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A review by rymdkejsaren
The Sheep Look Up by John Brunner
5.0
What an awestriking, nightmarish journey. The Sheep Look Up was written by John Brunner in 1972 with staggering prescience. By placing it in the near future (sometime in the 80ies), Brunner avoids the common pitfall of failing to predict household technologies that date the book terribly, but at the same time manages to describe a world that is in many other ways eerily similar to the world of 2020.
Others have painstakingly listed the similarities with the modern world (nearly 50 years after), so there's no need for me to take on that task. But I want to say that I believe part of what makes this so powerful is its raw, unapologetic portrayal of humanity, and how as a species we're our own worst enemy. For all our good qualities: our curiosity, inventiveness, resilience, and capacity for love – the biggest fight humanity faces is always against its own darker side: the egoism, tribalism, short-sightedness, and deeply rooted cognitive biases. By making this the root of the problem, Brunner cuts past the individual issues and creates a world that rings true with modern times because regardless of the factual accuracy and the changing technological and informational landscape, the core of the problem remains the same.
I admit, when I began reading this book I thought I there was no way I would get through it; its structure at first appeared to me fundamentally fractured and flawed. Individual tales from a variety of POV characters are interspersed with fragments of newspaper clippings, transcripts from TV and radio, and brief, omniscient scenes. But what first appears like a stuttering mess slowly melds into a powerful narrative which engulfs you whole, infects and infests you with its horrid vision of the future and its impact on individual people's lives, leaving you feverish and scared. Its phantasmagoric vision is presented in a nearly psychedelic format, where the parts that at first seem to be wholly dislocated soon add up in a way that creates inevitable and painful clarity.
I think the best way to summarise the power of this book is that I've given it the top 5 stars, but I'm not putting it on my recommended shelf.
Others have painstakingly listed the similarities with the modern world (nearly 50 years after), so there's no need for me to take on that task. But I want to say that I believe part of what makes this so powerful is its raw, unapologetic portrayal of humanity, and how as a species we're our own worst enemy. For all our good qualities: our curiosity, inventiveness, resilience, and capacity for love – the biggest fight humanity faces is always against its own darker side: the egoism, tribalism, short-sightedness, and deeply rooted cognitive biases. By making this the root of the problem, Brunner cuts past the individual issues and creates a world that rings true with modern times because regardless of the factual accuracy and the changing technological and informational landscape, the core of the problem remains the same.
I admit, when I began reading this book I thought I there was no way I would get through it; its structure at first appeared to me fundamentally fractured and flawed. Individual tales from a variety of POV characters are interspersed with fragments of newspaper clippings, transcripts from TV and radio, and brief, omniscient scenes. But what first appears like a stuttering mess slowly melds into a powerful narrative which engulfs you whole, infects and infests you with its horrid vision of the future and its impact on individual people's lives, leaving you feverish and scared. Its phantasmagoric vision is presented in a nearly psychedelic format, where the parts that at first seem to be wholly dislocated soon add up in a way that creates inevitable and painful clarity.
I think the best way to summarise the power of this book is that I've given it the top 5 stars, but I'm not putting it on my recommended shelf.