The Shockwave Rider
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4.4 • 15 Ratings
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- $7.99
Publisher Description
In a world drowning in data, a fugitive tries to outrun the forces that want to reprogram him, in this smart, edgy novel by a Hugo Award–winning author.
Constantly shifting his identity among a population choking on information, innovation, and novelty, Nickie Haflinger is a most dangerous outlaw, yet he doesn't even appear to exist. As global society falls apart in all directions, with corporate power run amok and personal freedom surrendered to computers and bureaucrats, Haflinger is caught and about to be re-programmed. Now he has to try to escape once again, defy the government—and turn the tide of organizational destruction, in this visionary science fiction novel by the author of The Sheep Look Up and Stand on Zanzibar.
"Brunner writes about the future as if he and the reader were already living in it." —The New York Times Book Review
"When John Brunner first told me of his intention to write the book, I was fascinated—but I wondered whether he, or anyone, could bring it off. Bring it off he has, with cool brilliance. A hero with transient personalities, animals with souls, think tanks and survival communities fuse to form a future so plausibly alive it as twitched at me ever since." —Alvin Toffler, author of Future Shock
"One of the most important science fiction authors. Brunner held a mirror up to reflect our foibles because he wanted to save us from ourselves." —SF Site
Customer Reviews
Lucidity without consolation
Reading John Brunner’s The Shockwave Rider is like staring into a mirror that reflects the decay of the future and the present simultaneously. He writes of a world where information has dissolved the last illusions of privacy, and yet humanity persists in its farce of control. The book is not a story so much as a slow erosion—a chronicle of systems devouring themselves, of individuals flung into the void of technological inevitability.
Brunner’s prose does not comfort; it whispers of the futility of resistance even as it sketches the possibility of escape. He invites us to imagine freedom, then reminds us it will likely be fleeting and absurd. In this, he achieves precisely what the modern condition demands: lucidity without consolation.
Four stars, not five, because perfection would require not merely a book, but an annihilation of hope more complete than literature can offer.