The Sheep Look Up

Gah, dystopian fiction is so depressing; yet when it's done well, it is such a good read. This is one such book. It came up on my Goodreads recommendations, and I'm surprised I hadn't encountered it before, since I've been reading a lot of science fiction & futuristic fiction in the past few years. I hadn't read or heard anything about the author before, which usually makes me a little wary. However, once I started this book, I didn't want to put it down.

In the novel, a company called Bamberly Hydroponics has created and is distributing a food product called Nutripon. Several batches of it are sent overseas as humanitarian aid; shortly thereafter, terrible sickness and mental illness strikes those countries. Meanwhile, the pollution and show more contamination are growing stateside; the water supply, being diverted from rural areas into the city, is recycled without proper sanitation and perpetuates a cycle of sickness that is deadly for the very young, very old, and poor; acid rain, crop failures, and transmissible disease compound the problems. Still, the wealthy business owners, such as Mr. Bamberly and his officers deny any implication of wrongdoing in the nationwide problems.

This book chronicles one year in an ambiguously future America; technology is not described at length, but the economy is faltering, food supplies are either contaminated or prohibitively expensive, air quality is so poor that you cannot be outside without a filtermask for more than a few minutes, the rich are getting richer and the poor getting poorer. It all seems so conspiracy theoretic, but on second glance, it's not too hard to see our own situation growing into this chaotic state -- the "Puritan" health food craze, the use of military force in developing countries, the manipulation of food and water supplies, the corporate zeal for profit at the expense of humanity.

This is one of those books akin to "1984" -- you shake your head and think, "That will never happen here," -- yet it is happening all around you. show less

this deserves a proper review, but i need some time, some time to lie down and think, to stifle the cries inside my head, to internalize that this is a book written 50 years ago and not last week's twitter feed.
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we're all dead, that is no news. whoever writes a story about the end of the world is always right, at least in part. some put too much weight on specific dates or ways in which things will come to pass, and so they are more wrong than right. others prefer to keep things vague, and so they better reflect the fact that it is always the end of the world for someone, and some day it will be the end of the world for everyone.
the thing with the sheep look up is that there are dates and countries and names, but it still is so, so show more right. it actually doesn't read so much as a prediction of what is going to happen if we don't get it together, but as a description of how things are. now. this week. today.
brunner wrote this 50 years ago.
the style reminded me a lot of peter watts, which is no surprise, since watts himself has mentioned brunner as one of his main and major influences.
style and content are there: ecocide, extraction capitalism, consumerism, chemical warfare, technology gone wrong, societal collapse. i can see now so many parallels with watts' rifters novels.
i'm rambling.
i'm just amazed by the prescience of this novel. the writing style helps, and perfectly mirrors the way we consume information nowadays. the book is a patchwork of snapshots, screencasts, conversations, headlines and traditional chapters. if brunner were writing it today, it would be a series of tweets, facebook status, podcasts, blogposts and leaked confidential documents.
and that's the thing: i didn't feel like i was reading a book so much as experiencing it. being in it.
this is not helpful, i know.
it's probably not going to convince anybody to read the book, except as a study on zeitgeist and foreknowledge.
i'm just impressed, because i've read a lot of old, classic scifi (and other stuff too), and usually, no matter how interesting the concept, condescendence comes easy: we know so much more now than when this book was written, we are so much better.
well, not here. nothing has changed in 50 years.
isn't that depressing? show less

This is an early predecessor of today's cli-fi subgenre, exploring the landscape of environmental disaster. I wanted to experience the eerie prescience of its 1972 vision: a future in which the environment's total collapse is imminent, but the American president is too obsessed with political gamesmanship and keeping out immigrants to care. The signs of that collapse ramp ever up and up: smog and oxygen masks, skin rashes, tainted drinking water, birth defects, poisoned seas and oceans, antibiotic resistance, vermin invasions, epidemics ... all that I could find missing is rising temperatures and sea levels.

Brunner worked on a near future scale, with the obvious consequences fifty years on, and this is very much a product of the 1970s. show more I suspect he researched women's inner lives, for example, by reading Playboy magazine aided largely by the pictures. Value remains in his message: a novel centered on the topic of man-made environmental disaster speaks louder to us today than does most of his other work. When one of his characters says "You can't blame the people who can't hear the warnings; you have to blame the ones who can, and who ignore them", in the 2020s it's not difficult to read the former as his contemporary readers, and the latter as potentially us.

The novel's general population seems ignorant or uncaring of the links between human activity and the chaos they suffer under, even though these links are very direct and obvious. In place of UN environmental talks, street demonstrations and Greta Thunberg, they have only terrorists and survivalists. Brunner is telling us that if we don't prioritize the environment when influencing our political sphere, nothing meaningful enough will be done. We might congratulate ourselves in a relative sense, if we ignore how uncomfortably close Brunner's vision nears as we continue to dither. It's held back from being a classic for being too much of its time, but that time has not yet entirely run out. show less

With _The Sheep Look Up_, John Brunner created a masterpiece. The book has a complex structure, which tackles a large cast of characters as they get involved in the disintegration of the world they live in. This disintegration is coming about due to a vast amount of pollution and otherwise destructive behaviors entertained by the inhabitants. Sometimes political, sometimes horrific, always biting; this is a science fiction satire that has lost very few of its teeth in the thirty years it was written. No matter that the novel's 1980s setting has come and gone, this book still hits close to home.

Well, here we are, in 2014, and when we go outside, we are very much in the world feared by John Brunner, a city planner, in 1972. I'm sure he hated being right about all this stuff. Environmental catastrophe, Big Business grinding us down into the polluted mud, and no real way to fight back easily. I find myself mourning the small number of Librarythingers who have provided themselves with the manual for the new age that this book has come to be.

I don't think this aged as well as some of the other landmarks of early dystopian science fiction. The whole thing feels like a very strong reflection of the post-Silent Spring, mid-Vietnam zeitgeist of its publication date of 1972. It's of some interest as a sort of historical document; a vivid depiction of an apocalypse that never came to pass. At the same time, though, all the detailed descriptions of specific threats make the whole thing feel quite dated. We might still have an apocalypse, but it won't be this one.
There are some good notes. The characters are sketched out well enough that I managed to keep track of almost all of them despite an absurd amount of jumping around to different viewpoints. And some themes still feel show more relevant today, like the way that environmental pressures put extra strain on race, class, and national tensions. Unfortunately, the depiction of race interactions is so clumsily antiquated that we're right back to feeling the age of the text.
It suffers from a number of non-age-related flaws as well. The plot loses its way pretty badly in the middle. Around the same time, the book starts to lean very heavily on a particular narrative device that I would have found exceedingly clever when I was in middle school but not at any point after that. I can respect this as an important work of its time, but I did not enjoy it as a book. show less

What a weird combination of eerie prescience and slapstick satire this is, for all that I'm pretty sure it was just supposed to be the latter.

The Sheep Look Up is very much a product of its time, when the Vietnam War was still raging and Rachel Carson's Silent Spring was still relatively new and shocking. As such, its view of the rest of the twentieth century -- the author's imagined future, our immediate past -- should come across as dated. There are no cell phones, no internet; computers are still big expensive things on which time must be reserved. But despite all this, the novel feels fresh as ever. Horribly, terrifyingly fresh.

I've read a lot of dystopian lit in the last few years, watched my world die and devolve in dozens of show more different ways in the (virtual) pages of all kinds of fiction. And some of those books have upset me, yes. But none have just plain scared me as much as this one did.

I finished reading and I had to rush outside and take in a deep gulp of the cold and still mostly clean night air of Cheyenne in January -- I say mostly because, well, there's an oil refinery on the south side of town, and an inversion layer like we've got going on tonight traps all that lovely sour crude smell, but at least I didn't need a filtration mask to breathe. Down in, say, Denver, though (where, incidentally, a lot of the most gruesome action in The Sheep Look Up takes place), well, they do have those smog warnings on some days, and some days I can look south and kind of see it.

The America of The Sheep Look Up is one in which no books like The Sheep Look Up ever got written, or, if they did, paid attention to. It's a grandly collapsing environmental catastrophe of the old school, where the air, water and soil have all been allowed to become so toxic that filtration masks to breathe are just the beginning; the Great Lakes are completely dead, no city's water supply is reliably safe, trace heavy metals and defoliants and pesticides contaminate even the food that is supposedly clean and organic and sold at a premium, and still the profit motive is king; even providers of global food aid expect to make a buck off it, to say nothing of those who are only too happy to get rich providing filtration masks and allegedly clean food and water purification devices.

The madness is presided over by a recently elected jackwagon of a President of the United States who is half Ronald Reagan and half George W. Bush (with a dash of Ferris F. Fremont thrown in), cavalier and clueless but quick to give the press a tough-talking John Wayne soundbite that puts all those America-hating traitors who think they should still be able to see the sun and the moon in the sky in their places. President Prexy is still hell bent on exporting the American Way of Life, by force if necessary, and seems all but unopposed in his military adventurism and his willingness to maintain the status quo at all costs.

Almost. Enter Austin Train, academic and agitator, a spiritual son of Ralph Nader whose message was even less well-received than Nader's had been at the time of this writing (1972), and who finally had a bit of a nervous breakdown and disappeared. Only wait, some people were listening, and in his name have formed a movement that some readers see as predicting the Occupiers of today. Even more marginalized than our Occupiers, though, they're all in sort of a holding pattern, struggling just to survive on a continent drowning in toxic waste, sewage and effluent, and barely holding on against drug resistant diseases, parasities, birth defects, chronic environmental disease and malnutrition. A lot of them seem barely able to hold a coherent thought in their heads; all of them are hoping that Train will come back and show them what to do.

Brunner conveys all of this in a very post-modern style, presenting us with a series of vignettes of different characters coping with this toilet of a world in different places intercut with snatches of mass media chatter that give the small, sad stories of his characters great depth and context. We get stories from both sides of the barricades, profiteers and agitators for a better world (or at least for an end to the madness, since this America may well be past the point of no return, environmentally). The plot that ties it all together is almost a whodunnit, but of course we know who did it.

Never before in life have I been so grateful to live in a world where the voices crying out against pollution and waste have not been totally marginalized. But lest I get too comfortable -- I read this book on an e-reader, that was manufactured using a pollution-intensive process, on another continent. The United States might not now, thanks to the culture of warning and concern of which novels like The Sheep Look Up have been a vital part, become the toilet this novel depicts, but that doesn't mean other places won't. There's a reason so many of our manufacturing jobs have disappeared, and that reason is the flight by pollution-causing industry to countries who don't have even our still rather lame environmental (and occupational) standards. We're still treating the planet as a toilet. We're just keeping our own bathrooms clean.

For now. show less