The Shockwave Rider

What Hacker News says

1. wombatpmOct 2026
   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
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2. wise_bloodSep 2026
   20 years ago I read a The Guardian article about the "top geek novels". I immediately read a bunch of those.

   Recently I managed to find the list again, and it's been endless pleasure:

   - American Gods -- Neil Gaiman

   - Brave New World -- Aldous Huxley

   - The Colour of Magic -- Terry Pratchett

   - Consider Phlebas -- Iain M Banks

   - Cryptonomicon -- Neal Stephenson

   - Cloud Atlas -- David Mitchell

   - The Diamond Age -- Neal Stephenson

   - The Dispossessed -- Ursula K Le Guin

   - Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? -- Philip Dick

   - Dune -- Frank Herbert

   - Foundation -- Isaac Asimov

   - Giles Goat-Boy -- John Barth

   - Gravity's Rainbow -- Thomas Pynchon

   - The HitchHiker's Guide to the Galaxy -- Douglas Adams

   - I, Robot -- Isaac Asimov

   - The Illuminatus! Trilogy -- Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson

   - The Left Hand of Darkness -- Ursula K Le Guin

   - The Man in the High Castle -- Philip K Dick

   - Microserfs -- Douglas Coupland

   - Neuromancer -- William Gibson

   - Nineteen Eighty-Four -- George Orwell

   - Orlando -- Virgina Woolf

   - The Shockwave Rider -- John Brunner

   - Snow Crash -- Neal Stephenson

   - Stand on Zanzibar -- John Brunner

   - Stranger in a Strange Land -- Robert Heinlein

   - Trouble with lichen - John Wyndham

   - UBIK -- Philip Dick

   - Watchmen -- Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons

   - Woman on the Edge of Time -- Marge Piercy

   (I am creatively interpreting "The Colour of Magic" as "all Discworld", "Dune" as "the six Dune books", etc.)

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3. gumbyAug 2026
   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)

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4. mindcrimeApr 2026
   Glasshouse[1] by Charles Stross

   Permutation City[2] by Greg Egan

   We Are Legion (We Are Bob)[3] by Dennis E. Taylor

   Halting State[4] by Charles Stross

   Singularity Sky[5] by Charles Stross

   Dungeon Crawler Carl[6] by Matt Dinniman

   Zero World[7] by Jason M. Hough

   The Shockwave Rider[8] by John Brunner

   [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glasshouse_(novel)

   [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permutation_City

   [3]: https://www.amazon.com/We-Are-Legion-Bob-Bobiverse/dp/166822...

   [4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halting_State

   [5]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singularity_Sky

   [6]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dungeon_Crawler_Carl

   [7]: https://www.jasonhough.com/book/zero-world

   [8]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shockwave_Rider

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5. gopher_spaceMar 2026
   Delphi markets feature prominently in Shockwave Rider by John Brunner. It's an important book, and Brunner is amazing if you've never read him before.

   He's actually one of my metrics for judging used book stores. Sci-fi has Brunner, politics has Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72, nonfiction has someone's old annotated copy of G.E.B.

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6. gopher_spaceMar 2026
   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.

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