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A reasonably good near-future dystopia, where racial violence, stoked by unscrupulous weapons manufacturers, is gradually causing society to come apart at the seams. Some of the ideas are nice, but it is starting to feel rather dated, and the ending is an unsatisfying deus ex machina. If you want to read one of his books, I recommend Stand on Zanzibar, which is similar but better done.
Set in 2014, The Jagged Orbit is a tale of our over-armed, over-medicated and Apartheid ridden future. As seen from 1968, Brunner sees America divided into "knee" and "kneeblank" enclaves. (The terms will be explained in the book, but you'll get it after a bit). Those who are not finding themselves committed to the Ginsburg psychiatric hospital for medical care designed to emotionally distance them from everything live in constant fear of riots and 'knee' enclave invasions. Their fears are stoke...
5.0 stars. Not quite as good as Brunner's "Stand on Zanzibar" which I think is one of the best SF novels of all time. This is still head and shoulders above most of the SF out there. A superb novel. Where Zanzibar dealt with overpopulation, this novel deals with the propblem of racial disunity and the fragmantation of individuals to such a degree that people become almost totally isolated from each other emotionally. Highly recommended. Winner: Britsh Science Fiction Award for Best Novel (1971)N...
This is a prototype cyberpunk science fiction novel set in a future where racial relations have totally descended into open warfare. Due to rampant paranoia advanced personal armament sales are the most lucrative business on the planet. In addition to racial relations, western religious traditions are breaking down and people are turning to idolatry. And there are drugs that can make some people psychic.There was a plot, but it was hard to follow, and I have a hard time recalling it.This book wa...
This novel was written close on the heels of Brunner’s acknowledged masterpiece, Stand on Zanzibar, and is one of his so-called Club of Rome novels, along with SoZ, Shockwave Rider, and Sheep Look Up, all dealing with the neo-Malthusian concerns cited in the Club of Rome’s Limits to Growth (1972). While Stand on Zanzibar was a satch-rich outpouring of narrative bits comprising fictional (and some real) media/news, music, essays, computer output, and an omniscient narrator, The Jagged Orbit is a
DNF... I tried getting into it. There are some good reviews out there. But I just couldn't get into it. I felt lost. Had no clue what they were talking about.
Perhaps one of the most important traits of science fiction is its ability to be prescient—the ability to be able to see trends in present day society and extrapolate them into plausible scenarios taking place in future societies or on alien worlds. What separates good science fiction from bad is this ability, for a good story can transcend the period from which it was written and feel as relevant today as in yesteryear. Jagged Orbit is one of these books. Written in the 1960s, it feels as if i...
Brunner dreamed up the most horrible things he could, and off course most of them came true. The race war in America didn’t quite play out like this, but with militarization of the police, psychiatric care by meds, edited news, snipers paralyzing cities, cities turned to war zones, over reliance on technology, private gun dealers engineering revolutions, are hardly the territory of science fiction, let alone fiction any longer. This book reads a little like the b-sides of Stand on Zanzibar, but
dnfcuz i dont fucking care
Originally published on my blog here in October 1998.Brunner's four most famous novels take an aspect of today's society and exaggerate it, to create dystopias which are compelling because of the way they relate to our fears for the future. Stand on Zanzibar, the best known, is about the population explosion; The Sheep Look Up environmental pollution; Shockwave Rider computers and privacy; and Jagged Orbit race relations. They all use a similar technique, with news items interrupting the narrati...
The Jagged Orbit is another in Brunner's series of novels about the dysfunction of contemporary Western societies and is as true today (if not more true) as when written. This novel is about race relations, alienation, gun control, computerization, AI, political mental health diagnoses...Though there are many passages or chapters which evoke concerns about Trumpism and creeping fascism, the novel overall did not really work for me. This structure is confused/weird as if the author is playing wit...
Aliens have invaded Earth and destroyed all matter capable of nuclear fission. Humanity is living as a shadow of itself, with a reduced population and infrastructure and the outlook of now being the inferior species on their own planet.It's an interesting book but quite short and simplistic. It has most of the staple from Brunner (and PKD), some good, some very bad: all women are prostitute (apart from a few smart ones, the exceptions), various extrasensorial and LSD-like experiences, some weird...
I took a long time coming to this book, after finishing the hugely disappointing Stand on Zanzibar, but I had promised myself to give the author another chance and this is another of his highly acclaimed novels. This time I wasn't nearly so patient.I gave up about 40 pages in. Presented again with a fragmented narrative with frequent and annoying digressions and the whiff of the same smug humour and didacticism, I just didn't have the patience to persevere. It was just going to be too much like
It's technically not cyberpunk because of when it was written, but it definitely does the high-tech-low-culture thing well, plus reads like an almost-contemporary novel given how presciently it describes the organization of society. I guess some things don't change (even though I wish they would). If you're not into the '60s psychedelic style you will not have fun with this book. Luckily for me I'm cool with hopping into word rivers and seeing where they take me.Oh also now I'm thinking of a new...
review of John Brunner's The Jagged Orbit by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - March 31, 2014 [sidenote: the actual edition I read is Ace's paperback version also from 1969 & NOT the hardcover bookclub edition - nonetheless, the cover's almost identical & the publisher & date are the same so it's not worth the trouble to create a new edition here - the paperback page count is 397 (not including the ads in the back).] ALSO, 'of course', my review is "5727 characters" too long so the full review is her...
While reading this, it struck me, since Brunner seems particularly Dick-influenced - how PKD's characters seem to be trapped in their roles. I suspect if you pick up any Dick novel at random you would find more than one character yearning to break away from a job, or a spouse or both and yet seems doomed to remain. PKD's characters, oddly much like Dick's are defined by their status and their place in society, and to a certain extent, so are Brunner's.Brunner's work is more obviously satirical,
This is set in a near future where personal protection is a priority. Home protection systems have lethal capability. Which is necessary because the armament out on the streets is what we would think of as military grade. Speaking of guns and blasters, Gottschalks are quite persistent with their annoying sales pitches. There are quite a few coined words. Spoolpigeon, pythoness, yash, mackero, macoot, etc. It took me a while to realize that a knee referred to a black person, but it was before cha...
I cannot recall what I was reading at the time, but the gist of it was that John Brunner wrote four challenging and experimental novels in the late 60s/early 70s. Of those four, I had read three and considered two of them to be among my top 20 of all time (Stand on Zanzibar and The Sheep Look Up; the other that I had read was The Shockwave Rider, which I like and which should be mandatory reading for cybergeeks, but I don't think if has the same impact of the other two). The fourth was this nove...
If you've at all heard of John Brunner, it's probably by way of his masterpiece (and masterpiece of 1970s SF) "Stand on Zanzibar", which managed the neat trick of creating a book about overpopulation that actually felt clastrophobic while taking a cross-section of its overstuffed expanse and spraying it at the reader all at once. It remains an extraordinarily visceral experience and probably works better as a multi-faceted depiction of a broken world than its more famous cousin Harry Harrison's