15 Jul, 2025
Shockwave Reader
John Brunner’s 1991 A Maze of Stars is a stand-alone science fiction novel.
Ship planted human colonies on six hundred worlds chosen from the six hundred thousand systems of the Arm of Stars1. Ship monitors each colony’s progress… as best it can, given the peculiar restrictions that define Ship’s course up and down the Arm.
8 Jul, 2025
Shockwave Reader
John Brunner’s 1965 The Squares of the City is a stand-alone Ruritanian thriller.
Under Vados’ benign dictatorship, the once-backwater South American nation of Aguazul thrives. Ciudad de Vados is an exemplar of Vados’ vision, a useless wasteland transformed into a peerless modern city.
Ciudad de Vados has one unsolved challenge. Traffic analyst Boyd Hakluyt is hired to help resolve it.
10 Jun, 2025
Shockwave Reader
John Brunner’s 1973 From This Day Forward is a collection of science fiction stories. Interior art is by Jack Gaughan.
The first thing1 I noticed about this slender, 176-page collection is…
31 Dec, 2024
Shockwave Reader
John Brunner’s 2013 The Man Who Was Secrett and Other Stories is a collection of short stories, most of which feature Mr. Secrett, librarian for Royal Society for Applied Linguistics. Except as otherwise noted, all contents are by John Brunner.
26 Nov, 2024
Shockwave Reader
John Brunner’s 1993 Muddle Earth is a stand-alone science fiction story. It is also, as far as I can tell, Brunner’s final novel, not counting posthumous collaborations. Various factors conspired against Brunner — actually, that describes his whole career — and his productivity towards the end of his life was affected.
Duckman’s Dumper is the unlikely name of the faster-than-light drive that gave humanity the stars. Other civilizations had FTL drives, but none as inexpensive as the Duckman’s Dumper. Earth licenses the Dumper and the licensing fees have allowed all of the better sort of people to leave Earth for better planets. This has left Earth with humanity’s dregs.
There was a further complication, one that had personal implications for one Rinpoche Gibbs.
29 Oct, 2024
Shockwave Reader
1970’s Good Men Do Nothing is the second volume of John Brunner’s Max Curfew thriller series.
Jamaican-born ex-Soviet agent Max Curfew vacations in Italy. By chance, his route takes him through the town of Giambattista de Belvedere on the day of a religious festival. Curfew plays tourist while the festival is ongoing.
This decision dooms poor unfortunate Maria Salvadore, who greets Curfew by spitting at him.
24 Sep, 2024
Shockwave Reader
John Brunner’s 1988 Days of March is a stand-alone mainstream novel.
There are many goals that Micky Daws would like to accomplish in 1962. However, to accomplish them Micky needs not to get incinerated in a nuclear exchange. Thus, Micky’s dedication to Liberty, an organization campaigning for nuclear disarmament.
27 Aug, 2024
Shockwave Reader
John Brunner’s 1987 The Shift Key is a stand-alone novel.
Usually, I start out by telling readers the genre, but in this case revealing the genre would be a bit of a spoiler. Read on!
Weyharrow Goodsir’s name is the oddest aspect of an otherwise unremarkable British village. Weyharrow has no crime-solving spinsters, no outbreaks of murder, not even the occasional alien mass-impregnation events so common elsewhere in the UK. Such crises that Weyharrow experiences are interpersonal, unremarkable, and entirely conventional.
Until the day the town goes mad.
30 Jul, 2024
Shockwave Reader
John Brunner’s 1983 The Great Steamboat Race is a stand-alone historical novel.
Despite the advanced technology and skilled pilots of the 1870s, the Mississippi was still an often-dangerous river on which to operate steamboats. Prudent men would not exacerbate the hazards with dubious endeavors such as races.
Prudence is a virtue more lauded than practiced. Which brings us to the matter of the steamboats Atchafalaya and Nonpareil.
25 Jun, 2024
Shockwave Reader
John Brunner’s 1984 The Tides of Time is a stand-alone science fiction novel.
Travelers Gene and Stacy make port and set up camp in a cave on a backwater Greek island. They will be there for some time… centuries, by some measurements.