Comment by gopher_space
9 hours ago
Delphi markets feature prominently in Shockwave Rider by John Brunner. It's an important book, and Brunner is amazing if you've never read him before.
He's actually one of my metrics for judging used book stores. Sci-fi has Brunner, politics has Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72, nonfiction has someone's old annotated copy of G.E.B.
Look everyone, this person believes talking Tortoises are real!
In all seriousness, I love G.E.B. how do you use it to judge a given used book store?
In my experience book stores either have multiple copies or zero copies.
Robertson Davies is another bellwether author I should mention.
I'll admit, I bought Stand on Zanzibar based on a recommendation from my Dad, but I only got a few pages in before getting distracted by something else. I should give Brunner another shot.
"The Shockwave Runner" has aged vastly better than "Stand on Zanzibar", which I found unreadable. The first book predicts an early-21st century society full of smartphone users, ubiquitous privacy violations, and governments run by criminal gangs; the other is like if Paul Ehrlich wrote a sci-fi novel. I don't think "The Shockwave Runner" is as well written as any of the other cyberpunk classics, but as a guess at what 40-50 years in the authors future would look like, it's almost freakily realistic. (Although it feels like reading Neal Stephenson's "Anathem" at times - familiar tech described with alien words.)
Stand on Zanzibar, The Sheep Look Up, and Shockwave Rider all feel like variations on a theme. If you start with Shockwave and absolutely love it then you are in luck because there's more where that came from. But all of his books are worth reading imho.
> as a guess at what 40-50 years in the authors future would look like, it's almost freakily realistic.
Yeah, I should really revisit Future Shock. That book might have been a little ahead of its time.
> Although it feels like reading Neal Stephenson's "Anathem" at times - familiar tech described with alien words.
100% agree, and I think it's almost a bigger flaw here. I'm not saying "it gets better in the second season" but I wouldn't be surprised if some people bounce off the future slang.
Interestingly enough, Brunner might be one of the only white authors I've read who describes his characters by skin tone.