Should maybe be a four star, but 1. I didn't like the disjointed style this was done in. 2. I'm not really sure if I should add a point for the several aspects in which his predictions have come true, because now that they ARE true, there's less impact (in other words, it's become dated) ( )

I've heard so much about this book -- it's been on my to-read list for what seems like forever. However, it read much more like A Clockwork Orange (which I detest) rather than When Late the Sweet Bird Sang (which I love). Disappointment. Nothing against the book, really -- just not for me. ( )

The Sheep Look Up (1972)
by John Brunner ISBN 1 - 932100 - 05 - 9

“You're not a health food addict, are you?”.....”Thought not. You might have got off lighter if you had been. You see, what happens is, you pick up some subclinical infection - I don't mean only social diseases, but anything from a whitlow to a sore throat - and at the same time you're getting traces of antibiotic in your diet: what's left in the chicken particularly, but also pork and even steak that you've been eating. And there's just enough of the stuff to select for the resistant strains among the millions of organisms in your body, and when we come along and try to tackle them they thumb their noses at us. Are you with me?” p.97

“You and your ancestors treated the world like a fucking great toilet bowl. You shat in it and boasted about the mess you'd made. And now it's full and overflowing, and you're fat and happy and black kids are going crazy to keep you rich.” p.112

“Hey, man with a big muscles!
Yes, you!
Steam - powered, gas - powered, electrically - powered,
Youyou with the big concrete and cement footprints!
Globe - girdler, continent - Tamer, putting the planet through hoops,
You I hail!
Packer and preserver of food in incorruptible cans,
Blocker - out of winter - blast with bricks and mortar,
Wheeled, shod, tracked with rails of shining iron, Multiplier of goods and chattels, chewer - up of forests,
Furrow - maker across the unpopulous plains,
Flier higher than Eagles, swimmer swifter than sharks,
Trafficker in the world's wealth, miracle - worker,
I salute you, I sing your praises…

Song of the States Unborn, 1924
p.140

“In Europe, as you know, they've killed the Mediterranean, just as we killed the Great Lakes. They're in a fair way to killing the Baltic, with help from the Russians who have already killed the Caspian. Well, this living organism we call Mother Earth can't stand that treatment for a long -- her bowels tormented, her arteries clogged, her lungs choked... But what's happened inevitablly as a result? Such a social upheaval that all thoughts of spreading this -- this cancer of ours have had to be forgotten! Yes, there's hope! When starving refugees are besieging frontiers, armies can't be spared to propagate the cancer any further. They have to be called home -- like ours!” p.355

“The hungry sheep look up, and are not fed,
but swoln with wind, and the rank mist they draw,
Rot inwardly, and foul contagion spread.
Milton: ‘Lycidas’”
p.367

From the Afterword, by James John Bell:
“‘The Bush administration is working quickly to rollback many key environmental protections, including the Clean Water Act, Endangered Species Act, and the National Environmental Policy Act,’ says Cara Pike, Vice President of Communication for Earthjustice, the world's largest environmental law firm. 'Environmentalists thought the Reagan administration was bad, and it was, however, the current situation poses a threat to what has been accomplished by the environmental community over the last 30 years.'
Bush's Healthy Forest Initiative is a smokescreen for allowing logging interests to infiltrate the last of our old - growth forests in the name of fire prevention. Bush's plan actually suspends environmental laws and citizen appeals in order to speed Forest thinning in protected ancient Forests and increase Timber sales throughout the Pacific Northwest.” p.371

Do you want to know how drugs get in chicken eggs?

“‘Biopharming’ is an experimental application of genetic engineering in which crops, like corn and soybeans, are engineered to produce high concentrations of drugs -- pharmaceutical proteins and chemicals -- that they do not produce naturally. Animal 'pharms’ use cloning, and genetic engineering to harvest drugs, and even human organs, from animals. Biotech companies today breed genetically modified chickens, for instance, that produce insulin, and other new drugs, based on human proteins, manufactured inside the whites of their eggs.
Environmentalists and scientists, including the US National Academy of Sciences, have repeatedly warned biotech companies that growing drug - producing crops in open Fields would inevitably contaminate our food supply. Drug - crops grown on pharms across the u.s. today include corn that produces compounds such as untested AIDS and hepatitis B vaccines, a blood - clotting agent, and other compounds not meant for human consumption. A robot in Monsanto's lab tests additional candidates for genetic modification at a rate of 500 per day.” p.374

“Genetically engineered ingredients, such as Monsanto's BT corn and RoundUp Ready soy, are already in 60-70% of the food on American grocery store shelves, such as cereal, soup, tortilla chips, infant formula and soda. Amazingly, none of the genetically engineered foods on the market have been adequately tested for effects on human health or the environment, or labeled by the FDA, EPA, or USDA. Labeling is required in Europe, Russia, Japan, and Australia and has led to low acceptance (already planting a biotech crops has been banned in some of these countries). As a result, we have become the subjects of a large-scale experiment on our health and our environment by the Biotech industry and the giant corporations that use their products.” p.375

“Take it for granted that the government will disregard long - term dangers -- such as those affecting the environment-- in order to cling to power; that the citizenry will do the same because thinking is too much like hard work; and when the handful of Cassandras are proved right, they will be held to blame and very likely stoned or shot.” p.380
( )

This was not a book that one likes. I think it was important to read, I'm glad I did, I possibly wish I hadn't read it at the same time as a Superbug story in Asimov and [b:Silent Spring|27333|Silent Spring|Rachel Carson|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1436594630s/27333.jpg|880193] by Rachel Carson because WOW that was a scary depressing juxtaposition. ( )

review of
John Brunner's The Sheep Look Up
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - August 16, 2013

For the complete review go here:
http://www.goodreads.com/story/show/344636-a-review-of-john-brunner-s-ecological...

Wow! I'm overwhelmed. I can't say enuf good things about this. It was G, R, E, E, A, A, A, T!! In the meantime, I've procrastinated on writing this review & read 3 more Brunner bks instead. In David Brin's introduction to the edition of The Sheep Look Up I read, he says: "Along with Harry Harrison's Make Room, Make Room (which inspired the film Soylent Green), The Sheep Look Up was a pivotal work that helped spark the environmental movement. In so doing, it may have ironically joined the ranks of "self-preventing prophecies" . . . warnings that are so vivid and scary that people actually heed them, and thereby help to make a better future. We had better hope so." (p XVI) & in environmentalist James John Bell's Afterword he writes: "This book has been in hiding; slipping in and out of old bookstores, passing from one safe house to the next—gaining credence, biding time, fostering movements. The Sheep Look Up, when first published in 1972, didn't just inspire radical environmentalists, it became their Ecodefense manual. After rousing the rebels who formed such groups as Earth First! and Rainforest Action Network, it went underground. John Brunner's book was still every bit as potent when it found me decades later." (p 371) Indeed, & it's still potent when I found it 41 yrs after its initial publication.

The Sheep Look Up belongs in the company of those many "self-preventing prophecies" that populate socially conscious Sci-Fi - as well as in the company of such terrifying warnings of the effects of nuclear warfare, eg, that appeared on TV (of all places): Peter Watkins's 1965 The War Game (actually banned from British TV for 20 yrs), 1983's The Day After, & 1984's Threads. The Sheep Look Up is NOT a nuclear war story but it IS a very clear look at the similarly destructive potential of humanity's oblivion to the effects of its polluting practices. On the other hand, anyone who believes that Michael Crichton's 2008 State of Fear (see my paltry review here: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/15860.State_of_Fear ) somehow represents a fair & balanced & scientific look at ecological problems (or their outright denial in Crichton's case) & the people who attempt to solve them wd do well to read Brunner's The Sheep Look Up & to start by comparing the character depictions alone. Everyone's shown as being potentially fucked-up by Brunner, ie: HUMAN, instead of reduced to propagandistic caricatures as in Crichton's bk.

More from Bell: "John Brunner's homebrew of ecological resistance in The Sheep Look Up has much in common with the Earth Liberation Front (ELF). Born in 1992 at the inaugural UK Earth First! gathering in Brighton, England, the Earth Liberation Front has spread around the planet. When Earth First!ers decided to disavow nonviolent acts of sabotage, called monkey wrenching, ELF came out of the forests to pick up the wrench. Underground nonviolent acts of sabotage are claimed by "Elves" that operate in secret." (p 382) & here's a bit from my review of Crichton's State of Fear: "The basic plot is what you'd expect: a thriller about 'good' vs 'evil'. The 'evil' people are the ELF, the Earth Liberation Front - whose name, of course, is directly slanderous of the actual ELF & Earth First!. One of the 'good' guys is John Kenner. Strangely enuf, ELF is just a bunch of dumb hippies who somehow manage to have one of the most diabolically clever plots to technologically create eco-disasters ever conceived of. How such bumbling idiots have such genius for invention & planning is never explained. Of course, in formula-writing-world, the 'evil' plot HAS to be diabolical so that the 'hero''s genius for defeating it can be exciting." I have to wonder whether Crichton's propaganda is an attempt to discredit the ball that Brunner helped start rolling. Purely from a Sci-Fi writing standpoint I'd say that Brunner has it head-over-heels over Crichton.

Brin describes The Sheep Look Up as part of what's "often mentioned as a trilogy" that includes Shockwave Rider wch he describes as having "erupted with startling ideas, like the prescient concept of software viruses" & Stand on Zanzibar "foreshadowing multimedia and "hypertext" by two decades." (all quotes here from p XXV) Reading The Sheep Look Up from the perspective of an anarchist political activist w/ 40 yrs experience I reiterate the praise of "prescient". Take, eg, "the Trainites had scattered caltraps in the roadway" (p 11): I never even saw a caltrap, that I can remember, until 2000 or so & I didn't even know its name until 2013. Or consider this: "Next, the stalled cars had their windows opaqued with a cheap commercial compound used for etching glass, and slogans were painted on their doors. Some were long: THIS VEHICLE IS A DANGER TO LIFE AND LIMB. Many were short: IT STINKS! But the commonest of all was the universally known catchphrase: STOP, YOU'RE KILLING ME!" (p 11) This describes a form of anti-car activism that I didn't really see manifested until the late 1990s or early 2000s.

I don't remember when bottled water 1st came to my notice but I've always been opposed to it. The idea of having to pay large sums of money for something that shd come in drinkable form from our taps as an affordable public service disgusts me to this day - & the privatization of water still strikes me as one of the most dangerous things that can happen to a necessity of life. &, here, in The Sheep Look Up, one of the many signs of the deterioration of environmental conditions is 'ads' for bottled water:

"Duplicate at home the famous SPA WATERS OF THE WORLD!

"Laugh at that "Don't-Drink" notice! We supply the salts from every major spa in packet form—VICHY! Perrier! FONTELLA! APPOLLINARIS! MALVERN! ALL $9.95/oz!" - p 173

Brunner even anticipates home-water filters - something very common now:

""There, that's the latest of Mitsuyama's gadgets. A home water-purifier. Rechargeable cartridge system." - p 131

How many people wd drink from a stream these days, let alone a river? Not many, & w/ good reason. The world wasn't always like this.

The overall form of the novel is a simulated pastiche of these ads, 'news'casts, story, TV transcription, etc - & as the chaos of the environmental deterioration accelerates, the rapidity of the pace of the intercutting of these elements accelerates too. Each chapter is headed w/ a mnth name. Each begins w/ a poem, named & dated but not credited. I don't know if they're Brunner's creations but I suspect that they are. The 1st chapter, "December", begins w/ "Christmas in the New Rome" credited as from 1862. It begins:

"The day shall dawn when never child but may
Go forth upon the sward secure to play.
No cruel wolves shall trespass in their nooks,
Their lore of lions shall come from picture-books.
No aging tree a falling branch shall shed
To strike an unsuspecting infant's head.
From forests shall be tidy copses born
And every desert shall become a lawn." - p 2

The poem begins innocuously enuf in the sense that a child's welfare is the concern. If I had a kid I wdn't want it to be eaten by a wolf or have its neck snapped by a falling branch either. Of course, these days, kids can be hit by cars or have ice fall on them from the roof of an apartment bldg instead. But when things start to go awry for me is w/ this notion of "And every desert shall become a lawn." The idea of nature as a "desert" until humans have 'tamed' it discounts the value of ALL life except for human life. Take this excerpt from a letter written by General Forbes to William Pitt from "Pittsbourgh. 27th Novemr. 1758":

"I have used the freedom of giving your name to Fort Du Quesne, as I hope it was in some measure the being actuated by your spirits that now makes us Masters of the place. Nor could I help using the same freedom in the naming of two other Forts that I built (Plans of which I send you) the one Fort Ligonier & the other Bedford. I hope the name Fathers will take them under their Protection, In which case these dreary deserts will soon be the richest and most fertile of any possest by the British in No. America." [source credited online as "Compiled by Irene Stewart for the Allegheny County Committee of the Pennsylvania Society of the Colonial Dames of America. Pittsburgh: Allegheny Count Committee, 1927."]

The fact that the Pittsburgh environs wd've been well wooded, well watered, & well inhabited by Native Americans as well as a plenitude of other non-humans is of no importance to the utilitarian aims of British imperialism. & it's this very attitude toward the environment as merely a THING to be exploited w/ no concern for possible backfiring that Brunner explores so fully here. Wd anyone be so stupid as to throw a stick of dynamite above their head while mountain climbing? Probably - but not many. Then why pour toxic waste into a stream? If the people pouring the waste were then to drink THE WATER THUS POLLUTED they'd be as unlikely to pour waste in it as a mountain climber is to throw dynamite over their head. Instead, it becomes someone's else's problem - more like throwing the dynamite above the head of the mountain climber below you. In Pittsburgh, it's always struck me that industrialist Henry Clay Frick's home, now a museum, is on very nice grounds w/ old trees - I wonder how many of those old trees survived around the steel mills that his wealth came from? How many survived the pollution? &, as w/ fracking these days, how many of the CEOs raking in the BILLIONS live in areas where their "rock-water" is polluting the aquifers, where their fracking is causing shifting tectonics & earthquakes, where the incessant tanker trucks are clogging the country roads? Any? It seems unlikely. THEY CAN AFFORD TO LIVE SOMEWHERE ELSE. Brunner, as always, sees it well in advance:

""What's accidental about an earthquake in Denver? Mom told me: there weren't any around here when I was a baby. All that poisoned waste they poured down old mine-shafts made the rocks slip under the mountains. Nothing accidental there, man!"" - p 359

As for where the rich polluters live? I reckon castles were among the 1st gated communities. Brunner parodies this: "The speech from the radio continued. "What we've done for you is build that castle. Nightly, armed men stand guard at all our gates, the only point of access through our spike-topped walls. Stronghold Estates employ only the best-trained staff. Our watchmen are drawn from the police, our sharp-shooters are all ex-Marines."" - p 4

Brunner's setting is the USA. Why?

"PAGE: So what is our largest import?

"QUARREY: Ton for ton—oxygen. We produce less than sixty percent of the amount we consume.

"PAGE: And out biggest export?

"QUARREY: Ton for ton again, it's noxious gases." - p 25

Legend has it that during the heyday of the steel mills in Pittsburgh, the air pollution was so bad near the plants that cars parked on the plant lots wd have the metal eaten away w/in 6 mnths. It's better now but the particulates will last for a long time. LA is notorious for its smog: air pollution trapped by atmospheric conditions to produce a muddy gray that's hard to see far thru. In The Sheep Look Up people who don't filter the air are in trouble:

"Furious, he wound down his window and made violent beckoning gestures. At once the air made him cough and his eyes started to water. He simply wasn't used to these conditions." - p 5

The same man, on his way to a business meeting, enters the Men's Room to try to clean up from the pollution:

"Under the locked door of one of the cubicles: feet. Wary because of the incidence of men's-room muggings these days, he relieved himself with one eye fixed on the door. A faint sucking sound reached his ears, then a chinking. Christ, a syringe being filled! Not an addict with an expensive habit who's sneaked in there for privacy? Should I get out my gas gun?"

[..]

"Not wanting to leave greasy marks on the light fabric of his pants, he felt cautiously in his pocket for a coin to drop in the water-dispenser. Damnation. The dirty thing had been altered since his last visit. He had nickels and quarters, but the sign said only dimes. Wasn't there even one free one? No." - p 7

Alas, this is far from far-fetched. Do any of you, dear readers, remember when there were no such things as pay toilets? Thank goodness, they're not as omnipresent as their initiation into the world led me, personally, to fear.

Brunner's section headings are full of irony & puns (THUS FAR, NO FATHER). Take this, eg:

" A STRAW TO A DROWNING MAN

". . . positively identified as Uruguayan. Following the disclosure the Honduran government called on one million dollars of standby credit which will be applied to the purchase of arms and other urgently needed supplies, and appealed to Washington for assistance in combatting the Tupamaro threat. The Pentagon announced an hour ago that the aircraft carrier Wounded Knee had been diverted from routine patrols in the Atlantic and is already flying survey missions over the rebel-held area. Commenting just prior to leaving for a vacation in Honolulu, Prexy said, quote, They can pull just so many feathers out of the eagle's tail before it pecks. End quote." - p 123

The "Tupamaro"s having been an actual South American urban guerrilla group at the time of the writing of this bk, w/ their name being rooted in the name of a leader of an historical indigenous people's uprising against colonization, it's more than a little ironic that the American aircraft carrier is called "Wounded Knee" after a place where there was a massacre of Native Americans. Brunner's so well-informed that it's hard for me, at least, to find much fault w/ the intensive research that obviously went into the writing of this novel:

"On each envelope was printed: A FREE GIFT FOR YOU ON INDEPENDENCE DAY, COURTESY OF THE "BE A BETTER AMERICAN LEAGUE." Inside there was a handsome print, in copperplate engraving style, showing a tall man at a table with several companions handing pieces of cloth to a group of nearly naked Indians of both sexes.

"Underneath was the caption: First in a Series Commemorating Traditional American Values. The Governor of Massachusetts Distributes Smallpox-Infected Blankets to the Indians." - p 231

For the complete review go here:
http://www.goodreads.com/story/show/344636-a-review-of-john-brunner-s-ecological... ( )