ollowing the massive successes of Stand on Zanzibar (1968) and The Jagged Orbit (1969), and foreshadowing 1975's The Shockwave Rider, the novel under discussion rounds out the quartet of books that posthumously represent this prolific and multitalented British author at the peak of his powers. As he said once, "In [these four books], I've done my best to put on the page everything I as an individual could garner and combine into a credible narrative, concerning that tomorrow we are doomed to endure."
While not as experimentally configured as Zanzibar, Sheep still utilizes a "multimedia" approach to its story, breaking up the narrative into a dozen major perspectives and interspersing transcripts, news reports, advertisements and coverage by a kind of omniscient roving camera eye.
It's the day after tomorrow, and the globe is dying. Environmental decay and chaos are everywhere, from water shortages to foul air to April snow in Paris. Mass die-offs due to starvation are underway in the Third World. Diseases new and old are afflicting the First World as well. Practically every person is suffering from one plague or another, in sequence or multiply, and the medical establishment is hard-pressed to keep up. Nonetheless, people are still trying to get by with their normal lives, and we meet them one by one.
There's Philip Mason, executive for an insurance company, based in Denver with his wife Denise and two kids. Philip seems privileged, on top of the world, until various disasters threaten to bankrupt the company he works for. He's let go and must hustle as a water-filter salesman. Also in Denver, where much of the action takes place, is Pete Goddard, with his wife Jeannie. Both are African-American and striving to make it on Pete's salary as a cop. Likewise based in Denver is the Bamberly clan, headed by Jacob. A millionaire many times over, Jacob Bamberley is the maker of Nutripon, a cassava-derived synthetic foodstuff that was meant to be the salvation of the world but that has accidentally become contaminated and caused hundreds of deaths.
Reporter Peg Mankiewicz is a muckraker who eventually becomes involved in the Nutripon scandal. But more crucially, she's the friend of the man at the heart of this story: Austin Train. A scientist by education, Train has become a larger-than-life public figure because of his books cataloguing the abuse of the planet and calling for massive changes. Train is currently underground, having abdicated his position in despair. But hundreds of thousands of "Trainites" around the United States still embrace his vision and ideals. Often, however, this results in violence and sabotage.
In addition to these folks, we encounter such others as Lucy Ramage, a relief worker who becomes radicalized due to the Nutripon scandal. Major Michael Advowson, an Irish observer sent to the United States by the U.N. Hugh Pettingill, adopted son of Jacob Bamberly, who will go on to become a radical who kidnaps his own cousin. Page Petronella, the Oprah of her day. And Doug McNeill, a civilian doctor striving to keep his patients alive. As we witness a single year during which events pass from bad to worse, the lives of these people and others will intersect in complicated fashions.
An angry despair unique to SF
I read this book—a product of the indignant, visionary, polemical High '60s (1963-1975)—upon its release, and it had a deep effect on me, presenting a devastating portrait of the way humanity had screwed up its nest. Also, its bleakness was unrelieved, in contrast to much optimistic SF of the period and after. The most noble plans of the best-intentioned characters all come to naught, and major fictional figures die ingloriously left and right. Maybe this startling impact was why I never returned to this book till now, when I was curious as to how it would hold up in the light of our current situation: global warming, avian flu pandemics, mad cow disease, runaway GM crops, killer hurricanes, etc., etc.
Well, I should have relied on Brunner's genius for my answer, because this book still kicks as much head-in-the-sand, SUV-driving, slavishly consuming Joe Sixpack butt as it ever did. Its power and message and passion are undiminished, even if a few of the concerns it addresses are no longer relevant, or at least slightly less pressing. (The air and rivers of the United States are incontestably cleaner than they once were or threatened to become.) This book remains a plank upside the head to complacency and ignorance. (And raises the question why no one writes like this anymore these days.)
Brunner's brilliance manifests in several ways. First off is his refusal to classify anyone as wholly bad or good. All his characters exhibit a range of behaviors and motivations that span the ethical spectrum. Even his saintly Austin Train has done wrong by abdicating his responsibility. And even the self-serving Jacob Bamberley has a smidgen of sincere altruism. Also hard-hitting is Brunner's unrelenting depiction of the way illness informs the society and people's individual lives, how an outbreak of mere diarrhea can nearly bring our intricate technological society to its knees.
But Brunner's real coup is in setting this book so close to his present. No date is ever specifically given for the action, but there are clues to the era nonetheless. Someone mentions that the '80s are just around the corner. The president of the U.S. (a clown nicknamed Prexy who pontificates in nonsensical sound bites like an augury of Reagan or Bush) claims to have been elected in the third century of the nation (i.e., post-1976). By anchoring his tale to the decade in which it was composed, Brunner creates a kind of mordant, utterly believable social satire akin to the work of the New Journalists, prefiguring the novels of Tom Wolfe and Kurt Anderson. Some of this, I believe, is attributable to Brunner's fondness for Philip K. Dick's novels. There are moments of Phildickian absurdity and stream-of-consciousness insight into the average citizen throughout this book.
While hardly as celebrated as Orwell's 1984 (1949), this book, I believe, functioned in much the same way as Orwell's classic: helping—thus far—to prevent the very calamity it so cleverly, angrily and powerfully thrust under our noses.
