The Shockwave Rider

Duncan Lawie, our resident science fiction book reviewer takes a look at John Brunner's The Shockwave Rider this week. The book centers on a near future world where access to data means power - sounds like it's taken from today's headlines. The Shockwave Rider author John Brunner pages 280 publisher USA: Ballentine Del Ray UK: Methuen (1975) rating 8.5 reviewer Duncan Lawie ISBN 0345324315 summary A near future dystopia centred on information technology where access to hidden data is the means to power

John Brunner is one of the great names of science fiction with a writing career stretching from the 1950s to the 1990s. Whilst he wrote close to 70 novels, his near future dystopias of the 1960s and 1970s were his most successful - including Stand on Zanzibar, for which he won a Hugo award. It is ironic that much which he had warned of came to pass within his own lifetime, robbing him of an audience for his later works.

The Shockwave Rider is the culmination of Brunner's near future prescience. Written in the early seventies, he explicitly acknowledges Alvin Toffler's Future Shock - an influential discussion of the change brought on by technology - though Brunner had already published a number of novels on the catastrophic effects of humanity's approach to the world and each other. The difference with this work is the far closer focus on North America and the decision to drive the plot through a single central character. The book continues to use the cut-up style Brunner had developed, with a variety of techniques used to offer other viewpoints, but this is essentially the story of Nicky Haflinger, a brilliant individual attempting to transform the "plug-in society".

The social etiquette of American society in this book expects everyone to move from one job to another and across the country once or twice a year.The rapid, repeated changes result in disconnection from any sense of genuine community and a tendency to make belongings and relationships interchangeable - a plug-in society. The inability of the average person to cope with this rate of change and the resulting loss of loyalty, commitment and real relation is solved by the use of drugs - primarily prescription tranquillisers which ameliorate the continual shocks of life. A comprehensive communications network, which started as a corollary to this mobile society has become central to its continuance, storing vast detail of each individual in the databanks. Such use of and reliance on computer data leads to the central paranoia of this world - a fear of what the records might contain and what might be used to your detriment by someone who has better access to data. In a world where no one is more than the sum of their computer records, Haflinger's ability to re-engineer his persona through reprogramming the data banks allows him to escape the government agencies and sample lifestyles at many levels of society. However, much of the story is framed as an interrogation so it is clear that his capture is inevitable. The extant powers fear his skill and the potential it has to give him great power. Yet, Haflinger's journey is not a search for power but for wisdom.

The book is set about forty years after it was written, placing it little more than ten years in our own future. This kind of near future writing tends to date very badly but Brunner has done such an excellent job that The Shockwave Rider seems to be in the process of moving genres from science fiction to social realist or techno thriller. The plug-in society which he describes has much in common with modern life in the Western world whilst the technology is generally kept sufficiently vague that it fits in easily with a present-day mental picture. The terminology for the data net seems a little dated, but what Haflinger programs into the system sounds terribly familiar: Brunner describes worms which make their way through the system, reading and transforming data; and phages, more dangerous constructs, some of which are reputedly capable of comprehensively shutting down the whole network if activated. Haflinger has made a life for himself by perverting the data on which the continued functioning of North America relies. Almost a decade before Neuromancer, the "hacker" with a mission was already well defined.

The writing is occasionally rather indifferent, particularly early in the book, but there are also passages of incandescent writing. The author's passion shines through when describing the depths of despondency and paranoia descending from such a dehumanised system and when discussing the alternative possibilities. He is no Luddite - the solutions proposed require a similar technological baseline but result from placing the tools in the hands of the most capable, making them the means to a humane society. However, his agenda is rarely allowed to get in the way of the story, which develops rapidly, making the book seem much shorter than it is. In addition, his characters are as rounded and believable as the society they exist in. Brunner dedicated much of his best writing to warning of the dangerous direction our society is heading and developing ideas for a technologically literate future which still has room for people to be people. That he does this whilst writing accurately and entertainingly is a mark of true excellence - and The Shockwave Rider is a remarkable example.

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