On This Day: John Brunner

HIPCRIME: You committed one when you opened this book. Keep it up. It’s our only hope.
~ The Hipcrime Vocab by Chad Mulligan

COINCIDENCE: You weren’t paying attention to the other half of what was happening.
~ The Hipcrime Vocab by Chad Mulligan

PATRIOTISM: A great British writer once said that if he had to choose between betraying his country and betraying a friend he hoped he would have the decency to betray his country.
(Amen, brothers and sisters! Amen!)
~ The Hipcrime Vocab by Chad Mulligan

If you recognise these quotes, we congratulate you, for you are one of the enlightened souls who have read John Brunner‘s brilliantly fractured 1968 novel, Stand on Zanzibar, which won the Hugo Award and the BSFA Award. The creation of Stand on Zanzibar alone would be enough to ensure John Brunner entry into the pantheon of SF greats, but he produced many other fine and worthy works (which, coincidentally, you can find via his author page on the SF Gateway) such as The Shockwave Rider, in which he predicted the computer virus.

Stand on Zanzibar has recently been re-issued in the new SF Masterworks style, with a wonderfully insightful introduction from Ken MacLeod. This new edition is currently available only as a paperback, but we’re updating the eBook with a new cover and Ken’s introduction, and hope to have it on sale in the next week or so.

Also available, as we noted last week, is The John Brunner SF Gateway Omnibus, featuring The Shockwave Rider, The Sheep Look Up and The Traveller in Black.

John Brunner passed away during the 1995 Glasgow Worldcon. Had he not, he would have been celebrating his 80th birthday today.