The Sheep Look Up [Paperback]

John Brunner imagines a world so toxic life is barely feasible. Born in 1934, Brunner published his first novel at the age of 17 and had gone on to build a career on pulp space opera adventures. By the 1960's, however, he was learning a more confident and mature literary style and had begun to explore themes of social dysfunction and the impact of science and technology on human life, and was hailed as one of the leading lights in the British New Wave of science fiction.

Brunner's "Stand on Zanzibar" achieved critical acclaim in 1968 for its exploration of overpopulation and global pollution. "The Jagged Orbit", "The Sheep Look Up", and "The Shockwave Ruler" would follow to form a foreboding and visionary quartet of warnings about consumerism, pollution, and climate change. Brunner has been described as doing for science fiction what Rachel Carson did for science fact by pointing to the growing dangers of environmental collapse.

"The Sheep Look Up" is the darkest of Brunner's apocalyptic quartet. North America is on the verge of extinction. It has been transformed into a vast petri dish of contaminants and toxic waste. The population is sickened by poisoned foods and an equally poisonous atmosphere. The car and aeroplane spew pollution into the atmosphere. Climate change has reduced agriculture to a lottery in which farmers try to sway the odds by liberal doses of fertilisers, pesticides, and antibiotics administered to their animals. Medicine has all but collapsed.

A growing resistance movement is fighting a political and guerrilla war against the polluters, but the political status quo fervently denies that climate change is occurring or that the levels of pollution have passed beyond a safe event horizon. Meanwhile, US troops roam the globe, attempting to pacify increasingly wider tracts of disaffected humanity ... and American travellers wonder why everyone hates them.

Brunner's dystopic world is hardly fantasy. First published in 1972, it seems a visionary message today with its apocalyptic vision of a hell on earth which is beginning to look all too familiar in the 21st century.

Brunner's novel was written in the form of a diary of a year in the death of the Earth - it is told in snapshot entries ... newspaper headlines, television news flashes, the incidental experiences of a cast of witnesses to collapse, a series of cameo images of decaying life. The characters are a motley collection, some prominent, some 'ordinary', but each has a part to play in exposing the reader to a vision of calamity as global politics and economics propel the USA to obliteration.

It's a thoroughly absorbing - and depressing - piece of science fiction. Perhaps 'imagined social history' might be a better description of the genre. Brunner's imagination certainly captured a world which is disturbingly real. It's a page-turner of a novel. It's difficult to put down, so rapidly do you get caught up in it.

If I have a criticism it is that the cast of thousands can leave you struggling to remember precisely what was happening to each of them last time you heard from them, but the reader has no right to expect an easy read here. Brunner's is a disturbing vision which offers a vital corrective to the space opera adventure which dominates so much science fiction, on the page or on the screen. A classic which demonstrates Brunner's visionary and literary strengths, and a dynamic, exciting piece of writing which deserves to be read by a wide audience.

I read this book as a teenager and hunted it down on Amazon recently.

Revisiting it I am struck by how many 'hits' the author makes in his dystopian vision of the near future where man has ruined the environment. There's a President spookily similar to GW Bush, and some of the statements by the industrial spokespeople have actually been used by industry since th book was written in the early 1970's.

It's writing style is episodic, flicking from one set of characters to another along a gradually converging set of story arcs.

Quite frankly if I had the money I'd buy the movie rights, it is the '1984' of environmental meltdown.

There has a re-assessment of the work of SF writer John Brunner in the past ten years - his seminal work, the epic population-crisis novel 'Stand On Zanzibar' was added to the Gollancz-published 'SF Masterworks' series, and is readily available in high-street book shops. However, despite a reprint in 2003 by independent publishers BenBella Books, his prophetic environmental-crisis novel 'The Sheep Look Up' is still less well known to the average SF reader.

Writers such as William Gibson, David Brin and Warren Ellis cite Brunner as an influence, and it is easy to see why. Unlike many of his contemporaries in sixties and seventies SF, Brunner is intimately concerned with world-building and speculative prophecy, and focuses less on the psychological concerns of writers like Philip K. Dick, or the hard science of Arthur C. Clarke and Isaac Asimov.

In his three best-loved, most oft-cited novels ('Stand On Zanzibar,' 'The Sheep Look Up' and 'The Shockwave Rider') Brunner's intense, multi-voice narratives have more in common with the speculative world-building of Kim Stanley Robinson, or the cyberpunk masters who claim him as their progenitor. The cyberpunks in particular play blatant homage to Brunner - Gibson's techno-futurist street gang in 'Neuromancer,' the Panther Moderns, take their name from characters in 'Stand On Zanzibar.' Warren Ellis, a decade or so later, named a futuristic vehicle operated by the superhero team 'Nextwave' after Brunner's 'The Shockwave Rider.' So what is it about Brunner's writing that these writers identify with?

Speaking about 'The Sheep Look Up' to literary website Salon, Gibson says:"No one except possibly the late John Brunner... has ever described anything in science fiction that is remotely like the reality of 2007 as we know it." He is right - the world which Brunner describes, with similar over-population problems as he wrote about in 'Zanzibar,' but with the added challenges of smog-filled skies, poisoned food and water supplies, and a huge gap between the dominant rich and the disenfranchised poor, is still eerily prescient.

This is not unique in and of itself - many SF writers have generated tropes which turned out to have the ring of truth, when viewed through the lens of history. What Brunner did so well - and a significant amount of time before the coining of the subgenres 'Hard' or 'Realist' SF - was to situate these tropes in a vivid, all-encompassing narrative populated not just by believable characters, but also by invented newspapers, songs, and snatches of TV and radio shows. In addition, quotations from actual published material are interleaved, blurring the lines between real and imagined ephemera.

This 'collage' technique, where world-building is done in interstitial interludes between chapters as well as in them, is credited to John Dos Passos. Brunner skillfully makes the technique his own. The effect on the reader is to create not just a believable world, but (to paraphrase Grant Morrison) 'a shimmering holographic tapestry' of meaning and depth. Brunner's novels are effective not just because of his characters - who are sometimes thinly-drawn - but because of the fine-grained detail he exhumes from his imagined worlds.

Like the cyberpunk novels of the 80s and 90s, some of Brunner's world-building is now anachronistic. Just as the absence of mobile phones from works like 'Neuromancer' and Bruce Sterling's 'Islands In The Net' now seem odd, there are tropes in 'The Sheep Look Up' which have not stood the test of time. Brunner shared with Philip K. Dick the assumption that marijuana and psychedelic drugs would be legalised and commonplace in the their future (our present). This does not detract from Brunner's breathless, widescreen vision very much. 'Sheep' still feels utterly real, because of the sheer amount of vivid background detail.

Reading 'The Sheep Look Up' again, it is abundantly clear that a continued reassessment of Brunner's canon is not only desirable, but essential. If the job of the speculative fiction writer is to give us dire warnings, or messages of hope, while transporting us to compelling and believable utopias and dystopias, then Brunner is a masterful practitioner, and one of the innovators of the genre. 'The Sheep Look Up' is a wonderful exploration of his clear-eyed, humanist philosophy, with important lessons about our past, our present, and our immediate literary past.