<span class="SFPTagline"> From SCIFIPEDIA </span>

John Brunner (full name John Kilian Huston Brunner) (September 24, 1934 - August 26, 1995) wrote science fiction novels and stories. He began publishing in the late 50s and early 60s, mostly adventure novels that came out as Ace Doubles, with titles like The World Swappers (1958), The Atlantic Abomination (1960), and The Slavers of Space (1960). Perhaps the first major sign of Brunner's potential was The Whole Man (1964, published in the UK as Telepathist), the story of a crippled youth in a war-torn future attempting to harness his skills as a projective telepath. The Long Result (1965) was a tale of interstellar multiculturalism, and The Squares of the City (1965) was a tour de force whose plot was based on a famous chess game.

In 1968, Brunner published Stand on Zanzibar, a huge, multithreaded tale with a structure reminiscent of John Dos Passos's USA, telling of an overpopulated future. Brunner was the first to apply this sort of design to a science fiction novel, and he made it work well, as the many stories reflected upon one another. The book won the Hugo Award, and while of course some of its predictions for the far-off twenty-first century haven't panned out (name-brand marijuana), much of it holds up.

Brunner followed Stand on Zanzibar with the similarly structured The Jagged Orbit (1969), primarily focused on racial issues. The Sheep Look Up (1972) dealt with the environment, with far more unrelieved gloom than its predecessors. The last of Brunner's major multithread novels, The Shockwave Rider (1975) took a fairly prescient look at computer networks, introducing the concept of the worm.

Brunner continued to produce enjoyable minor work. Timescoop (1969) may have been his funniest book. The cover blurb said, "He brought back the monsters of the past to help him rule the world." Actually, the monsters were merely obnoxious ancestors. Times without Number (1969) explored similar time paradoxes more seriously. Brunner polished and improved his earlier works for republication. Perhaps the best of these was Give Warning to the World (1973), a rewrite of his first published novel, Echo in the Skull (1959). Brunner had a particular gift for writing about people cooperating; perhaps only Spider Robinson, in the sf field, approaches him. The Stone That Never Came Down (1973) is an excellent example of that skill.

Brunner attempted to cross over to the mainstream with The Great Steamboat Race (1983), a large, complex, richly plotted and inhabited historical novel, but it failed in the marketplace. His last big book, Children of Thunder (1989), had moments that reminded readers of Brunner at his best, but all in all, it showed the work of Age the Caricaturist. Brunner died of a stroke in 1995 while attending Worldcon in Glasgow, Scotland.