John Brunner

First you use machines, then you wear machines, and then ...? Then you serve machines.
HIPCRIME   You committed one when you opened this book. Keep it up. It's our only hope.

John Kilian Houston Brunner (September 24, 1934 – August 26, 1995) was a science fiction author. His work in the new wave sub-genre is highly acclaimed and influential. His earlier (prolific, often pseudonymous) space operas are generally considered unremarkable.

Sourced

Stand on Zanzibar (1968)

I know people who can't even learn from what happened this morning. Hegel must have been taking the long view.
Faust felt like this. The stars move still, time runs, the clock will strike, the devil will come and Faustus must be damned ...
We're aware of the scale of the planet, so we don't accept that our own circumscribed horizons constitute reality. Much more real is what's relayed to us by the TV.
You have many years to live — do things you will be proud to remember when you're old.
Christ, what an imagination I've got.
Now we're going to have the brain race. And, if we're lucky, the final stage will be the human race.
Winner of the Hugo Award for best novel of the year. Quotations from the "SF Masterworks" edition: Orion Publishing, London (1999) ISBN 1-85798-836-1
  • SCANALYZER is the one single, the ONLY study of the news in depth that’s processed by General Technics’ famed computer Shalmaneser, who sees all, hears all, knows all save only that which YOU, Mr. and Mrs. Everywhere, wish to keep to yourselves.
    • context (1) “Scanalyze My Name“
  • HIPCRIME   You committed one when you opened this book. Keep it up. It's our only hope.
— The Hipcrime Vocab by Chad C. Mulligan
  • the happening world (1) “Read the Directions“
  • Like living creatures, automobiles expired when their environment became saturated with their own excreta. We ourselves are living creatures. We don't want the same to happen to us.
    • context (2) "Editorial Slot"
  • Nothing short of religion could persuade a normal girl to make herself look so awful.
    • tracking with closeups (2) “Yonderboy”
  • COINCIDENCE   You weren’t paying attention to the other half of what was going on.
    • context (3) “You Have to Push Him Over”
  • “I haven’t changed my mind, if that’s what you’re getting at,” he said at length. The stench and crackle of burning boats was vivid to him.
    • continuity (3) “After One Decade”
  • “What are you going to do for a career?”
    Diverted from his orbit, Donald binked. “Well, something which uses up a minimum of my time, I imagine. So I can use the rest to mortar up the gaps in my education.”
    • continuity (3) “After One Decade”
  • You don’t have to know everything. You simply need to know where to find it when necessary.
    • continuity (3) “After One Decade”
  • “Ah, go to hell!”
    “That’s a remarkably Christian attitude, Donald. Both meaningless and barbaric.”
    • the happening world (3) “Domestica”
  • Who should know better than a cosmetician that human beings are less than rational creatures?
    • tracking with closeups (4) “Masker Aid”
  • Rather painfully, we managed to digest Darwinian evolution so far as physical attributes were concerned within half a century of the initial controversy. (I say “we,” but if you’re a Bible-thumping fundamentalist I expect you at this point to take the book by one corner at arm’s length and ceremonially consign it to the place where you put most sensible ideas, along with everything else you decline to acknowledge the existence of, such as mainly shit.)
    • context (5) “The Grand Manor”
  • NEGRO   Member of a subgroup of the human race who hails, or whose ancestors hailed, from a chunk of land nicknamed—not by its residents—Africa. Superior to the Caucasian in that negroes did not invent nuclear weapons, the automobile, Christianity, nerve gas, the concentration camp, military epidemics, or the megalopolis.
    • context (6) “One Comes Out Where...”
  • I love the place, and when they get love down to a bunch of factors you can analyse with a computer there’ll be nothing left of whatever makes it worth being human!
    • tracking with closeups (6) “Which Side Am I On?”
  • We’ve always cared more about property rights than human rights in this country. You should know that.
    • continuity (6) “Auction Block for Me”
  • In short order they fell into the same pit as their rivals, who had for decades ignored the plain and simple fact that to a starving man “freedom” implies a full rice-bowl—or, if he has an exceptional imagination, a healthy ox to pull his plough. It has nothing to do with voting for a political delegate.
    • context (8) “Isolation”
  • How do you whip up resentment against absentee landlords and pocketers of bribes when the highest ambition of the people is either to become the former or be in a position to receive the latter?
    • context (8) “Isolation”
  • There’s one bright spot in the generally gloomy picture know as the Pacific Conflict Zone. According to my calculations, by the year 2500 or so we should have killed off every last member of our species who is stupid enough to take part in so futile a pastime as this war between “ideals,” and with luck they won’t have left their genes behind because they’ll typically have been killed at an age when society thinks they’re too young to assume the responsibility of childbearing. After that we may get some peace and quiet for a change.
    • context (8) “Isolation”
  • I can't see heaven but I credit hell —
    I live in New York so I know it well.
    When they shut out heaven with the Fuller Dome
    God gave it up and He went home.
    • the happening world (6) "Street Seen"
  • They’d have me out and shoot me the first day they took charge. Anyone like me is intolerably subversive to an authoritarian régime, because I’m not interested in imposing my ideas by force on other people.
    • tracking with closeups (8) “Ill Wind”
  • Papa Hegel he say that all we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history. I know people who can't even learn from what happened this morning. Hegel must have been taking the long view.
    • context (9) "Guncrit"
  • “I don’t believe in God,” said the captain. “I wouldn’t care to believe in anyone who could make such a stinking lousy species as the one you belong to.”
    • continuity (10) “Due Process”
  • In an individual one would regard it as evidence of insanity to see someone repeatedly undertaking enterprises that resulted in his losing precisely what he claimed he was trying to achieve; it is not less lunatic to do it on the international scale, but if you’ve been catching the news lately you’ll have noticed it’s being done more than ever.
    • context (11) “Come Outside and Say That”
  • “How does it feel to have just changed the course of history?”
    “I don’t know what you mean,” said the navigator. “To my way of thinking, by the time history happens I’m going to be dead.”
    • tracking with closeups (11) “The Sealed Train”
  • If you want to know what's shortly due for the guillotine look for the most obvious of all symptoms: extremism. It is an almost infallible sign — a kind of death-rattle — when a human institution is forced by its members into stressing those and only those factors which are identificatory, at the expense of others which it necessarily shares with competing institutions because human beings belong to all of them.
    • context (12) "The Sociological Counterpart of Cheyne-Stokes Respiration"
  • Faust felt like this. The stars move still, time runs, the clock will strike, the devil will come and Faustus must be damned ... How long did he buy with the currency of his soul — ten years?
    • continuity (12) "It's Supposed To Be Automatic But Actually You Have To Press This Button"
  • I don’t hate her personally, though if she were enough of a person to be worth such a strong emotion I think I easily could. What I hate is what she represents: the willingness of human beings to be reduced to a slick visual package, like a new television set—up-to-the-minute casing, same old works.
    • the happening world (8) “Be Kind To Your Forfeited Friends”
  • So not only the world, but he himself, was different from what he had imagined.
    • continuity (13) “Multiply by a Million”
  • “I think,” Chad grunted, “that if he [Shalmaneser, the computer] really is intelligent nobody will recognise the fact. Because we aren’t.”
    • continuity (13) “Multiply by a Million”
  • “The whole of modern so-called civilised existence is an attempt to deny reality insofar as it exists. When did Don last look at the stars, when did Norman last get soaked in a rainstorm? The stars as far as these people are concerned are the Manhattan-pattern!” He jerked his thumb at a window beyond which the city’s treasure-house of coloured light glimmered gaudily.
    • continuity (13) “Multiply by a Million”
  • Any society which gives lip-service to the idea of equal opportunity is going to generate jealousy of others who are better off than you are, even if the thing that’s in short supply can’t be carved up and shared without destroying it.
    • continuity (13) “Multiply by a Million”
  • I can make a guess. There’s going to be trouble. Come to think of it, that’s a safe catch-all prophecy. Whatever happens in present circumstances there’s going to be trouble.
    • continuity (13) “Multiply by a Million”
  • First you use machines, then you wear machines, and then ...? Then you serve machines.
    • continuity (14) "The Right Man For The Job"
  • LEADERSHIP   A form of self-preservation exhibited by people with autodestructive imaginations in order to ensure that when it comes to the crunch it’ll be someone else’s bones which go crack and not their own.
    • context (14) “Storm Centre”
  • Watching their sets in a kind of trance
    were people in Mexico, people in France.
    They don't chase Jones but the dreams are the same —
    Mr. and Mrs. Everywhere, that's the right name!
    Herr und Frau Uberall or les Partout,
    A gadget on the set makes them look like you.

    When the Everywhere couple crack a joke
    It's laughed at by all right-thinking folk.
    When the Everywhere couple adopt a pose
    It's the with-it view as everyone knows.
    It may be a rumor or it may be true
    But a gadget on the set has it said by you!

    "What do you think about Yatakang?"
    "I think the same as the Everywhere gang."
    "What do you think of Beninia then?"
    "The Everywheres will tell me but I don't know when."
    Whatever my country and whatever my name
    A gadget on the set makes me think the same.

    • context (16) "Mr. & Mrs. Everywhere: Calypso (stanzas 2, 5, and 7)
  • We’re aware of the scale of the planet, so we don’t accept that our own circumscribed horizons constitute reality. Much more real is what’s relayed to us by the TV.
    • continuity (17) "Timescales"
  • "They surely are condemned to Hell
    Who rule their lives by greed and lust
    And Satan waits for those as well
    Who in machines repose their trust."
    • tracking with closeups (17) "Brighter Than A Thousand Men"
  • SHALMANESER   That real cool piece of hardware up at the GT tower. They say he's apt to evolve to true consciousness one day. Also they say he's as intelligent as a thousand of us put together, which isn't really saying much, because when you put a thousand of us together look how stupidly we behave.
    • tracking with closeups (17) "Brighter Than A Thousand Men"
  • “Governments don’t change things,” she said. “Only time does that.”
    • continuity (24) “This Scene Not Shifted”
  • But there isn’t an outside. Talking about “society’s outcasts” or “opting out” is so much whaledreck. The fact that we generate huge quantities of waste is all that allows people to go outside; they’re benefiting from the superficial affluence which conformists use to alleviate boredom. In essence, using the term “out” is as meaningless as trying to define a location outside the universe. There’s no place for “outside” to be.
    • context (21) “Letter”
  • UNFAIR   Term applied to advantages enjoyed by other people which we tried to cheat them out of and didn’t manage.
    • the happening world (12) “The General Feeling”
  • You have many years to live—do things you will be proud to remember when you're old.
    • continuity (27) "Manscape"
  • “It would have been a longer and slower job, I’m sure, and probably there would have been a high price to pay. But what is the price of freedom?”
    “What’s the price of life?” Donald countered bitterly.
    • continuity (37) “Storage”
  • Your country, mine, every other country in the world, has the same cause and what it does is, it takes people who don’t give a pint of whaledreck for it and sends them off to kill women and children. Yes, it’s the cause of every country on earth! And you know what I call that cause? I call it naked stinking greed.
    • continuity (37) “Storage”
  • “I can at least comfort myself with the idea that whatever I’ve done I’ve helped to nail a lie, and I’m coming to think that lying is among the worst of all human failings. Next to actual killing. And experience has made us almost equally good at both of them.”
    “I have killed many people and seen many more killed on my orders,” Jogajong said. “It is what must be paid to buy what we want.”
    “What we’ve been told we want, by liars more skilled than ourselves.”
    • continuity (37) “Storage”
  • I just haven’t been conditioned into thinking that the right answer can’t be a simple one. When I told you you’d been contaminated I meant by that attitude, which is wider-spread than the common cold and just as undermining. Did nobody ever point out to you that the only liberty implied by free will is the opportunity to be wrong?
    • continuity (38) “Not For Sale But Can Be Had On Application”
  • If the evidence says you’re wrong, you don’t have the right theory. You change the theory, not the evidence.
    • continuity (38) “Not For Sale But Can Be Had On Application”
  • LOGIC   The principle governing human intellection. Its nature may be deduced from examining the following propositions, both of which are held by human beings to be true and often by the same people: “I can’t so you musn’t,” and “I can but you musn’t.”
    • the happening world (15) “Equal and Opposite”
  • He had decided it was better to be a volcano than a man; at least one set no store by what one’s acts destroyed.
    • continuity (39) “Better To Be a Volcano”
  • I never thought of asking anyone to do it for me. Something’s wrong with me. In a time of trouble should people not be able to ask help without feeling demeaned?
    • tracking with closeups (31) “Unto Us a Child”
  • Isn’t it typical? We train one man—one ordinary, inoffensive, retiring little man—to be an efficient killing machine and he kills the one person who stood a chance of saving us from ourselves!
    • continuity (42) “And Say Which Seed Will Grow“
  • What in God’s name is it worth to be human, if we have to be saved from ourselves by a machine?
    • continuity (42) “And Say Which Seed Will Grow“
  • Bathed in his currents of liquid helium, self-contained, immobile, vastly well informed by every mechanical sense: Shalmaneser.
    Every now and again there passes through his circuits a pulse which carries the cybernetic equivalent of the phrase, “Christ, what an imagination I’ve got.“
    • tracking with closeups (32) “The Cool and Detached View“

The Shockwave Rider (1975)

If there is such a phenomenon as absolute evil, it consists in treating another human being as a thing.
This novel anticipated and influenced the Cyberpunk genre, and coined the term computer worm. Quotations from the first paperback edition: Ballantine/Del Rey, New York, (1976) ISBN 0-345-27472-5
  • First we had the legs race. Then we had the arms race. Now we're going to have the brain race. And, if we're lucky, the final stage will be the human race.
    • Bk. 1, Ch. "The Number You Have Reached"
  • It's not because my mind is made up that I don't want you to confuse me with any more facts. It's because my mind isn't made up. I already have more facts than I can cope with.
    • Bk. 1, Ch. "Paradox, Next Stop After the Boondocks
  • "But I was never put on trial, never convicted!"
    "You are not entitled to a trial."
    "Anybody's entitled to a trial, damn you!"
    "That is absolutely true. But you see you are not anybody. You are nobody.
    • Bk. 1, Ch. "The Conviction of His Courage" (His record having been erased from government computers.)
  • The theory was and always had been: this is the thing the solid citizen has no need to worry about. Important, later all-important question: what about the hollow citizen?
    • Bk. 2, Ch. "In the Beginning Was the Herd"
  • One might as well claim that the tide which rubs pebbles smooth on a beach is doing the pebbles a service because being round is prettier than being jagged. It's of no concern to a pebble what shape it is. But it's very important to a person.
    • Bk. 2, Ch. "Let's All Be Different Same As Me"
  • If there is such a phenomenon as absolute evil, it consists in treating another human being as a thing.
    • Bk. 3, Ch. "Like They Say, It's Bounce Or Break"
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Last modified on 12 March 2012, at 01:30