John Brunner (novelist)

For other people of the same name, see John Brunner (disambiguation).

John Kilian Houston Brunner
Born	(1934-09-24)24 September 1934 Wallingford, Oxfordshire, United Kingdom
Died	25 August 1995(1995-08-25) (aged 60)
Occupation	Novelist
Nationality	British
Genres	Science fiction fantasy
Notable work(s)	Stand on Zanzibar, The Shockwave Rider, The Sheep Look Up, The Jagged Orbit
Influences John Dos Passos
Influenced Cyberpunk, Ken MacLeod
www.sfhub.ac.uk/Brunner.htm

John Kilian Houston Brunner (24 September 1934 – 26 August 1995) was a prolific British author of science fiction novels and stories. His 1968 novel Stand on Zanzibar, about an overpopulated world, won the 1969 Hugo Award for best science fiction novel, and the BSFA award the same year. The Jagged Orbit won the BSFA award in 1970.

Life

Brunner was born at Preston Crowmarsh, near Wallingford in Oxfordshire, and went to school at St Andrew's Prep School, Pangbourne then to Cheltenham. He wrote his first novel, Galactic Storm, at 17, published under the name of Gill Hunt, but did not write full-time until 1958. He served as an officer in the Royal Air Force from 1953 to 1955, and married Marjorie Rosamond Sauer on 1958-07-12. His health began to decline in the 1980s, and worsened with the death of his wife Marjorie in 1986. He remarried, to Li Yi Tan, on 27 September 1991. Brunner died of a heart attack in Glasgow, Scotland on 25 August 1995, while attending the World Science Fiction Convention there. Brunner was popular in science fiction fandom in his native Britain.

Literary works

At first writing conventional space opera, Brunner later began to experiment with the novel form. His 1968 novel Stand on Zanzibar, about overpopulation, won the 1969 Hugo Award for best science fiction novel. It also won the BSFA award the same year. It exploits the fragmented organizational style John Dos Passos invented for his U.S.A. trilogy, but updates it in terms of the theory of media popularized by Marshall McLuhan.

The Jagged Orbit, set in a United States dominated by weapons proliferation and interracial violence, won the BSFA award in 1970. The Sheep Look Up (1972) was a prophetic warning of corporate domination and ecological disaster. Brunner is credited with coining the term "worm" and predicting the emergence of computer viruses in his 1975 novel The Shockwave Rider, in which he used the term to describe software which reproduces itself across a computer network. Together with Stand on Zanzibar, these novels are collectively known as the "Club of Rome Quartet", named after the Club of Rome whose 1972 report The Limits to Growth warned of the dire effects of overpopulation.

Brunner's pen names include K. H. Brunner, Gill Hunt, John Loxmith, Trevor Staines, and Keith Woodcott.

In addition to his fiction, Brunner wrote many unpaid articles in a variety of publications, particularly fanzines, but also 13 letters to the New Scientist and an article about the educational relevance of science fiction in Physics Education. Brunner was an active member of the organization Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and wrote the words to "The H-Bomb's Thunder", which was sung on the Aldermaston Marches. He was a linguist and Guest of Honour at the first European Science Fiction Convention Eurocon-1 in Trieste in 1972.

Film and TV

John Brunner wrote the screenplay for the 1967 science fiction film The Terrornauts by Amicus Productions.

Two of his short stories, "Some Lapse of Time" and "The Last Lonely Man" were adapted as TV plays in the BBC science fiction series Out of the Unknown, in series 1 (1965) and series 3 (1969) respectively.

Bibliography

Novels

• Galactic Storm (1951) (as Gill Hunt)
• Threshold of Eternity (1959)
• The 100th Millennium (1959) (based on "Earth Is But a Star", revised in 1968 as Catch a Falling Star)
• Echo in the Skull (1959) (revised in 1974 as Give Warning to the World)
• The World Swappers (1959)
• The Brink (1959)
• Slavers of Space (1960) (revised in 1968 as Into the Slave Nebula)
• The Skynappers (1960)
• The Atlantic Abomination (1960)
• Sanctuary in the Sky (1960)
• I Speak for Earth (1961) (as Keith Woodcott)
• Meeting at Infinity (1961)
• Secret Agent of Terra (1962) (revised in 1969 as The Avengers of Carrig. Book 1 of the "Zarathustra Refugee Planets" series.)
• The Super Barbarians (1962)
• The Ladder in the Sky (1962) (as Keith Woodcott)
• The Dreaming Earth (1963) (revision of 1961 serial "Put Down This Earth")
• The Psionic Menace (1963) (as Keith Woodcott)
• Listen! The Stars! (1963) (revised in 1972 as The Stardroppers)
• The Astronauts Must Not Land (1963) (revised in 1973 as More Things in Heaven)
• The Space-Time Juggler (1963) (also published as The Wanton of Argus)
• Castaways' World (1963) (revised in 1974 as Polymath. Book 2 of the "Zarathustra Refugee Planets series.)
• The Rites of Ohe (1963)
• To Conquer Chaos (1964)
• The Whole Man (1964) (also published as Telepathist)
• The Martian Sphinx (1965) (as Keith Woodcott)
• Enigma from Tantalus (1965)
• The Repairmen of Cyclops (1965, Book 3 of the "Zarathustra Refugee Planets" series.)
• The Altar on Asconel (1965) (serialised as The Altar on Asconel)
• The Day of the Star Cities (1965) (revised in 1973 as Age of Miracles)
• The Long Result (1965)
• The Squares of the City (1965)
• A Planet of Your Own (1966)
• The Productions of Time (1967)
• Born Under Mars (1967)
• Quicksand (1967)
• Bedlam Planet (1968)
• Stand on Zanzibar (1968)
• The Evil That Men Do (1969)
• Double, Double (1969)
• The Jagged Orbit (1969)
• Timescoop (1969)
• The Gaudy Shadows (1970)
• The Wrong End of Time (1971)
• The Dramaturges of Yan (1972)
• The Sheep Look Up (1972)
• The Stone That Never Came Down (1973)
• Total Eclipse (1974)
• Web of Everywhere (1974) (also published as The Webs of Everywhere)
• The Shockwave Rider (1975)
• The Infinitive of Go (1980)
• Players at the Game of People (1980)
• Manshape (1982) (revision of the novella "Endless Shadow")
• The Crucible of Time (1983)
• The Tides of Time (1984)
• The Shift Key (1987)
• Children of the Thunder (1988)
• A Maze of Stars (1991)
• Muddle Earth (1993)

Collections

• No Future in It (1962)
• Times Without Number (1962) (revised and expanded in 1969)
• Now Then! (1965) (also published as Now Then)
• No Other Gods But Me (1966)
• Out of My Mind (1967, Ballantine; abridged variant 1968, NEL)
• Not Before Time (1968)
• The Traveler in Black (1971) (revised and expanded by 1 story as The Compleat Traveller in Black in 1986)
• From This Day Forward (1972)
• Entry to Elsewhen (1972)
• Time-Jump (1973)
• The Book of John Brunner (1976)
• Interstellar Empire (1976) (a collection of a novella and two "Ace Double" halves: The Altar on Asconel, "The Man from the Big Dark" and The Space-Time Juggler (under the title of The Wanton of Argus))
• Foreign Constellations (1980)
• The Best of John Brunner (1988)
• Victims of the Nova (1989) (Omnibus of Polymath, Secret Agent of Terra and The Repairmen of Cyclops)
• The Man Who Was Secrett and Other Stories (2013)

Poetry

• Life In an Explosive Forming Press (1970)
• Trip: A Sequence of Poems Through the U.S.A. (1971)
• A Hastily Thrown Together Bit of Zork (1974)
• Tomorrow May Be Even Worse (1978)
• A New Settlement of Old Scores (1983)

Nongenre

• The Crutch of Memory (1964)
• Wear the Butcher's Medal (1965)
• Black Is the Color (1969)
• A Plague on Both Your Causes (1969) (also published as Backlash)
• The Devil's Work (1970)
• Good Men Do Nothing (1971)
• Honky in the Woodpile (1971)
• The Great Steamboat Race (1983)
• The Days of March (1988)

External links

• John Brunner Archive at the University of Liverpool
• Obituary on Rudy's Books
• Heroes of Cyberspace:John Brunner by Charles A. Gimon
• Bibliography on SciFan
• John Brunner at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database
• Science Fiction Inventions by John Brunner
• Audio review of The Crucible of Time at The Science Fiction Book Review Podcast
• Cover for short story by Brunner that looks like scene from Planet of the Apes