ickie Haflinger has a unique talent: He's a phone phreak, someone who can manipulate the global data network using an ordinary veephone. And in a world where everything but the odd "paid-avoidance zone" is tied to the net, he's a dangerous man. More than one man, actually, since his ability -- combined with a pilfered high-level government code -- allows him to change identities at will.
But Nickie's talent is more curse than blessing. As a child it caught the attention of a government desperately seeking to win the "brain race" when the arms race became a dead issue. So Nickie was recruited to the Tarnover Institute, a seeming ideal school for gifted youths like himself. But Nickie found out that the government was lavishing $3 million per year on his education so it could turn him into another drone that would take its place in the IQ army of the future, no questions asked.
So Nickie stole the code, and ever since he's been on the run. His identities have included a utopia designer, a lifestyle counselor, a Delphi gambler, a computer sabotage consultant, a systems rationalizer and a priest. With each change he has tried to find a way to thwart the government's abuse of global information, and to find a cure for a society that has been tearing itself apart under the strains of information overload.
After many letdowns Nickie finally finds what he is looking for, including the dormant ability within himself to love and trust again. Everything is going fine, until he gets caught...
The future, both real and imagined
If The Shockwave Rider had been published a decade after its 1975 copyright date, there is no doubt it would have been lumped into that shifting, slippery, semi-solid body of work now called cyberpunk. But since it appeared in a time before the term "cyberpunk" had been coined, this novel was merely seen as a one-off about a future subsumed by data, corporations and the government. While it was not a commercial success, it did receive some critical note and it also became an underground hit in the high-tech community then evolving around computers.
Historical Note: In the 1980s, researchers at Xerox PARC dubbed the first self-replicating, self-propagating computer program a "worm" after the "tapeworms" Nickie uses to erase his previous identities.
But while The Shockwave Rider missed cashing in on the cyberpunk cachet, it nevertheless remains an important work. Brunner's hard-luck, gritty street-kid-cum-data-jockey foreshadowed the dozens of such anti-heroes that would appear in the 1980s. And his portrayal of a society enmeshed in data overload could, as the saying goes, be taken out of today's headlines. More than that, The Shockwave Rider is also a good tale, artfully told. Although it's slow (and perhaps a bit confusing) to start, the book quickly hits its pace and continues marching unrelentingly until the end, drawing readers along with it.
By the end of the book readers will have a keen sense of, if not the future at least a future, and what the role of both humanity as a whole and the individual as a piece might be in that future. It's a story as enjoyable and profound today as it was 22 years ago, and it's absolutely a must read for cyberpunk aficionados.
