I didn't like this book at all. It is a utopian sermon stuck in the middle of a body-horror captivity narrative with a clunky good-triumphs-over-evil sledgehammer at the end. If you had to suffer through the likes of Rousseau's Emile1 or the other guy's Candide in school and found them arrogant, preachy, and divorced from reality, The Shockwave Rider is not for you.
The story begins with an unconscious man in a cell having his memories laid bare for the surveillance of government officers. We experience the man's life as a series of flashbacks along side the interrogators. Occasionally, the interrogators must bring the man back to consciousness lest his personality fragment or some such nonsense.
While the man is awake, he engages in a heady philosophical debate with his captors about the nature of government and society, in which both of them are far too certain of their own opinions--especially given the current dismal state of things. You get the sense that that author is a little high on his own stash.2
As much as Brunner may have sucked at telling us about his utopia, his predictions of the dystopia are accurate to an unfortunate degree.
One of his genius speculations is the idea that the government constantly runs nation-wide prediction markets where citizens bet on likely outcomes of a wide assortment of questions (and the government carefully designs the questions and subtly tweaks the outcomes to exert a maximum of control over their populace).
There, top-rank analysts constantly monitored the national Delphi pools to maintain a high scoial-mollification index. Three times since 1990 agitators had nearly brought about a bloody revolution, but each had been aborted. What the public currently yearned for could be deduced by watching the betting, and steps could be taken to ensure that what was feasible was done, what was not was carefully deeveed.
And every once in a while, Brunner makes an observation so on point, it stops you in your tracks:
But you’re in government. Your continuance in power has always depended on the ultimate sanction: ‘if you don’t obey we’ll kill you.’
He pegs economists as people "wearing a sewn-on badge in bright green and white saying underpower!--one of the people who on principle declined to use up their full power allotment and did their utmost to prevent others from using theirs." Which, honestly, is a pretty accurate description of the field these days.
He even captures a sensation I have about Bitcoin but have never been able to put in words before:
“You know, I always wondered what democracy might smell like. Finally, I detect it in the air.” “Curious that it should arrive in the form of electronic government,” Sweetwater murmured.
The idea that a better society should arrive in the form of electronic money is very curious indeed.
All the same, if you're thinking of reading a cyberpunk classic, I would skip this one.
Footnotes
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If you have never been cursed with opening the pages of this particular wordy woe, consider yourself lucky. It basically says--in the most boring and philosophical manner--that the best way to raise children is to have an open marriage, ↩
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I am deeply suspicious of writers who spend a lot of time telling us how a theoretical world might work but can't even summon the energy to write an actually engaging story that puts me in that world. The only believable parts of Brunner's world are the dystopian elements. ↩