#147 Armed to the teeth: The Jagged Orbit (1969) by John Brunner

A plea for human connection in a computerised world

The reputation of John Brunner rests largely on his four "tract novels" published between 1968 and 1975. Complex and imposing, they are fictional explorations of issues and crises facing society in the latter part of the 20th century.

Originally published in 1969, The Jagged Orbit is the second of these novels and Brunner's follow-up to Stand on Zanzibar - the first British novel to win the Hugo Award. In a declining United States in 2014, racial animosity is stoked and exploited to sell military weapons to anyone who can afford to buy.

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Transcript

 John Brunner's novel The Jagged Orbit it is 2014 and the United States is in decline. The federal government oversees a patchwork of segregated city-states. White people and people of colour live in mutual suspicion, stoked in part by a powerful weapons manufacturer which floods cities with high-end firepower. Computer “desketaries” and omnipresent mass media put information in easy reach, but people live behind armoured doors, frightened to go outside.

The second of Brunner's four tract novels speculating about the issues awaiting in the 21st century, The Jagged Orbit is a caution against over-reliance on technology, a warning about the concentration of power in the hands of the wealthy, and a plea for genuine human connection. Still relevant today, it vindicates Brunner's boldly predictive approach and underlines the importance of this under-recognised writer.

John Brunner and his tract novels

John Brunner (1934 - 1995) was a prolific British science fiction writer. He built his career writing fast-paced, pulpy novels for Ace Books in the early 1960s, but his reputation rests on his later, more ambitious work. Between 1968 and 1975 he published four landmark novels which confronted and extrapolated some of the emerging shifts of the late 20th century. 

Using deep research and experimental techniques, Brunner explored overpopulation, computerisation, pollution, urban unrest, racism, and economic change. The first of these novels, Stand on Zanzibar (1968), made Brunner the first ever British winner of the Hugo Award for Best Novel.

City of fear

The Jagged Orbit is a continuation of Brunner’s award-winning approach on Stand on Zanzibar. It retains the multiple viewpoints, inserted documents, and structural trickery of its predecessor  but is a more compact and in some ways more focused piece of work.

Like much of Stand on Zanzibar, The Jagged Orbit is set in New York City. The “Big Apple” has become a city of fear, primed for an ugly war of all against all. Citizens buy military-grade weapons from their local representative of the Gottschalk arms combine, lock themselves into the fortress-like apartments, and numb their minds with infomercials broadcast onto their “vusets”. Brunner’s typically kaleidoscopic plot follows several individuals with distinct roles in this warped society. 

Matthew Flamen is a “spoolpigeon”, a semi-independent investigative journalist who likes to think he operates in the public interest. Lyla Clay is a young “pythoness” who earns money by entering drug-induced trances and making unconscious, cryptic predictions. James Reedeth is a doctor at a massive mental institution, run by the reclusive Elias Mogshack, who wants everyone in New York, if not everyone in the United States, exposed to his unique methods.

When a notorious white supremacist is allowed entry into the US, he sparks deadly riots which play into the hands of the Gottschalks. The merchants of death have still other plots in motion, one involving one of Reedeth’s patients, who has an uncanny facility with computers. The city of fear is primed to explode.

It couldn’t happen here

Brunner prided himself on his attention to and connection with the United States. As with some other British writers - like Bob Shaw - many of his novels were published there first, rather than at home in the UK. Brunner visited the US numerous times, meeting with publishers, booksellers, and fans. His resulting “transatlanticism” separated him, sometimes unpleasantly, from his British colleagues, who saw him as overly American in focus and style. Brunner sought to master American idiom and to get a sense of developments in US society - as the Science Fiction Encyclopedia puts it wryly, the anti-Americanism in Stand on Zanzibar “has a satisfyingly American ring to it”. 

The Jagged Orbit is one of Brunner’s acutely American novels. It projects a number of trends prominent in the American society of the late 1960s into a troubling, but not wholly dystopian, future outlook. Brunner’s New York, a cauldron of racist suspicion and regular mass violence, recalls the Watts riots that took place in Los Angeles in August 1965, as well as the deadly Detroit riots which marked the peak of the “long hot summer of 1967”. The heavily mediatised environment in which Flamen participates recalls the growing importance of television, and Clay’s trances are steeped in the transcendental drug culture of the ‘60s.

Connections and disconnections

Arguably, Brunner’s principal point with The Jagged Orbit was a plea to prioritise genuine human connection over dependence on technology. Much of the urban population in the novel are stupified by infomercial television, and blithely reliant on computers. These machines, including “desketaries”, need carefully crafted prompts and operate within limited bounds, restricting or mangling useful information. It is easy to see the thread from these devices to the so-called “AI” algorithms of today, which are just as apt to promote laziness and misinformation.

In contrast, Brunner’s more enlightened characters argue strongly for real human interactions, for genuine dialogue which breaks down barriers and dissipates the climate of fear on which the villains feed and profit from. It is a message which remains powerful over fifty years later.

The Jagged Orbit is not among Brunner’s strongest work, being overly focused on sometimes didactic dialogue and never coalescing strongly enough around a specific theme. It is intermittently fascinating, however, and well worth seeking out for those who enjoyed the approach taken by the better-known Stand on Zanzibar.