#189 Computer fugitive: The Shockwave Rider (1975) by John Brunner

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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Transcript

Nickie Haflinger is a product of the system. Extensively trained in a covert U.S. government facility, he has been moulded to operate in a highly computerised future “tightly webbed in a net of inter-locking data-channels”. Having witnessed other government experiments which disturb him, Haflinger goes rogue. Picking up and discarding identities in quick succession, he sets out on a chase from Ohio to California, with his former overseers on his trail.

Published in 1975, The Shockwave Rider is the fourth and final in John Brunner’s famous sequence of “tract novels” which reflect the author’s thinking about the challenges to come in the 21st century. While Brunner’s previous efforts had confronted overpopulation, environmental degradation, and urban violence, The Shockwave Rider explores computerisation and the prospect of a networked world. 

By turns prophetic and arguably naive, Brunner’s novel is an intriguing look at a digital future, written when ARPANET was the most sophisticated extant computer network. Brunner correctly foresaw the privacy and security threats implicit in a networked society, as well as our desire to assume different personas online. However, his hope that people could choose to disentangle themselves from overbearing systems clashes with the rigid, heavily surveilled landscape of today’s Internet.

The “tract novels”

John Brunner’s writing became increasingly mature and sophisticated in the mid-1960s. He gradually moved away from pulp story formats, and mined science publications and grey literature to imagine the world of the relatively near future. This culminated with his landmark novel Stand on Zanzibar (1968). Written in a panoramic style strongly influenced by the USA trilogy (1930 - 1936) by John Dos Passos, this work made Brunner the first British winner of the Hugo Award for Best Novel. 

Although Stand on Zanzibar was not particularly successful in commercial terms - likely in part due to its huge length for a novel at that time - Brunner wrote three further books in a relatively similar style. The Jagged Orbit (1969), The Sheep Look Up (1972), and The Shockwave Rider each posit a different 21st century scenario, based on Brunner’s extrapolation of trends he observed in the world around him. Unfortunately for us, Brunner’s predictive methods were sometimes quite sound.

Super phreak

Much of the book covers Haflinger’s period as a fugitive, hunted by his government handlers. When the heat is on, he uses his computer skills to assume new, invented identities and to erase all traces of his previous guises. To describe this, Brunner coined the term “computer worm”, later adopted by computer scientists.

During his time on the run, Haflinger lives as a fringe preacher in Toledo, Ohio and then as a wealthy computer consultant in Kansas City, Missouri. There, he meets Kate, a bright young perpetual student who sees through his false identity. Together they move on to find a home in Precipice, one of several new communities that have sprung up to house refugees from an earthquake that destroyed San Francisco. 

Inspired by his new friends in California, Haflinger transforms from fugitive to would-be hacker revolutionary, bent on tearing down the veils of government secrecy and exposing the corruption of a decadent elite.

Information overload

Classic science fiction should not be judged on its predictive accuracy; but if it were, The Shockwave Rider would rate quite highly. Brunner’s depiction of a computer-reliant, highly networked society is quite striking and reflects his awareness of recent technological progress. In Stand on Zanzibar, the monolithic supercomputer Shalmaneser guides corporate decision-making. The Shockwave Rider depicts a much more distributed and interconnected model of computing, influenced by the development of ARPANET. 

Crucially, Brunner imagines a future in which distributed computer networks, processing vast reams of data, are accessible to all. Citizens access the continental net through their landline phones, and Haflinger’s manipulation of this system resembles phreaking, the analogue precursor to computer hacking. Brunner anticipates a version of today’s prediction markets, termed “Delphi pools”, after Pythia, the famous Oracle of Delphi. Conducted over the continental net, these exploit the predictive potential of the “wisdom of the crowd”.

Typically for Brunner’s work, The Shockwave Rider does not linger on technology but focuses instead on its social effects. Many people practice the “plug-in lifestyle”, a kind of highly mobile existence made possible by a combination of computerisation, cheaper transport, and consumer fads. This terminology recalls James Tiptree Jr.’s story “The Girl Who Was Plugged In” (1973), an influence on William Gibson and cyberpunk. In some ways, these plugged-in people resemble an early form of today’s digital nomads. As a child, Haflinger was transferred from family to family, essentially as a kind of lifestyle accessory. He credits this experience with preparing him for a world of constant change.

Brunner was strongly influenced by Alvin Toffler’s book Future Shock (1970), which posited that people could suffer trauma from “too much change in too short a period of time”. In The Shockwave Rider, some people - notably Haflinger - are afflicted by “overload”, a kind of trauma inflicted by over-exposure not so much to change, but to information. Even in this Brunner was only a few steps removed from the kind of derangement people experience today, affected by online misinformation, deepfakes, propaganda, and the bizarre counterfactuals spat out by LLMs. 

The cyber novel

As with The Jagged Orbit, The Shockwave Rider is written in a more grounded style than Stand on Zanzibar. Brunner’s deployment of futuristic neologisms is kept to a relative minimum, and there are fewer settings. Brunner prided himself on his ostensibly authentic use of American locations and dialogue, and these are quite effective. In keeping with the other “tract novels”, The Shockwave Rider is quite talky, and the characters express themselves far more through dialogue than through physical action. This is a thought-provoking, rather than exciting, piece of work. 

The novel has often been described, not unreasonably, as a precursor to cyberpunk. It can certainly be thought of a “cyber” novel, deeply immersed in the social implications of then-advanced computer technology but lacking the gritty cynicism and violence found in the later, true cyberpunk of Gibson and Bruce Sterling. Brunner, with his clipped English accent and love of folk music, was nobody’s idea of a punk - but certainly The Shockwave Rider influenced cyberpunk writers. One of these was Pat Cadigan, who met Brunner at the University of Kansas in 1975.

Digital democracy

The crux of The Shockwave Rider is in its comparison between its imagined mainstream future society - and especially the cruel government labs - and the almost utopian lifestyle of Precipice. In the refugee town, Haflinger and Kate find genuine community and solidarity of a type which Brunner suggests is fatally undermined by the computerised society. Set on his revolutionary course, Haflinger defines absolute evil: “it consists in treating another human being as a thing.” Based in Precipice, Haflinger uses the ultimate worm to turn the continental net against its overseers, and give the people the chance to define their own idea of the good society.

Part of the message of the novel seems to be that the risk of a networked world is that it better enables the powerful to treat human beings as things. As computer technologies are increasingly used by repressive states as tools of misinformation, cruelty, and violence, The Shockwave Rider remains relevant despite the rather pat simplicity of its prescriptions.