The IBIC Guide to Books By John Brunner

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Remarks from the IBIC Editor's Journal

January 7, 1996

Regular readers will recall that I mourned the death of noted SF author John Brunner last fall. I went out and bought a copy of one of his better-known works, THE JAGGED ORBIT, which I'd never read, and read it in memoriam. It was worth it. This novel has aged better than most. Brunner's treatment of the themes of escalating violence and insanity in contemporary society is, if anything, more compelling and believable in 1996 than in 1969. A very honest and frightening book.


Letter from the Editor

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...


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Editor's Recommendations, Summer 1996

In 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.

  • When I was around fifteen, I came across Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle's science fiction novel, INFERNO. This '70s remake of Dante's classic describes science fiction writer Allen Carpentier's descent into Hell. It's still a very fresh, accessible take on the classic. What a great movie it would make!
  • The Niven/Pournelle INFERNO immediately inspired me to read the original Divine Comedy. I've read a number of translations over the years, but my favorite is the one by Dorothy Sayers (INFERNO; PURGATORY; PARADISE). The notes are excellent, and Sayers had such a knowledgeable and witty mind that reading her prose is a pleasure in itself. (For those interested in a more contemporary translation, I should mention that Robert Pinsky received excellent notices for his 1995 THE INFERNO OF DANTE : A NEW VERSE TRANSLATION; it's a very handsome book.)
  • I also want to tell you about the late Henry Fairlie's THE SEVEN DEADLY SINS TODAY, which probably did more than any other single book to galvanize me into a lifetime interest in Christianity that led me, eventually, to faith. Ironic, because Fairlie was a self-proclaimed agnostic socialist! But reading between the lines of this insightful and deeply feeling book, one realizes that the love of God cannot have been far from Fairlie's heart.
  • Finally, I should draw to your attention a more recent acquisition, the very handsome NIV STUDY BIBLE (10TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION) from Zondervan, indexed and bonded in leather in IBIC's theme color, burgundy (black and brown are also available). The notes to this Bible are amazing. They appear to provide you with a very substantial portion of what you need to know to have an intelligent layman's appreciation of the linguistic and historical issues involved in understanding Scripture.

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