November 1995
I was saddened to learn recently of the death of Hugo-winning science fiction author John Brunner at the World Science Fiction Convention in Edinburgh, Scotland, August 25. He was the author of a large number of decent science fiction novels and several outright classics, such as THE SHOCKWAVE RIDER, STAND ON ZANZIBAR, and THE SHEEP LOOK UP. At his best, he conveyed the daunting complexity and mounting insanity of modern life with great verve and incomparable fidelity.
It was the shocking news of Brunner's death which prompted me to consider the current state of the Internet as a means for discovering important news about books. Despite being at a nexus of Internet communication about books, I didn't learn about Brunner's death until the middle of October, when I received the current issue of LOCUS, the very worthy trade publication of the science fiction field. I often read the excellent Usenet newsgroup rec.arts.sf.written, but the demands on my time are sufficiently intense, and the traffic volume of the group has risen to such a level, that evidently I simply missed the discussion of Brunner's death on r.a.sf.w.
I was able to use the Dejanews archive to search on "John Brunner" and verify that indeed, Brunner's death was announced on Usenet in the evening of August 25th--before many of the conference attendees became aware of it!--and to discover a number of informative updates and moving eulogies that were posted to r.a.sf.w. in the days after his death. While Dejanews is a wonderful service, it is not a comfortable tool for rereading long threads that you missed. There's no substitute for "being there", even if it's being there on Usenet.
Once I missed the news on Usenet, neither surfing the Web nor scarfing "all the news that's fit to print" would have alerted me to Brunner's demise. As far as I can tell, there was no mention of Brunner's death on any of the major Web "switchboards" for book-lovers (discussed below in The IBIC Guide to Book-Related Internet Resources). And although I read the NEW YORK TIMES daily, I saw no mention of Brunner's death.
To further test the Internet's efficacy as a means of discovering meaningful information about events in the world of books, I ran an Infoseek search on "John Brunner". The number 1 search result was a glancing reference to him in a term paper on science fiction written by Dominic Sagolla, a student at my alma mater, Swarthmore College, followed by a miscellany of references to Brunner on various home pages scattered around the Internet. At spot #14 on the Infoseek search I came across THE INTERNET TOP 100 SF/FANTASY LIST, which showed that Internet voters ranked STAND ON ZANZIBAR #13 on the all-time list of SF/Fantasy greats, and at spot #15 on the search, I noted that an outmoded version of The Hacker's Jargon File gives Brunner partial credit for coining the computer term "worm" in his excellent novel THE SHOCKWAVE RIDER.
The conclusion I draw from these investigations is that Internet switchboards and search engines can be a lot of fun, but right now, they don't satisfactorily meet my need for timely, comprehensive news about the world of books. I've often thought it's a great shame that there's no "enthusiast's publication" for book-lovers. The NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW and the other national book reviews occupy the field, but I don't think they do it justice. Don't get me wrong--I thoroughly enjoy those book reviews and give them all the credit in the world. But the field is missing the charisma, flair, and sense of perspective that, say, AUTOMOBILE delivers to car-lovers or PREMIERE brings to film-lovers; for reasons that I don't fully understand, it seems that there's an unoccupied niche in the world of bringing information to book-lovers. With more advances in technologies for information delivery (such as the personal notification system at Amazon.com), maybe some new services will come along to fill this niche...
Editor's Recommendations, Summer 1996In this inaugural edition of IBIC's Featured Books, I'd like to draw your attention to several titles which have helped to shape my life and thinking.
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