On the run in the networked society

This episode returns to the work of a writer featured frequently here: John Brunner. His prolific output, creative and commercial struggles, and untimely death at the Glasgow Worldcon in 1995 are contribute to him being a fascinating figure.

The Shockwave Rider is one of his few novels currently in print. Like his magnum opus Stand on Zanzibar, it is a part of the SF Masterworks series. Written in the mid-1970s, it is one of Brunner's ambitious "tract novels", an attempt to confront imaginatively the seismic shifts that he saw coming in the 21st century. In this particular case, Brunner imagined a world in many ways like our own: politically repressive, technologically advanced, and interconnected by omnipresent computing. But as we will see, Brunner's vision from 1975 is quite unlike our present reality.

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