Breakfast In The Ruins: John Brunner

Showing posts with label John Brunner. Show all posts

Saturday, 23 September 2023

Penguin Time/Psyched Out Sci-fi:
The Squares of the City
by John Brunner
(1969)

Only marginally qualifying as science fiction, John Brunner’s 1965 novel is really more of a high concept socio-political thriller, taking place in Ciudad de Vados, the purpose-built capital city of the fictional South American nation of Aguazal.

Presumably modelled on President Juscelino Kubitschek’s construction of Brasilia in the early 1960s, the city is the crowning achievement of the charismatic President Vados, and we arrive in its environs in the company of one Boyd Hakluyt, an Australian expert in urban planning who has been engaged by the city’s municipal authorities in an initially rather vague consultancy role.

Upon arrival, Hakluyt soon discovers that his expertise in the fields of traffic management, industrial rezoning on so on will primarily be put to use in solving the problem presented by the masses of impoverished, disenfranchised rural peasants who are now migrating to the new metropolis, settling in a series of sprawling shantytowns and slums beneath the gleaming overpasses, and rather undermining El Presidente’s vision of a shining beacon of civilised modernity in the process.

Less than enthralled by this task, and unnerved by the evidence of creeping authoritarianism and violent political disorder he sees broiling away beneath the city’s tranquil surface, Hakluyt becomes drawn into a complex web of subterfuge and treachery, crossing paths with bureaucrats and politicians, dissidents and revolutionaries, union leaders, industrialists, media personalities, generals, journalists, gangsters and so on, all engaged in an exhaustingly complicated wrangling for influence and power which seems to eerily mirror the Aguazalian nation’s all-consuming obsession with the game of chess.

And beyond that, I will keep quiet, as ‘The Squares of the City’ is a novel which is very easy to “spoil”.

Suffice to say that, like much of Brunner’s work, it takes a bit of patience to get into - his prose initially seems quite dry, and his plotting needlessly convoluted - but it ultimately proves a very rewarding read. It is certainly a unique entry within its supposed genre, that’s for sure, and if the above synopsis has piqued your interest, I’d recommend giving it a go.

As to Franco Grignani’s cover illustration meanwhile - well, it’s not one of my favourite examples of his work for Penguin to be honest, but it certainly conveys the novel’s idea of an urban eco-system collapsing into entropic chaos fairly effectively.

Those little white dots on my scan of the cover, by the way, are not stars or any other part of the design - I’m afraid they’re just remnants of damp, of concrete dust, or something, which have become stuck to my copy of the book, suggesting it might have spent some time sitting atop a pile of paperbacks in an attic or similarly insalubrious environment.

As you may have gathered, these Grignani Penguins often ain’t cheap, and my insistence on picking them up for pennies does not lend itself to acquiring them in primo condition - but at least this one was readable.

Sunday, 27 March 2016

The Nature of the Catastrophe:
A British Apocalypse Cover Art Gallery.

Watching Hammer’s version of ‘Quatermass & The Pit’ recently, I was struck by a brief exchange between Andrew Keir’s Professor Quatermass and James Donald’s Dr. Roney as they brain-storm the likely origins and the excavated Martian remains.

“The will to survive is an odd phenomenon”, says Quatermass. “If we found out our own world was doomed, say by climatic changes, what would we do about it?”

“Nothing, probably”, replies Roney, “just go on squabbling like usual”.

As the 1967 movie swiftly moves on to other matters, 2016 viewers are left with a momentary chill (and yet more evidence of scriptwriter Nigel Kneale’s uncanny talent for holding a beam on the future, even when he wasn’t trying to).

Spending Christmas and New Years in Wales a few months ago, the temperature was anything up to 8 – 10 degrees higher than normal for the time of year, as rain poured down relentlessly for almost the entire duration of our stay. Watching the evening news, seeing various areas of the UK devastated by floods for the second year in a row, I couldn’t help reflecting that we probably have one of the more placid and non-disaster-prone climates of any nation on Earth, and wondering how many ‘freak’ meteorological upsets were simultaneously going unreported in other parts of the globe.

The second story each evening meanwhile brought grim footage of the proxy forces of assorted Western and Eastern powers scrabbling for control of empty, blood-stained piles of rubble in whatever remains of Syria, the juxtaposition making as clear a realisation of Kneale’s casual, fifty year old predication as could be wished for.

A few months later, watching the public’s largely disengaged response to the sight of the French authorities torching and tear-gassing the makeshift city constructed by refugees from war just across the channel, I was reminded not only of Christopher Priest’s bleak 1972 novel ‘Fugue For a Darkening Island’ (a book that trumps the “this might happen” scenarios of Priest’s fellow doom-mongering SF writers by depicting a series of events so grimly inevitable it’s a miracle it hasn’t taken place already), but of the obligatory shrugging-off-the-warning-signs / “it’ll never happen here” segment that tends open most stories in the good ol’ British End of the World tradition.

(This is most bluntly and grotesquely realised by the scene early in Cornel Wilde’s film adaptation of John Christopher’s ‘The Death of Grass’ [‘No Blade of Grass’, 1970], which sees attendees at a buffet lunch stuffing their plates with food as the TV in the corner of the room carries news of the Chinese government’s desperate decision to begin dropping atom bombs on their largest cities in a last ditch effort to curb the effects of mass starvation.)

Of course, you shouldn’t necessarily pay too much attention to my doom-mongering. I’m particularly prone to such alarmist trains of thought, having been unhealthily fixated by this peculiarly British strain of '60s & '70s apocalyptic sci-fi ever since I was in primary school. John Christopher’s ‘Tripods’ series were amongst the last “children’s” books I read, and, following my Dad’s sound recommendations from there, John Wyndham’s classics were amongst the first “grown up” tales I subsequently made a start on.

After that, I spent the rest of my formative years consuming any story I could find that concerning “the end of the world” and, whether by means of wind, floods, drought, plague, famine, alien invasion, over-population, under-population, nuclear fallout, air pollution or god knows what else, my nation’s authors and paperback publishers were with me every step of the way.

With this in mind then, I’ll leave you to peruse the collection of scans below and decide for yourself the extent to which these storied literary gents of the mid-twentieth century might have been on to something.

Meanwhile, I could claim I was busy this weekend scoping out that easily defendable farmhouse with it’s own water supply and potato field, wondering who I should invite to share the landrover with me as we flee the city before the roadblocks go up. But, for better or for worse, such survivalist fantasies must remain just that in my case. As a Type 1 diabetic, I know I’d be dead within six weeks if the NHS stopped dishing out regular prescriptions of injectible human insulin. So, um..

Happy Easter everyone!

(Please note that a few of these scans have previously appeared on this blog in the past, but it’s always nice to see them again I hope. Also, the ‘Fugue For a Darkening Island’ scan above is not mine – I seem to have lost my copy, so I found this one online.)