The Jagged Orbit

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, it seemed to me that you could tell which "oh my god we're all going to die" best seller John Brunner had just read, because every year he cranked out another fictional adaptation of the previous year's coming-disaster best seller. This book is his take on the predictions (in the wake of the Martin Luther King assassination and resulting riots in the US) that rising crime and increasing racial tensions would lead to a breakdown of society, and a general war of all-against-all. Now, obviously that didn't happen, and the jargon used to describe racial issues seems awfully dated at this late a date, but the rest of this story is the fascinating part, and why it's still one of my favorites of his, and why so much of it now seems eerily prescient. The lead character mentioned above, Matthew Flamen, is a "spool pigeon." What they don't tell you above is that a "spool pidgeon" is a gossip columnist and political analyst who specializes in creating fake digital film footage of real news figures doing and saying what he thinks they said or did; even if the film couldn't possibly have been really shot, in his world he can't get sued if the event (or something substantially similar) actually happened. And if the network's computerized analysis of the news and other gossip sources says that the probability of his guess being right is at 90% or higher and he does get sued, they'll pay for it out of their lawsuit insurance. The charlatan state mental health director mentioned above? The big revalation about him is that he considers all of society to be insane in some way or other, and aspires to have the entire state of New York (and eventually the world) under psychiatric treatment and control. So for all that this book was written in 1969, and the main disaster predicted in the book didn't come true, it's still a book that has fascinating things to say about human society, and some of those things are more relevant now than they ever were.

Jagged Orbit would be a frightening book if it were written now; that it was written 30 years ago ays a lot for Brunner's exceptionalism. Like the sheep look up and stand on zanzibar, Brunner cuts to the heart of society, with a style all of his own. I love Brunner, and would recommend him to anyone who can read.