The Sheep Look Up

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On the onset, I was amazed at the sheer realistic hellishness Brunner manages to invoke. Just look at the book’s Wikipedia page for an overview of all the troubles his future world is in. Brunner did miss the mark though, as he wrote a near-future novel set not that many years after he wrote it, somewhere at the end of a 1970ies that never manifested. Yet dismissing the book’s warning because of that would be misguided. Give or take a few decades, William Gibson was probably right when he remarked that “No one except possibly the late John Brunner, in his brilliant novel The Sheep Look Up, has ever described anything in science fiction that is remotely like the reality of 2007 as we know it.”

In the end, I liked the book, even though I failed to connect with the characters. Maybe that’s okay, as David Brin might have hinted at in his introduction to my edition: Brunner showed “that the world itself can be as fragile as any walking, talking character.” The two real characters in The Sheep Look Up indeed are our biosphere and American society at large. As such, it is both a micro and macro tragedy – I don’t think I spoil much if I say that in the book practically every human character dies, and so does American society and the human ecosphere.

In my memory Stand On Zanzibar feels much better, but I can’t really put my finger on why. Maybe I’m more experienced and critical as a reader 8 years later? Maybe Brunner’s use of fragments felt less real in Sheep – it may have become formulaic for him as well, as it was his third book using the technique? Maybe the language felt less realistic, more comical, more product?

I don’t really remember a lot about Zanzibar‘s characters, but Brunner reduces those of Sheep generally to 1 or 2 components: their job, their STD, their specific form of bad luck.

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