343 pages, Hardcover
Published 1969 by Ace Books
Nebula Award Nominee for Best Novel (1969),
British Science Fiction Association Award for Novel (1970)
I know that, as a PKD guy, it might be assumed that my favorite science fiction of the new wave would always come from him. Although today we are talking about a novel that PKD himself blurbed. Anyone who knows me knows that several of my favorite SF of all time came from the mind and fingertips of John Brunner. I have written extensively about Brunner and his impact on the genre. The Jagged Orbit was an important one that I was saving for a special occasion. A while back, I had a bonus Friday off, and we decided to take the train up to LA just to get lunch and have a bit of a train experience. So I thought it would be nice to read this one, since I could certainly read it all in one day of train travel. Normally, this would probably take me a few days or even a week.
I thought this would prove to be a better experience given the novel's experimental narrative style, which we can explore further as we go. I think it did improve my experience. Experimental style...
The Jagged Orbit is the second of the Club Rome Quartet, a sorta unofficial series of Brunner's four masterpieces of Future Shock style novels. All four portrayed a nightmare-like 21st century that is far more predictive than many more highly regarded classics. The Sheep Look Up, the third of the series, makes McCarthy’s The Road feel like a Disney movie. While Bradbury is taught in schools, I consider Stand on Zanzibar the towering achievement of SF in the entire 20th century.
It is almost as brilliant as SOZ, but The Jagged Orbit, coming directly after the masterpiece, might have set up impossible standards; it doesn't seem quite as brilliant at no fault of its own. TJO, taken on its own, is a staggering work of Science Fiction. Sure, if you are looking for an exact prediction, no SF is going to come close, but a Brunner Club Rome book is always FILLED with eerily similar things to reality.
Set in 2014, almost half a century in Brunner’s future, this book might not have anything as stark as the mass shooting in SOZ, but it hits on the gun culture more directly. Weapons manufacturers stir up racial tensions to sell weapons, including the demonization of immigrants, including one who is the focus of a media campaign. The news media, which is AI-slop distributed on the ¨commwebs.¨ Regions around the U.S. are divided into corporate and racially segregated mega-cities, and the wealthy have grown into a ruling class. If you take the hit rate on the Club Rome books, a staggering amount feels close to things that have come true. The reality is the series could've been called It Can Happen Here if Sinclair Lewis hadn't taken the title.
So we don't have computers called “desketaries,” but honestly, how different are these technologies in the book from smartphones? One of the most powerful parts of the book is a short chapter from a paper written after 2014, which shows how dependent American culture became on computers and how this failed to control the population.
¨For once, it is perfectly clear why they´ve had this swift and resounding success. Our society is no longer run by individuals, but holders of offices; it’s complexity is such that the average person’s predicament compares with that of a savage tribesman, his horizons bounded by a single valley, for whom knowledge of the cycle of seasons is a hard-won intellectual prize…¨
It is hard not to see Brunner writing this in the sixties, predicting computers, and the influence was pretty impressive.
¨…The data which might enable them to be issued over vu-beams are jealously guarded by priests serving up corporation gods, and outsiders are compelled to put up with the physical consequences of mysterious incomprehensible seasons. Take a vacation; you come back to discover that the urban landmark has vanished completely as an earthquake has felled a mountain.¨
It is subtle, but the mention of corporation gods here is important. He is making a bold statement about something as traditional as how we see the seasons as intuitive knowledge. We all see this coming true in our lives. The first example I give is the people who can’t navigate their own cities they live in because the GPS does their navigating. We are on the verge of corporations forgetting they need consumers and moving that mountain over us by turning over huge amounts of jobs to AI.
"Idol of the computer, in which the less imaginative now tend to invest their surplus of otherwise valueless faith."
We have computers designing cities, selecting bomb targets, fighting wars, doing almost any job that requires thinking. Younger students in higher education are putting their faith in software to write papers for them, and it leaves them with less skill in the end. What is amazing is that most Golden Age SF writers could envision moon bases, space travel, etc., Brunner actually saw a more realistic future, and it is funny because at the time readers were them considering nightmares or dystopian. Sure, your pocket computer can give you answers and connect you to the world, but it didn’t bring about a golden age.
“What drove the fail nail into the coffin of that particular hope, however, were the black insurrectionists of the eighties, which demonstrated that the federal authorities were incapable of controlling large sections of their own cities up to and including Washington D.C.”
Brunner was British but his short visits to the US in the year of the Civil Rights Act and just after it had become law had a profound enough of an impact that he set much of this series in our culture, and to be frank, he tore it to shreds. TJO is about race and not at all feeling optimistic in light of the new Civil Rights Act. Brunner saw the country becoming a near apartheid state.
Our view of this dystopia is spun through various experimental narrative techniques. Real articles, fake articles, multiple points of view, and chapters with titles longer than the chapter. Chapters that contradict each other and more. Our POV characters include a Stoolpigeon, a former journalist who now oversees the distribution of AI slop, Lydia, a Pythoness who is a cross between a stripper and an ayahuasca guide. A shady Doctor named James, and eventually we get a time traveler sorta….
The Gottchalk Cartel is an amazingly predictive element, too. The Trump kids, Eric and Don Jr. announced just weeks after Dad starts a war as president, set to make $750 million in Drone sales. The different racial, and political systems of this novel have gone from a Science fiction author’s nightmare to our daily reality, so how do we survive it in the novel. That is a spoiler so tread light here…
Spoilers for the very end…
What seems like Dues ex machina ending with a super computer from the future time-traveling back to change the racially inspire self-destruction of society these elements were hidden in plain sight. You see this supercomputer is given the task to maximize profits of the arms dealer, but it realizes that to be super effective, it will eventually run out of customers. Because everyone is kinda sorta you know, dead.
There is a hilarious reveal of this set-up by the many chapters that are set up by the many chapters that have longer titles than the actual text. Chapter 92 is a detailed sales report for some super weapon that ends with “Desirability rating 97.6%, Salability rating 0%”
Chapter Niniety- three is called “A Good point.” The entire chapter is “A product estimated to be desirable for 97.6% of the population should not display a salable rating of zero.”
End spoilers
The Jagged Orbit, compared to the output of most SF writers, is a knock-down, drag-out masterpiece. In the case of this author and this series, this amazing novel is the least powerful of the four books. It is, however, genius and should be rated, reviewed, and thought of as a stand-alone work of amazingly speculative fiction. Brunner saw our nightmare, but we have dues ex Machina to get out of it. Perhaps folks should start listening to the SF authors.
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