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The Whole Man (1964)

av John Brunner

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MedlemmarRecensionerPopularitetGenomsnittligt betygOmnämnanden
5571042,743 (3.51)14
In A Whole Man, a baby boy is born in a hospital surrounded by the chaos of battle and civil unrest. The birth is unremarkable and little noted, but the child, Gerald Howson, turns out to be very special. He is afflicted by infirmities and bodily flaws, but his mind becomes a miraculous device, capable of telepathic marvels that can, and do, change the world. But the power fantasies that sometimes tempt him are deadly to those near him and can ultimately threaten the whole of the world. And a man in a physical envelope that inspires pity and fright turns out to be the embodiment of a superman. This ebook was originally published in the United Kingdom under the title Telepathist.  For each generation, there is a writer meant to bend the rules of what we know. Hugo Award winner (Best Novel, Stand on Zanzibar) and British science fiction master John Brunner remains one of the most influential and respected authors of all time, and now many of his classic works are being reintroduced. For readers familiar with his vision, it is a chance to reexamine his thoughtful worlds and words, while for new readers, Brunner's work proves itself the very definition of timeless. … (mer)
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» Se även 14 omnämnanden

engelska (8)  spanska (1)  italienska (1)  Alla språk (10)
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A book with incredible ideas born of an amazing imagination. John Brunner's mind is so big on the inside, it's like a cavernous Hall full of different displays of all different sorts from all different fields. Here he has taken on writing about telepaths, but not the ordinary ideas about telepathy, where the telepath is horrified with the thoughts of the humans around. This story takes the subject of telepathy further steps.
I wonder at the thinking processes of our pets when I read this paragraph about a deaf/mute girl that the protagonist befriended:
P.44
"At first he could make no sense of The impressions he took from her mind, because she had never developed verbal thinking; she used kinesthetic and visual data in huge intermingled blocks, like a sour porridge with stones in it. While he struggled to achieve more than the first broad halting concepts of reassurance, she sat gazing at him and weeping silently released from loneliness after intolerable years, too overcome to question the mode of their communication."

Here's how Brunner explained an organ of telepathy in the brain:
P.59
" 'Now, here's a typical average brain - like mine or Christine's. The red arrow points to a group of cells called the organ of Funck. It's so small it's very existence was overlooked until the first telepathists were discovered. In my brain for instance, it consists of about 100 cells, not much different from their neighbors. You'll note its location.'
Again he extracted a fresh item from the folder. This one was a large x-ray transparency, the whitish outline of a skull with jaw and neck vertebrae.
'You'll remember we took x-rays of your head, Gerry, after giving you a radio - opaque substance which selectively...ah..."stains" cells in the organ of Funck. Take a look at the result.
'That whitish mass at the base of the brain,' Singh said. 'It's your organ of Funck. It's the largest, by almost 20%, that I've ever seen. Potentially you have the most powerful telepathic faculty in the world, because that's the organ which resonates with impulses in other nervous systems. You are capable of coping with any amount of information that staggers the mind.' "

( )
  burritapal | Oct 23, 2022 |
El enigma de las facultades paranormales o PSI se nos plantea en esta novela con impresionante claridad. Cuando un ser deforme y contrahecho como Gerry Howson, verdadero aborto de la naturaleza, hijo de padres casi desconocidos, descubre que posee facultades paranormales, su destino está sellado. Tras innumerables vicisitudes, llega a la misteriosa ciudad de los científicos que se alza en Ulan Bator, en el corazón de Asia, donde convive con otros como él, dotados de maravillosas propiedades, que hacen de ellos una fuerza escogida de las Naciones Unidas y, también, la avanzadilla de la Humanidad futura.
  Natt90 | Jul 18, 2022 |
review of
John Brunner's The Whole Man
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - February 22, 2012

John Brunner is growing on me.. like that mildew on the dragon in Choong's fantasy.. not like a disease but like a thorough level of detail.. This is the 3rd bk I've read by him. In the beginning there was The World Swappers ( http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2398747.The_World_Swappers ), wch I thought was pretty good but I wasn't exactly overwhelmed or anything; then there was Times Without Number ( http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6343227-times-without-number ), wch I thought was considerably better. But, NOW, w/ The Whole Man, I feel like Brunner's really getting somewhere.

The whole structure of the bk, the nature of the plot, allows for the seamless interpolation of subplots that're dramatically different from the main plot but still germane to it. That's clever enuf in itself to be very pleasing to me. The main character, Gerald Howson is a projective telepathist, a telepath who can project into other people's minds who're non-telepathic. One of the things that such telepaths can do is so involve other people in their fantasies that they become catatonic. Hence the aforementioned interpolated subplots.

"Because he was who he was, he once had asked for - and they had given him - a private aircraft to travel anywhere in the world, thinking to escape the dismayed stares and the whispering of ordinary people. But because he was what he was, even the faint shock which the pilot betrayed on meeting him hurt, and hurt badly. He bore with it for a little; then he cut short the trip and never asked for the plane again." (p 87)

I feel ya. There're many subcultures in the world that fancy themselves 'open-minded' but only a very few true individualists. Most people are, point-blank, a drag.

""What has to be done is this," Howson said in a voice as shrill and hard as a scream. "Somebody has to follow him into fantasy. Somebody has to risk his own sanity to work out the rules by which his universe operates - to sort out from ten real personalities and God knows how many schizoid secondaries the ego of the telepathist; to make the fantasy so uninhabitable that from sheer disgust he withdraws the links between himself and the others and reverts to normal perception."" (p 102)

Alright, I just witnessed the movie Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer while I was in the midst of reading this Brunner. I like the idea of letting that influence the writing of this review so I'm going to go for it. I'd call Spitzer & Ralph Nader & myself "psychopathfinders" - people who use psychopathic amts of energy for productive purposes rather than the destructive ones that society tries to force us into thru stereotype imposition & such-like - channeling one's anger against the injustices that make one angry in the 1st place.

What brought Spitzer's career as a social reformer down was being caught fucking some whores. I don't care that much about where he sticks his dick, as long as it's consensual, but I do care that by spending thousands of dollars an hr on these high-priced moronic hookers that he was reinforcing the utterly ridiculous & totally greedy sense of self-worth that these normals have & thereby reinforcing the worst aspects of the society that he's hypothetically combatting. The completely unintrospective greed of these 'escorts' & their pimps & madams is part & parcel of the same greed as that of their Johns: the bankers, the politicians, the generally overpd people who're willing to rip anybody & everybody off w/o any scruples whatsoever. Who else cd AFFORD to pay $2,000 an hr for sex but someone who rips off other people for a million a day? & I seriously doubt that the sex is even as good as having sex w/ someone like me. SO,

"What has to be done is this," cONVENIENCE said in a voice deemed dissonant by the musically thoughtless. "Somebody has to drive a conceptual wedge into the fantasy world that mass media uses to keep the normals who won't rock the capitalist boat rich & all the geniuses poor. Somebody has to risk their own sanity to work out the rules by which that shitty universe operates - to sort out from ten real personalities and God knows how many schizoid secondaries the egos of the sheep; to reveal that the nature of the fantasy is far more uninhabitable than what they'd really be capable of if they'd develop their own potential instead of being slaves - to the point that from sheer disgust they withdraw the links between tehmselves and the others and revert to actual perception instead of mediated imbecilic conformity."

& Brunner goes there, somewhat, when he writes things like:

"First off, he'd missed this kind of people. Which was hardly to be wondered at. One of the first benefits of an improved standard of living, as he had already been superficially aware, is to postpone the age at which a person's opinions congeal for life. Someone forced by poverty to avoid spending on enlarging his horizons the energy and time needed simply for staying alive adapted the attitudes, ready-made, of his environment. This was why students formed the backbone of so many revolutionary movements, for instance." (p 150)

To wch I wd amend: Let's not forget the Arrested Development, the people who never even reach an introspective phase of life, the ones who accept all aspects of greed w/o ever once examining any concepts of the better social good. & let's not forget the Psychopathfinders, the ones who struggle against being forced by poverty or other oppressive circumstances, against all odds, as it were.

Brunner has an aspiring writer imagine: "What I'd like is a technique which would enable a pre-Columbian Amerind to understand a twentieth-century Chinese." (p 153) Indeed. & it's a virile demonstration of Brunner's development as a writer that HE can imagine & hope for such a thing.

& Brunner has an aspiring artist imagine a multi/inter-media form that wd've still been somewhat futuristic in 1964 when this novel was written insofar as what it's somewhat evocative of is psychedelic light shows. Of course, even such things had predecessors in, eg, the Vortex sound & light experiments conducted by Jordan Belson & Henry Jacobs beginning in 1957 at the Morrison Planetarium in California. & what Brunner has his character imagine is both naively underinformed about such things &.. perhaps.. a little beyond it:

"(Once, long before, he had seen a tattered print of Disney's Fantasia; he had enjoyed it, and had wished there had been more attempts to combine sound and vision in a similar way. Now he was finding out what the combination would be like on the highest level.)

[That's the naive & underinformed part, at least on the part of the character Howson if not on the writer's - "Fantasia" is crap, IMO. & is from 1940 - there were already MANY precursors to it of far greater originality & conceptual importance: Viking Eggeling's "Diagonale-Symphonie" (1924), Hans Richter's "Rhythmus 21", Walter Ruttman's "Lichtspiel Opus 1" (1920 or 1922), many films of Mary Ellen Bute's, etc, etc.. The interested reader is advised to check out The Visual Music Village ( http://visualmusic.ning.com/ ) or even my own modest "Brain Waves Goodbye" ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4g9Q-0Q_MoY ).]

"Like a swimmer struggling in a torrential river, Howson sought wildly for solidity in this roaring stream of memory. Images presented themselves: a voice/velvet/a kitten's claws scratching/purple/ripe fruit - a ship's siren/fog/steel/yellowish-gray/cold/insecurity/sense of loss and emptiness - a common chord of C major struck on a piano/childhood/wood/black and white overlaid with bright gold/hate/something burning/tightness about the forehead/shame/stiffness in the wrists/liquidity/roundness..." (p 173)

& this is where his imagination becomes a bit more multi-sensorial:

"Rudi Allef's mind was almost as far from the ordinary as was Howson's own, but in a different direction. Somehow, Rudi's sense data cross-referenced interchangeably. Howson had experience of minds with limited audio-vision - those of people to whom musical sounds called up associated colors or pictures - but compared to what went on in Rudi's mind that was puerile." (p 173)

""My 'wet fireworks,' as my beloved wife will insist on calling them," he murmured. "Watch - this is my latest."

"He connected the cord to a socket beneath one of the larger tanks. A faint light came on; after a pause, it brightened, and a stream of opalescent bubbles began to work their way through the tank in a switchback formation. Shafts of green, yellow and blue shifted through the tank in an irregular series of of graceful loops; then a square form in bright red loomed up from a point till it almost filled the side of the tank nearest to the watchers. It vanished, and the graceful swerving curves continued." (p 179)

Lava Lamps, Dream Machines, Strobe Lights, Plasma Globes, Rain Forest Fountains, & Jacob's Ladders anyone?

In my review of Brunner's 1959 The World Swappers I reference his brief auto-biography in wch was written:

""I don't regard myself in any sense a quote creative writer unquote." &, then, in the next paragraph: ""Out of sympathy with: [..] the beat generation." Ha ha! Judging by this writing style: "a voice/velvet/a kitten's claws scratching/purple/ripe fruit - a ship's siren/fog/steel/yellowish-gray/cold/insecurity/sense of loss and emptiness", I'd say he's come around a bit. & while I criticized that I didn't really find the writing in that one very good, I'd say that it's much improved w/ this one.

""Hmmm!" Howson rubbed his chin. "But the difficulty one always runs up against in every attempt to integrate music and visual impressions is that the machinery is expensive, complicated and generally inadequate. What one needs is an instrument as simple and versatile as the piano, which combines the resources of a color-organ with those of an unlimited film library." (p 176)

Here we have shades of Scriabin, Varèse, &, yes, even myself. Scriabin conceived of the color-organ, & created some of my favorite piano music; Varèse postponed composing some pieces until the technology caught up w/ his imagination; & I've been experimenting w/ live sound combined w/ live projection for almost 40 yrs (witness my "Multiple Projections 1978 to 2009": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6smYCjQPuXM ) to an underwhelming lack of interest & acclaim.

This review might seem to have some spoilers but I've basically side-stepped the main plot to get at a few details that appeal to the (M)Usic geek in me:

"They had spent the week experimenting, improving and training; now the tank's speed of response was phenomenal, and Jay had improvised new, simpler controls to make the device as versatile and essentially as straightforward as a theremin. And Clara..." (p 182)

Clara being the telepathic go-between between Rudi (the composer) & the equipment (the instrument). Clara Rockmore, anyone? ( )
  tENTATIVELY | Apr 3, 2022 |
#shortreview for Instagram:

I finished reading the Telepathist this morning. It was a sad and rather brutal novel, about a man whose physical deformities enable him to develop powerful mental capabilities (telepathy, in this case). There's some dystopian-esque spy stuff going on in the background but the story is heavily character centric, with an unflinching examination of the ways in which society simultaneously exploits and abandons disabled individuals. Some of the language would likely be considered a trifle insensitive in modern standards but even disregarding the time period, Brunner has some wonderful and nuanced character portraits of people beaten down by poverty and circumstance, and the inherent danger of hope. Poor Gerald! ( )
  Sunyidean | Sep 7, 2021 |
This is my third book by Brunner and the first one I really like. I have more of his books on the shelf and reading this one gives me hope that there are more good stories to come. ( )
  ikeman100 | Apr 14, 2021 |
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» Lägg till fler författare (10 möjliga)

Författarens namnRollTyp av författareVerk?Status
Brunner, Johnprimär författarealla utgåvorbekräftat
Goodfellow, PeterOmslagmedförfattarevissa utgåvorbekräftat
Jack GaughanOmslagmedförfattarevissa utgåvorbekräftat
Kukalis, RomasOmslagmedförfattarevissa utgåvorbekräftat
Moll, CharlesOmslagmedförfattarevissa utgåvorbekräftat
Savage, SteeleOmslagmedförfattarevissa utgåvorbekräftat
Tinkelman, MurrayOmslagmedförfattarevissa utgåvorbekräftat

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'The Whole Man' (US title) is also published as 'Telepathist' (UK title). The US title was first (1964), the UK title came later (1965).
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In A Whole Man, a baby boy is born in a hospital surrounded by the chaos of battle and civil unrest. The birth is unremarkable and little noted, but the child, Gerald Howson, turns out to be very special. He is afflicted by infirmities and bodily flaws, but his mind becomes a miraculous device, capable of telepathic marvels that can, and do, change the world. But the power fantasies that sometimes tempt him are deadly to those near him and can ultimately threaten the whole of the world. And a man in a physical envelope that inspires pity and fright turns out to be the embodiment of a superman. This ebook was originally published in the United Kingdom under the title Telepathist.  For each generation, there is a writer meant to bend the rules of what we know. Hugo Award winner (Best Novel, Stand on Zanzibar) and British science fiction master John Brunner remains one of the most influential and respected authors of all time, and now many of his classic works are being reintroduced. For readers familiar with his vision, it is a chance to reexamine his thoughtful worlds and words, while for new readers, Brunner's work proves itself the very definition of timeless. 

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