John Brunner
John Kilian Houston Brunner was an influential British science fiction author born on September 24, 1934, in Oxfordshire, England. He began his writing career as a teenager, publishing his first novel at the age of seventeen. Educated at Cheltenham and Oxford, Brunner served as a pilot officer in the Royal Air Force from 1953 to 1956, after which he became an active participant in anti-nuclear movements, reflecting his deep concerns about global issues. Throughout his extensive career, Brunner authored over eighty novels and numerous short stories, initially focusing on traditional space opera themes before transitioning to near-future speculative fiction in the late 1960s. His notable works include "Stand on Zanzibar," which addresses the consequences of overpopulation, and "The Shockwave Rider," recognized as a precursor to cyberpunk literature, predicting the rise of the Internet and data manipulation. Despite facing challenges in making a living solely from writing, Brunner's contributions to the genre earned him significant accolades, including the Hugo and British Science Fiction Awards. He continued to write and lecture until his death from a stroke on August 25, 1995, during the World Science Fiction Convention, where he was honored by attendees. Brunner’s legacy remains impactful in the realm of speculative fiction, particularly for his prescient insights into societal issues.
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John Brunner
Writer
- Born: September 24, 1934
- Birthplace: Preston, Crowmarsh, Oxfordshire, England
- Died: August 25, 1995
- Place of death: Glasgow, Scotland
Biography
John Kilian Houston Brunner was born September 24, 1934, in Preston Crowmarsh, Oxfordshire, England. He was the son of Anthony and Felicity (Whittaker) Brunner. Brunner began submitting futuristic short stories early in his teens, and published his first novel, Galactic Storm (1952, as Gill Hunt) at the age of seventeen, two years before his first story was accepted in Astounding magazine. He was educated at Cheltenham (1948-1951), and later received a bachelor’s degree in modern languages at Oxford.
Brunner from 1953 to 1956 served in the Royal Air Force, where he became a pilot officer. The experience must have adversely affected him, for in 1957 he joined the National Council for the Abolition of Nuclear Tests, and frequently joined antinuclear protests with his wife Marjorie Rosamond (Sauer), whom he married in 1958. He served as Hampstead chairman of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, was a member of the group for many years, and even wrote the song that would become the organization’s anthem.
A prolific author—with more than eighty novels, several collections, and appearances in numerous anthologies—of both short speculative fiction and full-length works throughout a career that spanned more than four decades, Brunner nonetheless found it difficult to earn a living from his writing. In the late 1950’s, he found it necessary to work full time as an editor at Spring Books, Ltd., and did not turn to writing full time until 1959.
Brunner’s lengthy writing career can be roughly divided into two periods. His early work, from the 1950’s into the late 1960’s, concentrated primarily on far-future events, of the traditional space-opera variety, characterized by such novels as The Hundredth Millennium (1959), The Threshold of Eternity (1959), Slavers of Space (1960), and The Day of the Star Cities (1965). He wrote two far-reaching, multivolume novel series during this period: Interstellar Empire (including The Space-Time Juggler, 1963), and Zarathustra Refugee Planets (including The Repairman of Cyclops, 1965). Late in the 1960’s, Brunner shifted focus to near- future possibilities, experimented with the form and format of the sci-fi novel, and in the process predicted many things that have come to pass. It is for the prescience of these later works that his outstanding reputation in the genre mainly rests.
In 1968, Brunner published Stand on Zanzibar, a jaundiced look at the effects of overpopulation in the twenty- first century, which was nominated for a Nebula Award, and won the Hugo Award, the British Science Fiction Award, and the Prix Apollo Award for the French translation of the novel. Nebula- nominated and British Science Fiction Award-winner The Jagged Orbit (1969) deals with race relations, social unrest, and paranoia in the New York of 2014 a.d. The Nebula- nominated The Sheep Look Up (1972) is concerned with the horrors of pollution. The Shockwave Rider (1975), called the first cyberpunk novel, predicts the rise of the Internet, computer viruses and worms, and government and media data manipulation.
Though John Brunner wrote continuously until the end of his days, frequently lectured and served as writer-in-residence at the University of Kansas (1972), his health began to deteriorate in the 1980’s, exacerbated by the death of his wife in 1986 (he remarried in 1991, to Chinese immigrant LiYi Tan). He died of a massive stroke on August 25, 1995, while attending the World Science Fiction Convention in Glasgow, Scotland, where attendees gave him a four-minute standing ovation for his contributions to the genre. Appropriately, fans around the world learned of his death via the Internet.