The Sheep Look Up
In a near future, the air pollution is so bad that everyone wears gas masks. The infant mortality rate is soaring, and birth defects, new diseases, and physical ailments of all kinds abound. The water is undrinkable—unless you’re poor and have no choice. Large corporations fighting over profits from gas masks, drinking water, and clean food tower over an ineffectual, corrupt government. Environmentalist Austin Train is on the run. The “trainites,” a group of violent environmental activists, want him to lead their movement; the government wants him dead; and the media demands amusement. But Train just wants to survive.
Stats for nerds
16recommend
45mentions
34people
2008–2026years
49% recommend51% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- On my optimistic days I feel like we are living in a Zanzibar Shockwave Rider future. The rest of the time it feels like Sheep Look Up or Jagged Orbit. Highly recommend John Brunner
- The better prescient reference is John Brunner’s triad of The Shockwave Rider (origin of the computer virus, too!), The Sheep Look Up, and Stand on Zanzibar. They very much foreshadow the shallow pop star president, contempt for expertise, mass poverty, and incoherent direct action scenarios of technocracy/mass surveillance/prediction markets (shockwave), climate and pollution (the sheep), and population (Zanzibar). Great, if chilling stories.
They were written in the 60s and 70s but felt disturbingly predictive when I first read them in the 80s and even more so today.
(Big fan of both Ballard and Gibson too, though they are very different)
- Stand on Zanzibar, The Sheep Look Up, and Shockwave Rider all feel like variations on a theme. If you start with Shockwave and absolutely love it then you are in luck because there's more where that came from. But all of his books are worth reading imho.
> as a guess at what 40-50 years in the authors future would look like, it's almost freakily realistic.
Yeah, I should really revisit Future Shock. That book might have been a little ahead of its time.
> Although it feels like reading Neal Stephenson's "Anathem" at times - familiar tech described with alien words.
100% agree, and I think it's almost a bigger flaw here. I'm not saying "it gets better in the second season" but I wouldn't be surprised if some people bounce off the future slang.
Interestingly enough, Brunner might be one of the only white authors I've read who describes his characters by skin tone.
- Somebody really should mention John Brunner. His "Stand on Zanzibar" and "The Sheep Look Up" predate Gibson and Sterling by a decade and both those authors have cited his influence on their works. I love Neuromancer but Zanzibar is also brilliant.
- Now is a good time to read The Sheep Look Up by John Brunner.
- This article also reminds me of "The Sheep Look Up" by John Brunner (1972).
The author is from the UK, but it's mostly set in the US. It contains a brilliant parody of Trader Joes / Whole Foods (from well before they were founded, of course).
Apparently, he wrote a series of dystopias. I've been meaning to read the other ones.
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