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The Jagged Orbit (Gollancz Collectors' Editions) (Paperback)

by John Brunner (Author) "So what shape was the world in this morning? ..." (more)
3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)

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Product details

  • Paperback: 397 pages
  • Publisher: Gollancz; New edition edition (24 Aug 2000)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 0575070528
  • ISBN-13: 978-0575070523
  • Product Dimensions: 21.4 x 13.4 x 3.4 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 699,301 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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    #12 in  Books > Science Fiction & Fantasy > Authors, A-Z > B > Brunner, John

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Product Description

Product Description

Matthew Flamen, the last of the networks' sppolpigeons, is desperate for a big story. And there's no shortage of possibilities: the Gottschalk cartel is fomenting trouble among the knees in order to sell their latest armaments to the blanks; which ties in nicely with the fact that something big is brewing with the X Patriots. And then there's the story that just falls into his lap: the one that suggests that the respected director of the New York State Mental Hospital is a charlatan...


About the Author

John Brunner (1934-95) published his first novel when he was seventeen and also made his first sale to US magazines at the same age. After serving in the RAF, he worked for a while as a technical abstractor and a publisher's editor before becoming a full-time writer in 1958. Among his many novels are The Squares of the City, The Telepathist, The Sheep Look Up, The Shockwave Rider and Stand on Zanzibar, universally recognized as his magnum opus.
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Customer Reviews

5 Reviews
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3.8 out of 5 stars (5 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Psy-Fi at its best, 18 April 2003
By EdSi (London, England) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Jagged Orbit (Paperback)
The Jagged Orbit comprises the third of a informally-bound group of four of Brunner's books (The Sheep Look Up, Zanzibar, Jagged Orbit and Shockwave Rider) and it is one of the most chilling.
In similar literary mode to Zanzibar and The Sheep Look up, the narrative flits between dialogues, monologues, newspaper articles and many other media, all the time creating a terrifyingly real backdrop for the bizzare and twisted world of Matthew Flammen, his schizoid wife, an in-patient who is more sane than his psychiatric doctors and a host of other believable, well-drawn and 'alive' characters...

Brunner has completely encapsulated the problems of his own time and those he knew to be coming in a wonderfully heartbreaking (but finally heartwarming) story about sanity, social paranoia, racism, violence, robotics, consumerism gone mad(!), modern-day oracles and psychiatry.

Anyone who has even a tentative desire to understand sanity, psychology and the reasons for the current state of the world MUST read this book...

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5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars 30 years + but a classic is a classic a must read, 16 Jul 2001
written thirty years ago Brunnerwriting style still setts the pages of this book alight. he puts his microscopic sight on a society that is in seemingly meltdown, arms dealers are fermenting war terroists are being reconginised by legitimate governments and the people that can not handle the worlds rapid changes are just thrown away on the junkpile of the world branded insane and dumped into institutions just to hide them. Brunner examines the world then with a scapel for a pen cuts to the heart of the problem wth modern society that are still with us today
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3.0 out of 5 stars An angry, prescient book, 25 Feb 2009
By Melmoth (London, England) - See all my reviews
I didn't want to like The Jagged Orbit at first. It's opening chapters contain plenty of the minor irritations of s.f. - rapid cuts from one half-introduced character to another, conversation spattered with unfamiliar terms, overuse of strained simile ("his heart was hammering on his ribs like a lunatic demanding to be let out of Bedlam"). It was trying too hard.

But then ... then I remembered what I liked about John Brunner. I remembered his passion and anger, his burning desire to make his fiction a lens with which to examine the society about him, his need to locate the seeds of its downfall and of its hope.

The Jagged Orbit was written in 1968-9 and contains many brief extracts from newspaper reports of the time. While today we hark back to 1968 as a time of student rebellion and riots in Paris, it was also a time of huge interracial unrest in the USA (and elsewhere) with many forecasting unending conflict between black and white and the setting up of bantu black states. It was also a time when people were already becoming concerned about the increasing emphasis on "personal freedom" and "individuality" and our increasing alienation from our fellow human beings. It was a world in which a phrase like "President Obama" was virtually inconceivable.

Brunner created a future from his own present and that future was a bleak one: black and white almost completely segregated, people so paranoid that their homes are ringed with lethal traps and their neighbourhood watch organises regular anti-incursion drills. Mobsters are your friendly local arms dealer, selling weaponry capable of levelling a city-block, door-to-door. Art is degraded to random assortments of meaningless junk, thrown together by bored, cruel and immoral sybarites (*cough* and Brunner had never even met a YBA *cough*). In New York State alone, thousands each year find themselves locked away in a vast asylum, where they can retreat into themselves, almost totally isolated from human contact.

Into this world Brunner throws an eclectic mix of characters - Matthew Flamen, the "spoolpigeon", broadcasting tales of scandal and corruption on a programme threatened by the network's desire for 24-hour advertising; Lyla the pythoness, a young woman whose drug-induced trances help her see into other's minds; Dr James Reedeth, a psychiatrist trapped in an institution he no longer believes in; Reedeth's mentor (and a clear vector for the author's own voice) the bright and bitter Xavier Conroy; Pedro Diablo, master propagandist of the black townships, now expelled from his own home for a trace of white blood in his ancestry; and the quiet, disturbingly powerful Harry Madison, a man too sane for the world in which he is forced to live. The result is a powerful indictment both of Brunner's own times but also of the times he foresaw.

"We mine our gardens, we close our frontiers, we barricade our cities ... It gets into our families ... it gets into our very love-making ... Another couple of generations and husbands will be afraid to be alone in the same room with their wives, mothers will be afraid of their babies ...".
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