review of
John Brunner's No Future In It
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - October 17, 2014

This is the last of the 4 Brunner short story compilations I had lying around to be read. It has work from 1955 to 1962 - written roughly when Brunner was ages 20 to 27. It's precocious, imaginative, varied, solidly written - but, still, for Brunner, a tad underdeveloped.

The 'worst' Space Opera SF writer 'type' might write an adventure story that's a typical hero's journey about a young astronaut being thrust into a bad situation & fighting against the outer space monsters to come out on top b/c of his adaptable genius. Brunner writes a story called Puzzle for Spacemen about an insurance investigator looking into an astronaut's death & being resented by other spacemen just wanting to get on w/ their work. The same story has "Packer's syndrome" in it:

"["]Does the term "Packer's syndrome mean anything to you?"

""Nothing at all. What is it?"

""Potential homicidal instability," - p 32

The 1st time I can remember hearing about Alfred Packer, the Colorado cannibal, was in 1986 when I was touring thru Boulder & Denver & one of the university cafeterias in one of those cities had an Alfred Packer burger.

The Windows of Heaven, 1956, is a story about a moon landing, something that actually happened w/ Apollo 11 a mere 13 yrs later. What didn't happen, fortunately, was what makes this story so devastating.

As w/ Puzzle for Spacemen, some of these stories are very pragmatic. Out of Order envisions a very efficient future consumer supply:

""Supply Central has lost an order, Ralph—and they're after our blood."

""Impossible!""

[..]

"What it in fact amounted to, though, was this: the entire structure of the planet's economy was in danger. It had been turned instantly from completely reliable and satisfactory to potentially unreliable. Unless the error could be proved to be an eliminable fault, they would have to start over.

"And that'll mean wars and slumps and—"" - pp 76-77

The surprise ending to that one's particularly wonderful.

Elected Silence is about solitary confinement, reputedly originated by the Quakers & probably the worst idea they ever had.

"To an intelligent person, surely the worst part of solitary confinement—or other enforced isolation—is the sense of time's slipping away without containing events. It makes time shapeless, plastic, ultimately tenuous.

"Restarting the old habits of thought becomes more and more difficult, like trying to run a rusty engine; though for a while it may give a passable imitation of its normal behavior, it is all the time decaying at an accelerated pace." - p 89

I'm reminded of Tehching Hsieh & his yr long performance in wch he confined himself to a cell he made & didn't talk to anyone for a yr. At the end of the yr he had difficulty speaking again.

One story, Badman, even reminds me of something that Ray Bradbury wd've written. Now THAT surprises me.

The Iron Jackass takes place on a planet where steel mills are the main industry & the story references the region of Pennsylvania that I live in. "I've talked with people whose ancestors came from the Monongahela Valley" (p 157) That grabbed my attn. Brunner's interest in folklore seems to've spawned this one. The expression from the days of Westward Ho!, 'One-horse town', gets updated to Outer-space Ho! w/ this: ""I feel like I'll break down myself if I have to stay in this one-reactor town any longer."" (p 148)

Protect Me From My Friends:

"Thinking is all very well in its place, but as the saying goes, "The trouble with having an open mind is that people come along and put things in it."

"Which, if you analyze it, isn't at all funny.

maybe if I knew how much rock there is lying on top of me when I sleep I would worry about it more likely knowing or not knowing try to push it out of the way within the rock me like a worm in an apple

in this volume 4000 cu. ft. loungeroom bedroom bathroom me like a rat in a trap

damn them all damn them all damn them all

especially the coming-down-the-passage ones the new and the known of strain strain to see PAST THE BEND AND NO NOT THIS TIME BECAUSE TOO LATE BUT ON THE WAY OUT CLING LONGER AND SEE IN PRESENT TIME NOT MEMORY" - p 163

Brunner changing his writing style to put the reader into an unusual mindset.

Then there're little details like: "He recollected what had brought him, hooked his toe around the stem of a nearby chair, and sat down." (p 151) "He hooked his foot under a chair, swiveled it around to face Lee's, and dropped his bulky body into it." (pp 182-183)

Stimulus: ""You probably only have a vague idea of the complexity of ecological relationships. For one thing, the huge increase in the spitcat population will have been reflected in a decrease of the herbivores. The local carrion eaters will have increased. Fewer herbivores mean less of the vegetation eaten. Follow me?"" (pp 176-177) Terraforming by manipulation of the local fauna. Think of the cane toads imported to Australia to eat bugs that they then don't proceed to est - overpopulating dramatically instead. Think of the rabbits brought to Australia fro hunting - overpopulating so much that a fence was built dividing the country to try to inhibit their spread. Think of the disease bred in mosquitoes w/ the idea that they'd kill off the rabbits - bred on an island off the mainland of Australia by people who thought it was 'safe' there: it wasn't. What's next? Spitcats. ( )

This is a better-than-average and better-than-expected collection of short stories from a writer who, in my opinion, has scaled the peaks and troughs of science fiction writing. None of the stories here match Brunner's peak of the Club of Rome quartet of novels, but that's hardly a fair comparison since it's difficult for a short story to show the sort of complexity that made those novels what they were. Many, though not all, of the stories have themes and/or treatments that were typical of British SF in the early 1960s. But even those that are of their time show some evidence of a writer who was capable of thinking differently from his contemporaries. Many are illuminated by brief notes from the author that precede the story. These don't always reflect well on him - I've heard Brunner described as arrogant or pompous by people who met him and that comes across in some of these authorial notes. But they are all interesting to read and add to, rather than detract from, enjoyment of the stories themselves.

Brief notes on each story follow, without spoilers:

No future in it

One of the more light-hearted stories in this collection. A reluctant magician in medieval Italy is having no success with spells that, in any event, he doesn't really believe in. Until he manages to capture what we realise is a time-traveller from our future.

Puzzle for spacemen

CSI in orbit. Less concisely, a forensic science story set in space-based construction site somewhere out towards the asteroid belt, at a time when space travel out to Pluto has become a part of normal trade. A small ship has turned up at the site with a dead pilot on board. The station commander wants shot of it as soon as possible, but the man sent up from Earth to investigate wants to solve the problem first. He quickly deduces that it's murder, and identifies a prime suspect. The question then is how to prove it.

Fair

Ray Bradbury famously made the world of the American fair or carnival his own in the world of science fiction and fantasy, although others have made good contrinutions to that sub-genre. This is one of them. Our fair is on a presumably not-too-far-future Earth where the East-West conflict still rages. Our protagonist is an older man, a veteran of conflict, and determined in some way to prove himself against the youth that the fair is aimed at. It seems like a fairly average mood piece until the final few paragraphs when the fair's purpose is revealed.

The Windows of Heaven

The story opens as the first man arrives on the moon, and in this pre-Apollo era it is ONE man without the degree of technical support we might expect, but with a spaceship that is vastly more versatile than those that eventually took astronauts to the moon. Both these differences are essential for the somewhat far-fetched story to work. Our hero has the supremely bad luck to arrive on the moon just as something is going horribly wrong with the Sun, which manages to go mildly nova while he is safely in the moon's shadow. He is thus both the first person on the moon and the last person alive. Nonetheless, he returns to Earth for a poignant ending.

Out Of Order

One of the poorer stories in the book, containing more elements than it needs to sustain a rather contrived plot-line. On a future Earth, we have vast automated factories able to supply everyone's needs in response to any order. When one fails, it's a cause for great concern. It turns out that the failure is actually more a case of an AI system succesfully delivering against what-was-said instead of what-was-intended in a somewhat improbably way. The aliens - yes, aliens - I think are intended to provide justification for some of the plot twists but fail to do so.

Elected Silence
Humans are in an interstellar war with some sketchily-described but very alien aliens, about whom we know very little. So when someone who has been their captive for over 20 years is rescued those fighting this war hope to gain deep insights into alien psychology and physiology. However, those trying to do so (with one exception) approach their task with cartoon-like military unsubtlety. It doesn't end well.

This story's theme is typical of the time, when the fear of brain-washing of prisoners in the Korean war reached panic level in the USA.

Badman

Report on the Nature of the Lunar Surface

The Iron Jackass

Protect Me From My Friends

Stimulus

A story which begins conventionally enough for its time but which ends up somewhere quite different - to explain how would be to ruin enjoyment of the story. We open with the arrival of a man called Lee on an unnamed world being colonised by humans. Lee's arrival is clearly a source of fear to the colonists. He comes from off-world and it is apparent that people like him only turn up when something has gone badly wrong, and that their sanctions can include closing an entire colony. Quite what caused Lee to be summoned, and what he intends to do about it, unfold slowly and in unexpected ways. Despite some dodgy biochemistry along the way, one of the more original stories in this book. ( )