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JOHN BRUNNER
By Jad Smith
UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS
Copyright © 2012 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-252-09451-4
Chapter One
RAISING THE NoISE LEVEL, 1951–66
Brunner owed his first meaningful encounter with SF to happenstance. At the start of World War II, his father Anthony decided to support the war effort by running a farm in Brimfield, Herefordshire, and after the move, Brunner's grandfather's rare 1898 Heinemann edition of H. G. Wells's The War of the Worlds (1898) ended up misshelved in his playroom. At six and a half years old, Brunner read it, adorned its endpapers with Martian fighting-machines, and that was that. As he once explained it, he was imprinted "as permanently as one of Konrad Lorenz's geese." He went in search of more SF. He tracked down a copy of Wells's The Time Machine (1895) in an outbuilding on the farm. He received Jules Verne's The Clipper of the Clouds (1886) as a birthday gift. He went to a local paper-salvage shop and begged to read D. C. Thomson comics with SF-themed strips before they were pulped.
By nine, Brunner was a full-fledged SF addict. He tried his hand at a story about a Martian named Gloop and, despite being unable to finish it, dreamed of becoming an SF author. Four years later, that dream took the form of ambition. Inspired by the April 1947 British reprint of Astounding, which contained Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore's "Rain Check," Hal Clement's "Cold Front," A. E. van Vogt's "Film Library," and Philip Latham's "The Blindness," he submitted a story to the magazine only to learn that it did not accept original material. He collected his first rejection letter and learned a lesson about the relation of the American and British markets. But in his mind, his future was decided. He would write SF.
Brunner's parents had other plans for him. His great grandfather had cofounded the soda-ash manufacturer Brunner Mond and Company, and his parents hoped to exploit family connections to the chemical industry to secure Brunner a corporate post. To prepare him for this career track, they sent him to St. Andrew's School, Pangbourne, and then to Cheltenham College. There also his aspirations met with disapproval. When he entered "author" as his desired profession on an annual questionnaire at Cheltenham, his teachers sat him down for a talk. They advised him of "the patent foolishness of such an ambition ... and of the utter improbability of [his] ever making a living that way." The warning persuaded him to write "broadcasting" on the form thereafter but had little other effect on his plans. Even though he disliked formal study, his near-eidetic memory allowed him to excel academically while still reading widely in pursuit of his own interests, and as he had at St. Andrew's, he proved an adept storyteller after lights out in his dormitory. Of course, he also continued to write.
During what would be his final term at Cheltenham in the fall of 1951, Brunner's first printed story appeared alongside fiction by A. Bertram Chandler, Kenneth Bulmer, and Manly Banister in Walt Willis's celebrated fanzine Slant. Though only a page long, "The Watchers" (1951) leaves little doubt that the seventeen-year-old Brunner began his career as a devoted idealist. In the story, two mysterious watchers reside on the moon, mostly in stasis, waking periodically to observe progress on Earth through a surface-scanning device called a perception probe. As they shut down the probe and collect their thoughts, their minds brim with "such words as GALAXY, ASTOUNDING, NEW WORLDS." Before going back to sleep, the first watcher sets a direct-approach alarm and concludes with delight, "They'll be up here soon." Through admiring references to leading SF magazines, Brunner's story linked the literature to the launchpad, and Willis neatly summed it up for readers as a wholehearted "declaration of faith." Even so, Brunner's choice of magazines already indicated his interest in something beyond Golden Age scientific optimism. Writing as the magazine market climbed toward its peak, Brunner set store by the field leader, Astounding, and the rallying British magazine modeled on it, New Worlds, but at the front of his list he placed Galaxy, the innovative newcomer focused more on the social than the scientific imagination.
With the help of Willis and H. J. Campbell, the editor of Authentic SF, Brunner sold his first novel, Galactic Storm (1951), at roughly the same time. Curtis Warren bought the novel and, according to practice, published it in paperback under one of several house pseudonyms, Gill Hunt. The novel appeared between two higher-quality Hunt books by David Griffiths and E. C. Tubb, and Brunner soon came to appreciate his anonymity. He had written the novel at sixteen and understandably regarded it as a failure by twenty. Curtis Warren packaged the book as space opera, but the poorly stitched-together jumble of plot elements hardly deserved even that label. The novel hurriedly ranges from an iconoclastic young genius using a supercomputer to identify widespread global warming, to a polar expedition to investigate the problem, to a Venusian plot to take over Earth, to a full-scale counterattack on Venus carried out through a bombardment of its surface with the seeds of a fast-growing mutant plant that oxygenates the planet's CO2-heavy atmosphere, to the utter destruction of the Venusians. The dialogue oscillates between comically gee-whiz Americanisms and out-of-place Briticisms, and long sequences of scientific-sounding jargon continually stall the plot, so much so that at one point in the story, the first-person narrator stops to apologize for the tediousness of the previous section.
While Brunner on occasion referred vaguely to his Curtis Warren novel—for instance, in his fanzine Pogrom—he refused to acknowledge it for more than thirty years, presumably until Fran Buhman, with or without his permission, credited him with it at the head of his Guest of Honor bibliography in the 1983 ConStellation program. Nonetheless, Galactic Storm provides a helpful window into the development of the young Brunner. For instance, in an unexpected twist, Earth's victory rings hollow. The analysis of Venusian machinery brings about striking technological advances, but all signs indicate that Earth governments will put them to the same old uses: aggression and war. The end of the novel sketches the contours of a rampant nationalism that menaces humanity even more than the Venusians had, and the threat of mutually assured destruction looms larger than ever on the horizon. The American narrator, presenting himself as a voice of reason in the wilderness of cold-war politics, looks with hope to a newly formed United Nations–style organization as a possible champion of the human race, but his hope is tempered with skepticism. As he would do so often later in his career, Brunner here exploited the win-the-day logic of pulp plotting but brought it to an ambiguous resolution. Despite the novel's nuts-and-bolts tenor, he also ultimately prioritized a social theme.
Disenchanted with the prospect of further formal education and encouraged by the sale of Galactic Storm, Brunner dropped out of Cheltenham, giving up a scholarship to Oxford. He craved time of his own, to follow his own internal compass and to work seriously at writing before entering the National Service. And work he did. Despite accumulating quite a few rejection slips, he had by June 1952 secured a place for "Brainpower" in the new Scottish magazine Nebula SF, which he had helped the editor Peter Hamilton design and launch. His first U.S. sale preceded his eighteenth birthday in September 1952 and was nothing less than momentous. John W. Campbell Jr. bought Brunner's novelette "Thou Good and Faithful" for the March 1953 issue of Astounding and gave it the cover, a rare honor for an unknown writer. Another sale to a U.S. publication followed near the end of the year, when Malcolm Reiss took his short novel The Wanton of Argus for Two Complete Science-Adventure Books. Brunner marked these successes by attending a meeting of the London Science Fiction Circle. He felt heartened when Arthur C. Clarke, William F. Temple, and Samuel Youd (a.k.a. John Christopher), among others, received him cordially, but the gloomy predictions of his parents and teachers remained fresh in his mind. He still feared that he would "come a public cropper," and he published these early works under the pen names John Loxmith and Kilian Houston Brunner.
It is worthwhile to linger for a moment on "Thou Good and Faithful." Brunner traced the story's genesis to casual mention in one of Clifford D. Simak's novels of a robot stealing away to homestead a planet—Buster in Time and Again (1951)—and he took its title from City (1952), specifically from the robot Jenkins's account of early Dog culture, when the Dogs still await the day when Man might return and pat their heads and say, "Well done, thou good and faithful servant." Simak's influence also showed in Brunner's use of robots, pets, and a pastoral landscape, and in his shading of the plot with a delicate hint of fantasy. Yet Brunner recombined these elements in a distinctive fashion.
The story begins with scouts from New Earth, the rim world Alpha Centauri IV, searching for habitable worlds in the galactic hub and locating a one-in-a-million planet likely to earn them their retirement and then some. Protocol requires them to establish the absence of intelligent life there before staking a claim, but the evidence remains inconclusive. A lunar outpost sits abandoned and in disrepair. The planet's groomed landscape looks like a well-kept but empty park. After they land their ship, a small animal resembling a bug-eyed wallaby approaches it. The captain, Chang, tries to communicate with the creature, but a lifelike robot nonchalantly retrieves it and departs. The presence of other robots such as this one raises a series of questions: Did they naturally evolve on the planet, or were they manufactured? If the latter is the case, then who created them? Did the robots turn on their creators and destroy them? Without a particularly good reason to do so, Chang settles on the final idea and decides to eradicate the robots. That plan is soon put to rest. A single robot conclusively demonstrates its ability to destroy Chang and his crew by remotely detonating their ship's weapons. It also delivers a message in the form of a proposal: rather than face sure destruction in a conflict, accept the planet and the service of the robots as a gift. Incredulous, Chang agrees to meet with one of several supercomputers camouflaged on the planet's surface. This "Big One" explains that its humanlike creators sought and achieved transcendence, leaving behind their pets and robot servants. A human presence on the planet will restore the latter's purpose.
The issue of ecology crops up in the background throughout the novelette. Readers learn that the hub planet resembles Earth before humans despoiled it and that New Earth now suffers from overcrowding and related woes. Before Chang undertakes a decision, this concern emerges into full view. The computer deduces that rather than choosing to evolve as its creators did, humans opted to expand, essentially unable to leave behind tribalism and territorial interests. The robots offer an alternative to expansionism: a science focused on moving up the evolutionary ladder; but Chang struggles to leave behind his now-obsolete mindset, to trust in even the possibility of another way. As the dilemma builds to a crescendo, the computer's creators intervene, briefly entering into Chang's consciousness and enabling him to decipher a plaque on the wall commemorating the robots' fidelity. It reads: "Well done, thou good and faithful servant." A quotation of Matthew 25:23, this plaque suggests that human advancement depends on a leap of faith into the unknown. Filled with wonder and inspired by "a glory beside which all the stars in the galaxy were as dark dead coals," Chang musters the courage to make just such a leap. He says yes to the proposal.
Already at this early stage of his career, Brunner tinkered with a cultural approach to ecology. He here tackles ecology as a question not only of human impact on biotic environments but also of changing social and technological milieux on humans. Chang has consented to a grand experiment, not of Campbellian applied science but of science applied to man. Humans do not use technology to win the day; they become its object. The optimistic conclusion of the story carries weight because of the implied risk to humanity itself. As the pun in his name indicates, Chang has agreed to change what it means to be human, possibly even to an entirely posthuman future.
Just as he gained momentum with his writing, Brunner found himself called up for National Service. His two-year stint as an officer in the Royal Air Force began in early January 1953, when he reported to Padgate for recruit training. While there, he showed his resolve to become a writer by turning down another scholarship to Oxford, this one offered by a rich uncle on behalf of Imperial Chemical Industries, the parent company of Brunner Mond. Once stationed at Bletchley, though, he tried to go on writing with little success, selling only one minor story, "Tomorrow Is Another Day" (1954), in nearly a year and a half. His feelings about fandom also grew bleak during this period, and in the spring of 1954, he sent a letter to the fanzine Hyphen depicting fan culture as insular and more focused on socializing than on SF. However, Supermancon in June 1954 restored his faith in fandom and his sense of purpose as a writer. Afterward, in a letter that Willis excerpted in Hyphen, Brunner wrote: "Nowhere barring fandom is there a place where I believe I can be me.... Next January I get out of this insane rat race of the RAF, and then I'm going to spend a year at home writing ... and fanning." During the final six months or so of his service, Brunner ramped up to his discharge on January 6, 1955. Between bouts of RAF paperwork, he completed the first issue of his fanzine Noise Level, sending it out with the second mailing of the Off-Trail Magazine Publishers' Association (OMPA) in December 1954, and he also made another major sale, placing the short story "Armistice" (1955) in Astounding. Still, he felt that his time in the National Service had forced him to "start all over again from scratch."
If nothing else, Brunner's experience in the RAF fed into his writing at the thematic level. Throughout his career, he examined how groupthink could perpetuate outmoded thought patterns and entrench social complacency. The enforced conformity of military culture symbolized for him the worst kind of box for the human mind. "Armistice" puts an ironic spin on this idea. It depicts a future in which Earth's government, because of difficulties associated with colonial expansion to other worlds, designs techniques to stifle imagination and reduce citizens to little more than "hive-minded insects" living in a police state. Having nearly gone down the same blind alley, a benevolent race identical to humans in all respects but brainwave activity attempts to intervene; but when one colony's chief security officer, Talbot, implements brainwave scans, he captures two of their operatives, and the whole venture hangs in the balance.
Events do not play out as an SF reader of the day might have expected. Talbot interrogates the first prisoner and kills him, but he is transformed by the encounter. Hoping to turn humanity away from the dead end it approaches, he engages in a dialogue with the other prisoner, Kerguelen. The latter explains his origins—a large interplanetary society with no formal government—and offers an outsider's view of the human predicament: "You created a State and made it your father and mother, your school teacher and even your lover. You grew so dependent on it that now you are afraid of what might happen without it. In fact, you have made everybody so scared that if you did do away with it everything you fear would probably happen because people felt it was expected of them." When Talbot implores him for help, Kerguelen is deeply sympathetic but hides the fact. He knows other operatives will already possess the means to evade brainwave scans, and he is skeptical about humanity's ability to help itself. He seizes the one option left to him: to feign aggression and sacrifice his own life to ensure the plan's continued secrecy. Paradoxically, it is his refusal of an armistice that will bring an end to the hostilities. Not a simple protest against establishment thought, the story raises as many questions as it answers and highlights Brunner's early view of social change as a messy and unpredictable process riddled with moral complexities.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from JOHN BRUNNER by Jad Smith Copyright © 2012 by Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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