Back in the Midwest and still utterly exhausted, even after a truly prodigious sleep last night. The whole early-morning, late-late-night thing just didn’t end up working for me after a while. Of course given the choice I know which one I’d drop, but life is apparently just not like that sometimes.
On the plane back I started reading The Stone That Never Came Down by John Brunner, and I managed to finish it after the two-plus hour drive back to the apartment. I’ve found Brunner to be a little hit-and-miss; he’s got some truly brilliant ideas which then get joyfully pilfered by other SF writers (in fact, I was twigged on to this one by an attribution made by James Alan Gardner at the beginning of Vigilant), but sometimes his writing just can’t quite support them.
Stone is from the seven- or eight- year period when Brunner wrote what most consider to be his masterpieces: Stand on Zanzibar, The Sheep Look Up, and The Shockwave Rider. All three of those books, and Stone as well, could be described as incipient dystopian futures
: that is, what you’re looking at isn’t quite the bleak hopelessness of 1984 or Brave New World, but rather the lead-up to such a thing. The first two books on the list — which take as their themes population pressure and ecological breakdown, respectively — are quite pessimistic in their outlook; Rider and Stone actually offer solutions and potential escape from their nightmare scenarios, even if those solutions are more or less impractical.
The basic idea of The Stone That Never Came Down is this: what would happen if people lost their capacity to ignore? What if everything that you ever saw, heard, etc. was at your immedite recall, whether you liked it or not? And what if your reasoning abilities were accelerated enough to allow you to take advantage of this? Brunner’s postulate is that the world would be a better place; he feels that most of the social (and socialised) evils in our world are only made possible by selective inattention and hypocracy.
It’s an attractive theory, though a little naive. But Brunner is good enough to acknowledge that if everyone gained these addition capacities, the whole world would be changed. (He ends the book before the condition — caused by a manufactured virus — has the chance to spread that far, but hints at the sorts of adjustments that would be caused.) My big problem with the book is that a number of the characters are more or less undifferentiated, and almost all of them tend to talk in somewhat of a didactic manner.
Some of the same ideas were later manifested in The Shockwave Rider, which along with Vinge’s True Names is probably the direct antedecent of the whole cyberpunk
sub-genre. Again, we have the idea that a truly functioning society requires a free flow of information. In both Rider and Stone you have a world that’s being pushed to the breaking point, and there’s only a small handful of people who have the information needed to prevent catastrophe… which is done more or less by their sharing of that knowledge as far and widely as possible.