The Squares of the City

What Hacker News says

1. a34729tOct 2026
   There is even a book mentioned here a number of years ago - a particulae favorite of mine - that features this as a plot point: Squares of the City by John Brunner
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2. zemMay 2019
   yes, and it's excellent! I consider those three, and "the shockwave rider" to be Brunner's four "major" novels. he's also written lots of books that are entertaining enough but nothing really outstanding, and one other, "the squares of the city" that is not on par with the big four but which is inventive and well written enough that I'd recommend it to any fans of his.
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3. namenumberMay 2019
   Always nice to see people rediscover John Brunner, he's one of my favorite authors. There's a quote i once heard that goes approximately like this : "Philip K Dicks novels turn into movies, John Brunners novels turn into reality".

   Stand on Zanzibar was a real trip the first time i read it, though in later years my favorite Brunner novel has been Squares of the City. Its not as scifi-ey as Zanzibar, but it is interesting for being built on a famous chess game and for exploring the nature of propaganda and its influence on the body politic.

   And honestly, deciding to write a book where the characters conform to the moves of an almost 100 year old chess game and pulling it off is just amazing.

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4. zemApr 2015
   IMO, Brunner has written four outstanding classics: "Stand on Zanzibar", " The Shockwave Rider", "The Sheep Look Up" and "The Jagged Orbit", and one that was not quite in that league, but was great niche sf, " The Squares of the City". the rest is all what I term "minor sf" for want of a better term - I hesitate to call them potboilers, because some of them are very well written and entertaining, but they are the sort of book that sinks into the general background sea of science fiction, or are interesting experiments that did not quite click ("The traveller in Black", e.g.).
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5. lobster_johnsonApr 2015
   I read recently some commentary by a colleague and friend of his (I forget who; Silverberg, probably) that Brunner felt that after his "American trilogy" (Zanzibar, The Jagged Orbit and Sheep) he'd said everything he had wanted to say, and he was disappointed that his work was not recognized to the extent that it deserved. Without knowing much about Brunner's life, it's possible to infer that he simply lost his passion.

   On the other hand, between the first (The Squares of the City) and the last (The Jagged Orbit) of the books in his "golden period", he wrote 11 books that nobody talks about. As far as I can tell, his signal-to-noise ratio was higher than contemporary novelists such as Dick and Zelazny. One has to pay the rent, I suppose.

   Not many people know that Brunner spent years working on a big, ambitious historical novel he hoped would put him on the map as a mainstream novelist, though from the subject matter alone you can pretty much tell it was doomed from the start: The Great Steamboat Race. Apparently it's quite good, but nobody noticed when it eventually came out.

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