Bug Jack Barron

This is not a book to read as if it is still new. This is a book to understand as an alternate history that begins at a point in what is now our past. It is, simply, amazing, and has held up incredibly well. In today's age of Enron and Halliburton, Bug Jack Barron should be in everyone's collection, and more importantly, in the backs of our minds.... WWJD, baby? What would Jack Do?

What a fun book. Norman Spinrad certainly has a vibrant mind. I don't much like subversives in real life but the main character in this book is a hoot! Now I have to figure out what else Spinrad has written so I can see if there's something even better. Get it, read it, enjoy.

Norman Spinrad is one of those authors who never "broke out" but not because of the quality of his work. I would rank him with Ellison and Dick for quality. In short, he should be one of the greats.His imagination is so rich that you will spend as much, or more, time thinking about what you are reading as actually reading his work. This book is a tremendous example of his gift. Spinrad understands the direction our purient privacy denying society twenty years before we arrived in our current sorry state.If anything, reading this book you often forget when he was writing because the society he describes is seemingly so famil

If you've got a problem, bug Jack Barron, the television personality with one-hundred million viewers. If you've got $50,000.00 in liquid assets, contact the Foundation of Immortality and Benedict Howards will have you frozen until technology can bring you round and cure your ailment - forever. So a Negro without his assets in a suitably liquid state bugs Jack Barron, about how he's been refused a place in the Foundation of Immortality's freezers; that he's being racially prejudiced. This claim is refuted, and in order to win Jack Barron's allegiance Benedict Howards offers Jack Barron the chance of immortality - for real - forever. And whilst Jack Barron is sorely tempted to play along, their comes a point beyond which even he won't cross...Only the slang and political references in this book would be a problem to today's younger readers. Apart from that, the ideas are all still fresh and, for the most part, fully realised in today's television culture. This book is consistent with the quality of writing in Norman Spinrad's `No Direction Home', and which I would like to see more of.

Spinrad kicks the media, politicians and corporations where it hurts, and leaves the reader laughing until it hurts. Apparently denounced as depraved on the floor of parliament, beneath the toungue in cheek it's a disturbing discourse on the corrupting nature of money and power, in a world where your bank balance decides whether you will be granted life eternal. Comment on the power of media is prescient, with the title character's eponymous TV talk show's grip on the masses the only thing in the way of the nefarious plans of a mad, necrophobic billionare who throws gobs of money at private research into cryogenics and immortality, and is willing to go to any lengths to get his sinister 'freezer bill' through congress, and avert 'a million years of worm eaten nothingness'. The title character is so laid back he's teetering, aided by Spinrad's ear for slick dialogue. His wonderful pre-emptive speech in the presence of political heavies about cutting to the chase through the standard smoke-filled room rhetoric and double talk schtick is side splitting. The 'near-future' setting is somewhat dated but this matters little against the searing satire and shamelessly wicked characters. The ending was a little abrubt and unsatisfying, but this is a minor quibble against an SF classic.