy spend just one day, then are bounced back farther in time, with no explanation of how or why this happens. Further, as they go farther and farther back, eventually into pre-Greek-empire times, they know the language, and the residents of the island know them as having been there for a long time. They have known Stacy, now Anastasia, since she was a child. And Gene—now Evgenos, or Eugene—and Stacy think little of the fact that they’ve jumped. They too know their history in this time.
But every evening, as the fall asleep, they discuss, in English, some other time traveler they knew. Those other time travelers, it turns out, represent seven or eight or nine bad human behaviors (greed, sloth, adventurism, and the like), somewhat like Christianity’s seven deadly sins. This too is supposed to have some kind of relevance, although at the time each conversation happens, it just makes things stranger.
During the journey, Stacy becomes pregnant, and at each jump back in time, they also move forward one month, so her pregnancy develops to the point that after the final jump, she’s ready to deliver. Then they’re brought back to their original time, but Stacy dies in childbirth.
All of this begs for an explanation, but when it comes, it muddles things further, rather than explaining anything. The scientists in charge (?) of the experiment seem to think Gene has discovered answers to great cosmic questions about how to travel faster than light without going mad, and so the final three chapters are Gene trying to explain what he’s learned.
Confused? Me too. There’s apparently all sorts of symbolism—Anastasia means “resurrection” and Eugene means “well born,” for example, and their daughter Gene names Terra (as in “save the earth,” since environmentalism is mixed up in this as well)—that the reader is supposed to decode along the way. That’s too much work for too little reward.
I found The Tides of Time a case of “experimental” fiction in which the experiment failed. Your experience may differ, but my recommendation is that you not bother to find out.
Dark, dystopian, and deeply flawed. And yet….
Author John Brunner’s late 20th century England is a mess: the economy is collapsing, environmental degradation is rampant, the government is corrupt, religious fundamentalists are taking over, and a renegade general is advocating xenophobia and racism at home and nuclear war abroad. Things in the U.S. are similar, minus the general. Meanwhile, Japan and continental Europe are doing fine, or better.
Peter Levin is a freelance reporter. Few newspapers will buy his work and they are in danger of closing. Claudia Morris is an American sociologist. She made her name with a provocative book, but she now thinks she might have gotten her thesis wrong, and has come to England on sabbatical to do research and write a new book. She and Levin had met previously, and they meet up again.
Meanwhile, a baker’s dozen of just past puberty children scattered across the British Isles and in Italy have discovered that they have the power to control the people around them, and they’re wielding that power to get everything they want, including the deaths of those who threaten them.
And here’s where the first flaw shows up. Brunner tells the story of all but one of the children while Levin and Morris meet. Levin fumbles around trying to find paying work while she struggles to keep the funding for her studies coming. There’s little evidence of a connection between the Levin/Morris story line and those of the children for well over half of the book. A science fiction reader will trust the author to eventually bring parallel story lines together, and Brunner eventually does, but even then, the children seem to be of secondary interest Levin and Morris. The early portions of the book are such a disjointed mess that it’s often tempting to put the book down.
Other flaws: Written in the mid-1980s, the book seems to have been created in haste for the domestic British market, and so was not “translated” into American English for this publication. (My copy of Children is the first of three books collected into one hardback.) For someone like me who’s worked with Britons, this isn’t much of a problem, but for others, even the non-slang terms will cause American readers to stumble.
Speaking of slang, Brunner chose to create a whole new set of slang and swear words for his characters. It turns out that he did not make up the words he chose, they were terms from previous eras, some quite obscene in their original usage. This wouldn’t be much of a problem except that Levin, the children, and even the American Dr. Morris, who, by the way, is also a Jewish lesbian, swear like sailors. It’s annoying and unnecessary.
As a writer, I notice dialogue tags. Writers today are taught to use very few: said, asked, thought, maybe one or two others. Brunner, however, resorts to what are called “Tom Swifties,” after the Tom Swift adventure novels, in which each dialogue tag is overdone and accompanied by an adverb to overdo them even more. Brunner’s characters shout angrily, exclaim excitedly, growl menacingly, and so on. It’s annoying tremendously.
And yet, for all this, I kept reading. The story picks up once Levin and Morris hear about the kids. With the help of Levin’s estranged teenage daughter, who comes to live with him after her mother is killed by a plane crash in her neighborhood, they start to investigate the children. One of the children brings all but two of the others to live with him. He kills the Italian boy because he’s a potential rival. The other child (spoiler alert) is Levin’s daughter, and she’s in cahoots with the rest of them.
Levin and Morris suspect that these children were all created via artificial insemination (referred to by the British slang term “artinsem”) with sperm from a single donor, so they try to find him. It turns out (more spoilers) that Levin, who was also a sperm donor as a young man, is that man, something that’s only revealed at the end of the book, when the children show him their amoral, power-mad nature and ultimate plans to take over the world, by among other things, making Levin father more of them, including with Morris.
In true dystopian fashion, the bad guys (the kids) win, and the person we thought was the good guy (Levin) is in fact at fault for the whole mess.
It’s a tribute to Brunner’s skill as a writer that he was able to keep me interested in such a flawed work all the way to the end, but in the end the flaws drive the rating down, although to a higher score than I first thought I would give it.
The Tides of Time
I’m really not sure how to respond to this odd little novel by John Brunner. For the first three-quarters, it seems like a different take on the standard time travel story. Then it gets weird.
Rich white girl Stacy and her black boyfriend Gene are fleeing something. Prejudice because they’re a biracial couple? Maybe. It’s never made clear. In any case, they have signed up to travel through time and space, and are initially sent back to a Sphinx-shaped Greek island called Oragalia in their present day or close to it. But the next morning, they have magically jumped back in time to something like the 1980s. They spend the day exploring the island and its one small town. The next morning, they’ve jumped again, this time back to WWII.
The pattern continues: in each “Part,” or chapter, of the story Gene and Stacy spend just one day, then are bounced back farther in time, with no explanation of how or why this happens. Further, as they go farther and farther back, eventually into pre-Greek-empire times, they know the language, and the residents of the island know them as having been there for a long time. They have known Stacy, now Anastasia, since she was a child. And Gene—now Evgenos, or Eugene—and Stacy think little of the fact that they’ve jumped. They too know their history in this time.
But every evening, as the fall asleep, they discuss, in English, some other time traveler they knew. Those other time travelers, it turns out, represent seven or eight or nine bad human behaviors (greed, sloth, adventurism, and the like), somewhat like Christianity’s seven deadly sins. This too is supposed to have some kind of relevance, although at the time each conversation happens, it just makes things stranger.
During the journey, Stacy becomes pregnant, and at each jump back in time, they also move forward one month, so her pregnancy develops to the point that after the final jump, she’s ready to deliver. Then they’re brought back to their original time, but Stacy dies in childbirth.
All of this begs for an explanation, but when it comes, it muddles things further, rather than explaining anything. The scientists in charge (?) of the experiment seem to think Gene has discovered answers to great cosmic questions about how to travel faster than light without going mad, and so the final three chapters are Gene trying to explain what he’s learned.
Confused? Me too. There’s apparently all sorts of symbolism—Anastasia means “resurrection” and Eugene means “well born,” for example, and their daughter Gene names Terra (as in “save the earth,” since environmentalism is mixed up in this as well)—that the reader is supposed to decode along the way. That’s too much work for too little reward.
I found The Tides of Time a case of “experimental” fiction in which the experiment failed. Your experience may differ, but my recommendation is that you not bother to find out.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
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