I enjoyed The Sheep Look Up so much that I had really high expectations for this novel. But where Sheep was a sort of free form, bloody, experimental warning about the USA's impact on the global ecology of Earth, Rider is more of a standard cyberpunkish story. Don't get me wrong - there are some very cool, bleak moments, especially those involving "therapy" for children. But it just didn't live up to Sheep's promise.

I think my favorite concept Brunner brings into this book is that of "Hearing Aid", a free number one can call to rant, rave, cuss, complain to with a promise that it is not recorded and no one but the person on the other end of the line can hear them. In these days, when our every keystroke is recorded and our phone conversations are easily dipped into, I sort of wish we had something like that available to us as a regular thing. Some stuff you don't even want to blog about.

By the end, the story just wrapped up too neatly. It was a happy ending all around (something, I'll admit, I haven't seen much these past 6 months). All the mutant dogs do their noble best. The revolutionaries pull one over on the government and manage to put out a powerful computer worm (this book is here the term comes from) that exposes all the secret data hidden from view, effectively bringing about a sort of socialist drive for freedom and love. But, see, I don't think that the average US citizen would actually care much who we've been torturing or why. I think we would find it interesting for ten minutes and then go back to their daily routine.

final thought: I'm too cynical for this novel, but it wasn't a half bad read. If you want true dystopian horrifics, though, go for The Sheep Look Up instead. ( )

One of the first science fiction books I read in high school (late 1970s). Brunner took the increasing rate of change being experienced discussed in Future Shock and extrapolated that into the future. He envisioned a world wide data network which was used by everyone. Since everything was in the web, privacy was also extremely limited. Being able to manipulate (hack) data in "the web" gave people incredible power. The rate of change was so quick that most people have significant problems coping. Many "coped" by developing "plug in lifestyles". This book also touched on the topic of the misguided tendency to pursue knowledge without wisdom. This book deepened what had been only a passing interest in computing, made me think about pursuing wisdom not just knowledge, and gave me an appreciation that technology is a two edged sword. Before reading this book I deeply believed that technology was the answer to all problems. This book tempered my enthusiasm for technology and made me look for unintended consequences. ( )

Loved it.Not so much for the predictions about the world we now live in, lo these many years later, altho seeing what the author got right, and what he got wrong, is interesting... no. I loved the town of Precipice, CA.When can I move there? ( )

To me, from the point of view of speculating about and imagining the future, John Brunner's Shockwave Rider is one of the best Sci-Fi books ever written. I have lived through the computer revolution and have used all generations of the technology from mechanical calculating machines up to today's supercomputers and the World Wide Web.

The book was first published in 1975, a good 15 years before there was even a glimmering of the Web, and yet he got so many things right about the internet revolution and its impact on changing the way people think and relate to technology.

In short, it is a tour de force following on from his also outstanding environmentalist books, Stand on Zanzibar (1968) exploring consequences of population explosion, and The Sheep Look Up (1972) exploring consequences of industrial pollution and global warming. Brunner was prescient in so many ways I wonder if he wasn't somehow or other a time traveller. ( )

Nickie Haflinger was a child prodigy who flaked out, ran away from a super-secret government facility, and got away with it. He is on the run, however, and lives his life on the edge of an overly plugged in society. His life is changed when he meets someone who doesn't need all of those things that everyone else considers impossible to live without.

I love this book, and I recommend it frequently at work. I was introduced to it in a survey of SF in college in 1986, and I never forgot the ideas that it created. I enjoy pointing out the things he "got right" (although we all know that science fiction is imaginative, not predictive), although I am sometimes unnerved. ( )