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A review by mastercabs
The Sheep Look Up by John Brunner
5.0
Holy. Crap.
It took me a long time to read this because it was on Kia's Kindle, and I just had trouble getting around to it, BUT... HOLY CRAP.
This was written in 1972?
I really thought that I was going to end up rating this as a four because there were certain parts of the story that I thought were a tad intellectually/writing-wise lazy, but it more than makes up for them with the dearth of characters and their different personalities, the colorful and hideous landscape of a poisoned future, and - above all - the terrifying reality that while our civilization isn't being killed off in exactly the same way that it is in this, the message still stands.
How can we say that we care about the planet when even the aid organizations are often out to make a profit? How can we talk about children when we're cooking the planet, poisoning the ocean, and turning out biosphere into a horror show that wouldn't support animals who have an instinct to live in the wild, let alone a bunch of office workers who wouldn't know nightshade from potatoes?
True, our biosphere isn't as polluted as this one, but there's still time: the book is set in, what, 2070?
Also, a word on Prexy: he is Trump. He was made to be a caricature, I feel, but he's fitting the bill too well for me to ignore... forty-five years before the man's presidency. Christ. I don't know whether to be inspired by the fact that someone could write something this simultaneously fascinating and frightening or disgusted by the fact that we've seen crap like this coming since the onset of the industrial revolution. We ignore the Rachel Carsons and the Paul Ehrlichs - or we don't and find that our efforts are largely meaningless in a system of entropy and greed - either way, the simple message is that unless something almost unimaginable happens, humanity is bound for an extinction level calamity.
I used to get into arguments a lot with a Communist friend of mine about the accuracy of Malthusian economics. They would always eventually boil down to his saying that we do not need to be governed by resource allocation if it is done sanely and equitably. The world can be bountiful for all. This resulted in my saying that infinite growth isn't possible in a finite system, but I realize now that that doesn't matter. The truth is that we either learn to limit ourselves to our resources or nature will do it for us. Whether or not its possible in a potential system that we can create is almost inconsequential. To wit, if my grandmother had balls, she'd be my grandfather.
We either accept what's going on and react to it as a society, or we keep believing that international terrorism and gay sex are the downfall of all civilization and allow our society to collapse under its own weight.
You can make the argument that Brunner and his ilk - Al Gore comes to mind - are wrong because their predictions have not come true yet, but the simple fact is that species die out on earth all of the time. Our days are certainly numbered, and the number is indubitably less than the Republican party would have you believe - if you buy everything else that they are selling these days.
It took me a long time to read this because it was on Kia's Kindle, and I just had trouble getting around to it, BUT... HOLY CRAP.
This was written in 1972?
I really thought that I was going to end up rating this as a four because there were certain parts of the story that I thought were a tad intellectually/writing-wise lazy, but it more than makes up for them with the dearth of characters and their different personalities, the colorful and hideous landscape of a poisoned future, and - above all - the terrifying reality that while our civilization isn't being killed off in exactly the same way that it is in this, the message still stands.
How can we say that we care about the planet when even the aid organizations are often out to make a profit? How can we talk about children when we're cooking the planet, poisoning the ocean, and turning out biosphere into a horror show that wouldn't support animals who have an instinct to live in the wild, let alone a bunch of office workers who wouldn't know nightshade from potatoes?
True, our biosphere isn't as polluted as this one, but there's still time: the book is set in, what, 2070?
Also, a word on Prexy: he is Trump. He was made to be a caricature, I feel, but he's fitting the bill too well for me to ignore... forty-five years before the man's presidency. Christ. I don't know whether to be inspired by the fact that someone could write something this simultaneously fascinating and frightening or disgusted by the fact that we've seen crap like this coming since the onset of the industrial revolution. We ignore the Rachel Carsons and the Paul Ehrlichs - or we don't and find that our efforts are largely meaningless in a system of entropy and greed - either way, the simple message is that unless something almost unimaginable happens, humanity is bound for an extinction level calamity.
I used to get into arguments a lot with a Communist friend of mine about the accuracy of Malthusian economics. They would always eventually boil down to his saying that we do not need to be governed by resource allocation if it is done sanely and equitably. The world can be bountiful for all. This resulted in my saying that infinite growth isn't possible in a finite system, but I realize now that that doesn't matter. The truth is that we either learn to limit ourselves to our resources or nature will do it for us. Whether or not its possible in a potential system that we can create is almost inconsequential. To wit, if my grandmother had balls, she'd be my grandfather.
We either accept what's going on and react to it as a society, or we keep believing that international terrorism and gay sex are the downfall of all civilization and allow our society to collapse under its own weight.
You can make the argument that Brunner and his ilk - Al Gore comes to mind - are wrong because their predictions have not come true yet, but the simple fact is that species die out on earth all of the time. Our days are certainly numbered, and the number is indubitably less than the Republican party would have you believe - if you buy everything else that they are selling these days.