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The Great Steamboat Race
The captains of two famous steamboats fight to win a race on the Mississippi River from New Orleans to St. Louis
568 pages, Paperback
First published February 12, 1983
1 person is currently reading
50 people want to read
About the author
John Brunner
572 books485 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 - 4 of 4 reviews
September 2, 2023
This is his infamous turkey
I heard about this with a book of sci-fi interviews and, it was an amazing collection, and Brunner was one of the more interesting oddballs, but I think the strange thing was his career basically sailed smoothly from 1959 to 1975, when he got sidetracked in two or three things, that didn't work out quite as well as he planned, and one was this book
which i think had feared of not being published after he pushed away his sci-fi career for a while, and then his high blood pressure issues kicked in, seriously affecting his writing when he was feeling so lousy.
The oddest thing about the interviews is science fiction was in decline with the rocketships and the moon landings, and Star Trek, and the disillusionment with Kennedy's death and Vietnam, and almost no more science fiction after Star Trek and 2001, and the Moon Landings in theatres... and science fiction books went into some decline in the 70s and 80s, and then there were weirdnesses like Star Wars and Dungeons and Dragons, but there was Alien.
It's sad that Brunner had his health and financial problems as science fiction was losing steam, but i think this book probably came at the worst possible time in his career.
........
One thing that i came up with today after thinking about this for about 25 years is that i wonder if John Brunner being English was trying to copy the style and wackiness of Michael Moorcock, and well, maybe the world is only able to handle one Moorcock.....
Frankly, i would rather watch on DVD all the episodes of Darren McGavin on the 1959 television series Riverboat
But did Brunner consciously or unconsciously copy Jose Farmer's Steamboat books with the endless Moorcock Fantasy Series?
.........
Farmer!
Here are the wacky almost tiresome vibes you get of Farmer's series
which turned into five works
book one
"British adventurer Richard Francis Burton dies on Earth and is revived in mid-air in a vast dark room filled with human bodies, some only half-formed. There, he is confronted by men in a flying vehicle who then blast him with a weapon. He next awakes upon the shores of a mysterious river, naked and hairless. "
book two
"Departing from the exploits of Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton in the first Riverworld novel, To Your Scattered Bodies Go, The Fabulous Riverboat follows the efforts of Samuel Clemens to find a way to build a riverboat on the metal-poor Riverworld. In the process, he confronts a tenth-century Viking, makes friends with a member of another hominid species and forms an uneasy alliance with King John Lackland."
book three
"In the first plot line, Richard Burton and his friends continue their journey up river. On their journey they encounter a group of ancient Egyptians who tell them of a mission which their Pharaoh had undertaken to reach the source of the River"
book four
"The book begins with the Mysterious Stranger, known as X, the renegade Ethical (one of the Riverworld's creators) who posed as the engineer Barry Thorn on the airship Parseval and there murdered Milton Firebrass and several others, all of whom were fellow Ethicals. He is now posing as a Mayan named Ah Qaaq, in the company of the Chinese poet Li Po. Through his internal reverie he reveals that his identity was discovered by Monat Grrautut, the director of the Riverworld project, who recalled 'X' to the Dark Tower to be judged. Against this, 'X' used a remote command to kill all the inhabitants of the tower and stop the resurrections of Riverworld's inhabitants."
book five
"They must decide how to use the resurrection machinery they now control, and also solve the mystery of the murder of the mysterious stranger."
..........
Moorcock's Elric/Jerry Cornelius/Eternal Champion
Many of Moorcock's novels and short stories take place in a shared Multiverse: an array of interconnected parallel universes, many-layered dimensions, spheres, and alternative worlds, spanning from the Big Bang to the End of Time and from planet Earth to faraway galaxies. All these regions of spaces and parallel timelines are given shape by two metaphysical forces which are perpetually opposed to each other: Law and Chaos, which represent perpetual stasis and ever-changing disorder. Since a clear-cut prevalence of either Law or Chaos would erase all life from the Multiverse, a third force known as the Cosmic Balance enforces certain limits on the powers of Law and Chaos, which in turn ensure the continued existence of the Multiverse.....
The Eternal Champion is an appointed paladin of Balance who is bound to exist in each and every world and age of the Multiverse, so that Law and Chaos are perpetually kept in check; however, he often does not know of his role or struggles against it, never to succeed.
Since he must intervene whenever either Law or Chaos has gained an excess of power, requiring him to tip the scales accordingly, he is always doomed to be surrounded by strife and destruction, although he may go through long periods of relative quiet.
sighs
..............
I'm not sure i can actually decide if i like these sci-fi-fantasies by Farmer/Moorcock or Brunner, if they aren't just an acquired taste in genius, or utter dog crap, likely both!
now....
i want you to take those two writers and
figure out if indeed John Brunner is Curly, the Third of the Three Stooges
of these types of bombastic fantasies
---
Kirkus Reviews
Brunner, hitherto known primarily for superior science-fiction, now offers an extravagant exercise in Americana: a one-on-one steamboat race from New Orleans to St. Louis in June 1870--with nautical details, period exotica, geographical minutiae, and a surfeit of subplots.
First come, awfully slowly, 250 pages of background, introducing the boats' histories and the principal crew/passenger characters. On the one hand there's the veteran sidewheeler Atchafalaya, with lonely captain-owner Hosea Drew in command, seconded by his beloved protrgr pilot Fernand Lamenthe (cheated scion of a banking family).
On the other hand there's the brand-new Nonpareil, the dreamboat of old, blind ex-captain Miles Parbury (a Civil War river-warfare casualty), financed by shady Hamish Gordon and by Lamenthe's evil relatives. And soon a race becomes inevitable, thanks to a Gordon/Drew restaurant brawl, the Nonpareil's need to win river-business, public demand...and two St. Louis medical emergencies (one of them viral to Drew) that require the speedy arrival of quack "Electric Doctor" Cherouen.
So off go the steamboats, with a slew of contrived characters-in-conflict aboard: Fernand's quadroon-love Dorcas, ex-housemaid to old lech Parbury; Fernand's possessive mother, one of New Orleans' two top black-magic queens (she'll try casting spells to help Fernand win); Josephine, the other voodoo empress; reporter Joel; black engineer Caesar; a pretentious musician; and many others.
Still, none of the stories here, all leading to some personal stake in the race outcome, is full or involving enough to generate much emotional grip.
Instead, the novel is moved along, more or less, by the river itself-with each major port passing by, with a predictable assortment of boat-maneuvers and troubles along the way (refueling woes, debris, fog, mud, fire), with a nicely downbeat disaster-finale.
And Brunner's eclectic research, served up in lively dialogue and robust prose, makes this a lavish, 592-page treat for devotees of Mississippi-ana, even if others may find it somewhat overfreighted with storyline fragments and those unwieldy first-half flashbacks.
........
Brunner complained about his sci fi-career suffering, i still think this definately did it!
But i didn't think of it till now, was he trying to be the next Michael Moorcock, and stumbled?
[oops Farmer, no i think i meant Moorcock, on never mind, go watch The Wild Wild West with Robert Conrad and Burgess Meredith as the Special Guest Star!]
I heard about this with a book of sci-fi interviews and, it was an amazing collection, and Brunner was one of the more interesting oddballs, but I think the strange thing was his career basically sailed smoothly from 1959 to 1975, when he got sidetracked in two or three things, that didn't work out quite as well as he planned, and one was this book
which i think had feared of not being published after he pushed away his sci-fi career for a while, and then his high blood pressure issues kicked in, seriously affecting his writing when he was feeling so lousy.
The oddest thing about the interviews is science fiction was in decline with the rocketships and the moon landings, and Star Trek, and the disillusionment with Kennedy's death and Vietnam, and almost no more science fiction after Star Trek and 2001, and the Moon Landings in theatres... and science fiction books went into some decline in the 70s and 80s, and then there were weirdnesses like Star Wars and Dungeons and Dragons, but there was Alien.
It's sad that Brunner had his health and financial problems as science fiction was losing steam, but i think this book probably came at the worst possible time in his career.
........
One thing that i came up with today after thinking about this for about 25 years is that i wonder if John Brunner being English was trying to copy the style and wackiness of Michael Moorcock, and well, maybe the world is only able to handle one Moorcock.....
Frankly, i would rather watch on DVD all the episodes of Darren McGavin on the 1959 television series Riverboat
But did Brunner consciously or unconsciously copy Jose Farmer's Steamboat books with the endless Moorcock Fantasy Series?
.........
Farmer!
Here are the wacky almost tiresome vibes you get of Farmer's series
which turned into five works
book one
"British adventurer Richard Francis Burton dies on Earth and is revived in mid-air in a vast dark room filled with human bodies, some only half-formed. There, he is confronted by men in a flying vehicle who then blast him with a weapon. He next awakes upon the shores of a mysterious river, naked and hairless. "
book two
"Departing from the exploits of Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton in the first Riverworld novel, To Your Scattered Bodies Go, The Fabulous Riverboat follows the efforts of Samuel Clemens to find a way to build a riverboat on the metal-poor Riverworld. In the process, he confronts a tenth-century Viking, makes friends with a member of another hominid species and forms an uneasy alliance with King John Lackland."
book three
"In the first plot line, Richard Burton and his friends continue their journey up river. On their journey they encounter a group of ancient Egyptians who tell them of a mission which their Pharaoh had undertaken to reach the source of the River"
book four
"The book begins with the Mysterious Stranger, known as X, the renegade Ethical (one of the Riverworld's creators) who posed as the engineer Barry Thorn on the airship Parseval and there murdered Milton Firebrass and several others, all of whom were fellow Ethicals. He is now posing as a Mayan named Ah Qaaq, in the company of the Chinese poet Li Po. Through his internal reverie he reveals that his identity was discovered by Monat Grrautut, the director of the Riverworld project, who recalled 'X' to the Dark Tower to be judged. Against this, 'X' used a remote command to kill all the inhabitants of the tower and stop the resurrections of Riverworld's inhabitants."
book five
"They must decide how to use the resurrection machinery they now control, and also solve the mystery of the murder of the mysterious stranger."
..........
Moorcock's Elric/Jerry Cornelius/Eternal Champion
Many of Moorcock's novels and short stories take place in a shared Multiverse: an array of interconnected parallel universes, many-layered dimensions, spheres, and alternative worlds, spanning from the Big Bang to the End of Time and from planet Earth to faraway galaxies. All these regions of spaces and parallel timelines are given shape by two metaphysical forces which are perpetually opposed to each other: Law and Chaos, which represent perpetual stasis and ever-changing disorder. Since a clear-cut prevalence of either Law or Chaos would erase all life from the Multiverse, a third force known as the Cosmic Balance enforces certain limits on the powers of Law and Chaos, which in turn ensure the continued existence of the Multiverse.....
The Eternal Champion is an appointed paladin of Balance who is bound to exist in each and every world and age of the Multiverse, so that Law and Chaos are perpetually kept in check; however, he often does not know of his role or struggles against it, never to succeed.
Since he must intervene whenever either Law or Chaos has gained an excess of power, requiring him to tip the scales accordingly, he is always doomed to be surrounded by strife and destruction, although he may go through long periods of relative quiet.
sighs
..............
I'm not sure i can actually decide if i like these sci-fi-fantasies by Farmer/Moorcock or Brunner, if they aren't just an acquired taste in genius, or utter dog crap, likely both!
now....
i want you to take those two writers and
figure out if indeed John Brunner is Curly, the Third of the Three Stooges
of these types of bombastic fantasies
---
Kirkus Reviews
Brunner, hitherto known primarily for superior science-fiction, now offers an extravagant exercise in Americana: a one-on-one steamboat race from New Orleans to St. Louis in June 1870--with nautical details, period exotica, geographical minutiae, and a surfeit of subplots.
First come, awfully slowly, 250 pages of background, introducing the boats' histories and the principal crew/passenger characters. On the one hand there's the veteran sidewheeler Atchafalaya, with lonely captain-owner Hosea Drew in command, seconded by his beloved protrgr pilot Fernand Lamenthe (cheated scion of a banking family).
On the other hand there's the brand-new Nonpareil, the dreamboat of old, blind ex-captain Miles Parbury (a Civil War river-warfare casualty), financed by shady Hamish Gordon and by Lamenthe's evil relatives. And soon a race becomes inevitable, thanks to a Gordon/Drew restaurant brawl, the Nonpareil's need to win river-business, public demand...and two St. Louis medical emergencies (one of them viral to Drew) that require the speedy arrival of quack "Electric Doctor" Cherouen.
So off go the steamboats, with a slew of contrived characters-in-conflict aboard: Fernand's quadroon-love Dorcas, ex-housemaid to old lech Parbury; Fernand's possessive mother, one of New Orleans' two top black-magic queens (she'll try casting spells to help Fernand win); Josephine, the other voodoo empress; reporter Joel; black engineer Caesar; a pretentious musician; and many others.
Still, none of the stories here, all leading to some personal stake in the race outcome, is full or involving enough to generate much emotional grip.
Instead, the novel is moved along, more or less, by the river itself-with each major port passing by, with a predictable assortment of boat-maneuvers and troubles along the way (refueling woes, debris, fog, mud, fire), with a nicely downbeat disaster-finale.
And Brunner's eclectic research, served up in lively dialogue and robust prose, makes this a lavish, 592-page treat for devotees of Mississippi-ana, even if others may find it somewhat overfreighted with storyline fragments and those unwieldy first-half flashbacks.
........
Brunner complained about his sci fi-career suffering, i still think this definately did it!
But i didn't think of it till now, was he trying to be the next Michael Moorcock, and stumbled?
[oops Farmer, no i think i meant Moorcock, on never mind, go watch The Wild Wild West with Robert Conrad and Burgess Meredith as the Special Guest Star!]
August 16, 2017
This is an epic novel. There a myriad characters to keep track of throughout the story. Fortunately, the author saw fit to include a list of characters at the front of the book . I needed it a couple of times to keep the characters straight. I first read this book over ten years ago and it's been on the bookshelf ever since. I thought it was a topic that would interest Marv so I've been reading it to him at bedtime. Marv is not a pleasure reader and this book was too long and had too many characters to keep track of but he enjoyed the story. He especially enjoyed the references to the workings of a steamboat. He asked me to select a shorter book next time.
September 2, 2024
This was a no-go for me. I love me some big historical novels, but this was really flat. Brunner tried to liven up the writing by using a lot of exclamation points, but it was still uninspiring.
abandoned
June 22, 2013I really enjoy Brunner's science fiction and dystopian fiction, but I am not a big fan of this historical novel; the time period is not particularly interesting to me, and I'd rather focus on tracking down more of Brunner's futuristic novels.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews