During the early eighties, after the brothers Miley moved out of our 1134 W. Chase apartment in East Rogers Park, Chicago, Jim moved in, staying a few years. Jim, an artist, later an author, was an aficionado of the bizarre, of conspiracy theories, of the democratic potentials of new technologies and of all that Michael Miley had called "high weirdness." Primarily self-educated, he was an ever-enthusiastic source for new ideas and controversial opinions, introducing me to quite a lot during our

The Shockwave Rider is a book before its time, published in 1975, the book provides a vision for the future of computer networks today. The term 'Web' was used in this book years before the Web as we know it emerged. A riveting story of freeman vs Big Brother society which contains the classic values of privacy still being debated vigorously today. Computer worms and self replicating code - all the cyber components.The increasing rate of change has sent most Americans into mental distress. Every...

Wow! First Brunner I’ve read but I must immediately rate him on the genius scale along with my favorite, PKD. The politics here are surprisingly laudable, even now in 2019. His powers of prophecy are startling, too. Personally, unlike others, I found this book arresting from page one, with the middle section actually being my favorite. I admire authors who don’t baby the audience, watering down their vision or narrative. Brunner tosses us right in and expects us to catch up quickly. Those who do...

A proto-cyberpunk text by Brunner that I didn’t warm to that much but fairs alright in hindsight(and as a piece with quartet, sometimes refered to as his "American Quartet".), the images aren't as vivid and the plot is more opaque. Some interesting moments with an ending somewhat echoing Bester’s Tiger! Tiger! (Fine, Stars my Destination, blah!) Interesting book (especially the thoughts on identity which seem very prophetic for the identity theft age) some elements seem to have been better handl...

When you consider that this book was written in 1974 (or before) it is remarkably prescient in subject and anticipation of the internet and the concept of computers being omnipresence in our current lives. The sub story is interesting but not as interesting as Mr Brunner's ability to conceptualize our current lives. I really enjoyed this book and have read many of his other novels which I also enjoyed.

Most famous for inventing the computing use of 'worm'*, this is another example of John Brunner's astonishing prescience, at times feeling eerily close to being the definitive novel of the 2010s despite being published in 1975. It's set somewhere after the 20th century but before 2020, after America has hooked up computers to the telephone network to create a data-net, which starts out by recording people's preferences for the sake of safety and convenience, but ends up knowing more about them t...

I think the futuristic lingo is a little over done - makes it a bit more difficult to read than it has to be - he is painting a very scary look at a future that is now here in very many ways. This is pretty remarkable when the main thrust is a computerized society that was only beginning in 1975 & the Internet was a twinkling in ARPANet's juvenile eye. Well worth reading.

I have read at least a few dozen of Brunner's novels but this one, like Stand on Zanzibar really stands out. That being said, this is a very difficult book to review! Our main protagonist, Nickie Haflinger, starts the book in custody by a somewhat secret government agency, where they are playing back his memories (using some strange memory reader) of the last 6 years. It seems Nickie was something of a genius as a kid and one day he was 'adopted' by Tarnover, a government 'think tank' that sough...

I've recently re-read one of my favourite SF novels from the 1970s, John Brunner's The Shockwave Rider, and it has more than lived up to expectations.Okay, like any book using future technology it gets some things wrong. Its early 21st century tech is mostly too advanced (but then they still use tapes to store information). However, this book absolutely sizzles with ideas, some taken from Alvin Toffler's far effective readable futurology book, Future Shock.Just one example - the protagonist is i...

I'm writing this review on a smart phone, connected to the world wide web, and it will be seen by potentially thousands of people around the world, yet I am sat on a train in Birmingham, England. Later I will browse Facebook or YouTube, and advertisers will target me based on data they have detected from the web sites I have visited. This is the world we live in, the world envisaged by John Brunner in 1975, and that core idea is what makes this science fiction novel so very chilling. The minds o...

This book starts out a little rocky and disjointed (possibly an intentional style by the author to match with the subject material), then pulls together and ultimately soars by the last third. Written in 1975, much of the technology forecast in this book is amazingly prescient, especially that relating to the Internet ("datanet"). I'm not usually a fan of the elliptical writing and shallow characterization typical of older sci-fi, and I'm not a huge fan of puns (wordplay is used liberally throug...

I could really get into the (pre) cyberpunk aspects of this, yet the plot and character development are not strong points. I'm giving this 3 stars because of the issues it foreshadowed back in the hey day of 1975 that are super relevant today, all implications of humanity barreling into the information age. These include the struggle for personal privacy, cyber warfare & hacking, the widening disparity between the haves and the have-nots, and the blowback and damage to society from the ever acce...

Three and a half stars, rounded up. This is an unusual book, one without a plot exactly, and which ends with a question for the reader rather than an actual conclusion. But considering that it was published in 1975, it felt less outdated in its prediction of a wired future than one would have thought when I read it in 2004 or thereabouts.

TSR is not a plot book, and it is also not a character book, but it IS an idea book. Brunner was ahead of the curve (or the shockwave) on so many things, and managed to write about the modern Internet in 1975, anticipating terms like 'bandwidth' and 'computer worm'. This is great social SF.

The Shockwave Rider is the final installment in John Brunner's Club of Rome Quartet, and in many ways the most prescient of the lot. Previously, Stand on Zanzibar drew from Paul Ehrlich to deal with over-population, The Sheep Look Up covered Rachel Carson's Silent Spring and ecological breakdown, and (less successfully) The Jagged Orbit covered racial tensions and the medicalisation of everyday life by 'Big Pharma.' The Shockwave Rider imagines a future that must have seemed a little... if no

Prescient proto-cyberpunk classic. Highly influenced by Alvin Toffler's Futureshock, down to having a Toffler-like philosopher quoted in the book and a Toffler blurb on the back. Used the idea of the computer worm and virus (called a phage in the book) for maybe the first time in sci-fi. Eventually devolves into a 70s aging hippie luddite critique of of technological advancement, completely failing to foresee the individual, antitotalitarian empowerment the information revolution brought about.

Shockwave RiderJohn Brunner“It’s not because my mind in made up that I don’t want you to confuse me with any more facts. It’s because my mind isn’t made up. I already have more facts than I can cope with. So SHUT UP, do you hear me? SHUT UP!”Facts, facts, facts… Fact checking, alternate facts… From factum meaning real events. But whose reality are we talking about? We have access to so much information in the digital age, it really is staggering. For someone from 1975, the year Brunner published...

Loads of speechy dialogue overwhelm the genuinely innovative proto-cyberpunk ideas. Reminded me of Gilliam's movie Brazil.

When this book came out in the mid-1970's I was a computer/ theater geek college student. The ideas presented by John Brunner predicted the internet, computer viruses, government experiments worse than "Men Who Thought at Goats." I was fascinated. I had never read anything like it. Reading it 45 years on I cannot believe how much he got right. This story could still be part of our future. And, on a side note, I would love to meet the person in Wisconsin who named a haflinger horse Nickie. At lea...

bit of a campy ending but this book is really good. just incisive takes on the way big data feeds into consumption and the construction of a consumer personality, leading to the dissolution of a personal self and community. i will say this book is good in the way it articulates the psychological and sociological impact of a data-driven society and government, as opposed to blowing me away with any revelations in and of themselves. there are so many cool moments in this book so here's potpourri a...