Le monde en 2010. Tout est informatisé, automatique, électronique. Le Réseau est accessible à partir de n'importe quelle prise téléphonique.
Et si vous êtes un petit malin, vous pouvez savoir tout sur tous.
Les plus, forts, évidemment, en savent davantage.
Jusqu'à ce que Nick Haflinger, génie de l'informatique qui compose des programmes comme Bach des cantates, décide de ruiner le Réseau.
Et y expédie des couleuvres. Ce qu'on appelait autrefois des virus. En beaucoup, beaucoup plus gros.
Ce tableau d'un univers peu utopique, qui passionnera ceux qui se méfient des ordinateurs comme ceux qu'ils font rêver, est l'un des volets de la célèbre fresque prospective de John Brunner, composée de Tous à Zanzibar, L' Orbite déchiquetée, Le Troupeau aveugle et, bien entendu , Sur l'onde de choc.
L'avenir en direct.
Le xxie siècle comme si vous y étiez. Ses Villes où les gens dorment - légalement - dans les rues, où le terrorisme est un sport et les émeutes urbaines un spectacle. Surpeuplé, démentiel, tout proche.
Un monde où l'on s'interroge sur la conscience de Shalmeneser, l'oracle électronique, et où un sociologue brillant, Chad Mulligan, prêche dans le désert.Avec ce livre-univers, John Brunner a battu sur leur propre terrain les meilleurs spécialistes de la futurologie.Tous à Zanzibar a obtenu aux Etats-Unis le prix Hugo, en France le prix Apollo, et en Grande-Bretagne le prix de l'Association britannique de science-fiction. Un classique entre les classiques.
There are seven billion-plus humans crowding the surface of 21st century Earth. It is an age of intelligent computers, mass-market psychedelic drugs, politics conducted by assassination, scientists who burn incense to appease volcanoes ... all the hysteria of a dangerously overcrowded world, portrayed in a dazzlingly inventive style.
Winner of the Hugo Award for best novel, 1969
Winner of the BSFA Award for best novel, 1969
Nineteen light years from Earth, on Sigma Draconis, an international space team stumbles upon the first evidence of another highly advanced civilization in the universe.
Tragically, however, the Draconians are extinct and have been for a hundred thousand years. What mysterious disaster destroyed man's nearest neighbour in the colossal emptiness of space? And will the same fate befall Earth?
The answers, as Earth degenerates into squabbles, paranoia and self-destruction, are vital. But how to begin the almost insuperable task of cracking the enigma of a long-buried and utterly alien culture?
A revised version of THE ASTRONAUTS MUST NOT LAND (1963). It isn't every day that the impossible happens. But when it does, and you're a witness, you have to start looking for answers. The authorities won't talk. So you decide to find out for yourself. That's what Drummond did. And when he found out. it changed the universe!
When the sleepy town of Weyharrow is enveloped by a mysterious fog, the inhabitants find themselves behaving in strange and dangerous ways. Dr Steven Glaze, a young probationary GP, prescribes a most unorthodox treatment for arthritis; the vicar proclaims in morning service that the villagers are in the hands of the devil; and Phyllis Knabbe tragically commits suicide. Throughout the village people have seemingly taken leave of their senses.
Soon word leaks out and Weharrow becomes inundated both by the national press and a bus load of hippies seeking a magical experience, who believe that a nearby ancient pagan temple is somehow responsible for this strange phenomenon. But Steven Glaze and Jenny, a reporter for the local newspaper, feel sure that there is more to this than meets the eye and they set out to discover the cause - supernatural or otherwise - of everyone's drastically altered behaviour.
The interstellar Bridge System was the greatest invention in the long history of cosmic humanity. Spread through dozens of planets, men and their societies had drifted apart in isolation until the Bridge came to link together humanity's multifold worlds . . . and had affirmed once more that all men were brothers and sisters under the skin.
But the far away world of Azreal was the exception, the one dissident world that refused the Bridge. It became the task of two agents, a man and a woman, to bring Azreal back into manshape unity, to ferret out the hidden reasons for the stubborn refusal.
The problem, with its perils and high risks, was to involve more than just secrets, for Manshape is John Brunner novel that deals with the very fabric of civilization . . .
Colonising a new planet requires much more than just settling on a newly discovered island of Old Earth. New planets were different in thousands of ways, different from Earth and from each other. Any of those differences could mean death and disaster to a human settlement.
When a ship filled with refugees from a cosmic catastrophe crash-landed on such an unmapped world, their outlook was precarious. Their ship was lost, salvage had been minor, and everything came to depend on one bright young man accidentally among them.
He was a trainee planet-builder. It would have been his job to foresee all the problems necessary to set up a safe home for humanity. But the problem was that he was a mere student - and he had been studying the wrong planet.
(First published 1974)
Inkosi - the magnificent Ridgeback
Bruno and Hermetic Tradition - a pop-rock-mod group consisting in part of Bruno Twentyman, Cressida Beggarstaff, Gideon Hard, Liz, Nancy, Glenn and others.
Dr. Tom Reedwall, who works for the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries.
Miss Felicia Beeding, a pathetically daffy old drunk, a living in a burned out house above a chalk cliff.
Joseph Leigh-Warden, a rundown journalist, mostly sour, sometimes vicious.
Sergeant Branksome and Rodge Sellers of the local constabulary.
Radio Jolly Roger - a piratical broadcasting station whose personnel sometimes fished.
And many more.
What peculiar invisibility tied these disparate types together - threatening to make them all the same? They themselves didn't know - and perhaps never would.
A hundred thousand years from now, it was discovered that a star was approaching the world on a collision course. Its discoverer, Creohan, figured there might be time to save the world if he could arouse everyone to the danger.
But the Earth had become a strange and kaleidoscopic place in that distant era. Too many empires had risen and fallen, too many cultures had spread their shattered fragments across a planet whose very maps had long since been forgotten. People were too busy with their own private dreams to pay attention to one more new alarm.
The story Creohan's effort to Catch a Falling Star is one of John Brunner's most colourful science-fiction concepts.
The Acre was the only part of an entire world where Earthmen were allowed to live as they pleased and as they were accustomed. For elsewhere on Quallavarra, humanity was forced into servitude by the Vorra, THE SUPER BARBARIANS, who has somehow managed to conquer space.
But within the Acre, the underling Terrestrials had cooked up a neat method of keeping teir conquerors from stamping them out altogether. They had uncovered a diabolical Earth secret the Vorra couldn't abide - and yet couldn't do without.
Life had become too interesting on one world crawling across the rubble-strewn arm of a spiral galaxy.
For as the system moved it swept up cosmic dust and debris. Ice ages and periods of tropical warmth followed one another very quickly. Meteors large and small fell constantly. Yesterday's fabled culture might be tomorrow's interesting hole in the ground.
But society had always endured. Many thought it always would. Only the brightest scientists admitted that to survive, the race would have to abandon the planet. And to do that they'd have to invent spacecraft . . .
This engrossing epic describes the development, over millennia, of a species from a culture of planet-bound medieval city-states to a sophisticated, technological civilization. With The Crucible of Time, John Brunner returns to the large-canvas science fiction he pioneered in his Hugo Award-winning, novel Stand on Zanzibar.
First published in 1982.
He was 'The Visitor' . . .
in a society revolutionised and troubled by a transportation device that let you walk through a door and be anywhere in the world - instantly.
He was 'The Visitor' . . .
at a time when unauthorised travel had caused the violent deaths of countless millions and the survivors were quaking in fear.
He was 'The Visitor' . . .
in a world where the invasion of privacy was the ultimate crime and where his obsession with visiting places where he had no right to be led him on a perilous adventure towards his own destruction.
A stardropper got its name from the belief that the user was eavesdropping on the stars. But that was only a guess . . . nobody really knew what the instrument did.
The instrument itself made no sense scientifically. A conventional earpiece, an amplifier, a power source - all attached to a small vacuum box, an alnico magnet, and a calibrated 'tuner'. What you got from all this was some very extraordinary noises and the conviction that you were listening to beings from space and could almost understand what you were hearing.
What brought Special Agent Dan Cross into the stardropper problem was the carefully censored news that users of the instrument had begun to disappear. They popped out of existence suddenly - and the world's leaders began to suspect that somehow the fad had lit the fuse on a bomb that would either destroy the world or change it forever.
(First published 1972)
The far-flung fingers of Earth's civilisation touched many corners of the galaxy, and among them was the beautiful planet Yan. Here the colonists lived a peaceful, almost idyllic life, amid ancient and secret relics, co-existing with their strange and compatible neighbours.
The arrival of Gregory Chart, the greatest dramatist ever, whose productions were played out in the skies, and whose actors were also the audience, could only disrupt and destroy once the Yanfolk were aroused from their dreaming indifference . . .
(First published 1972)
If the past is tampered with, the present might be totally transformed. So the whole fabric of reality depends on the watchful efforts of the Society of Time. Don Miguel Navarro is a junior officer in this force dedicated to defending the Spanish Empire and the mother church from the results of meddling in history by time-travellers.
But he begins to wonder just how dedicated the Society really is when he has to deal with a case of corruption involving fellow officers . . .
After he has to rescue the entire court from death at the hands of Amazon warriors brought through time, his greatest trial becomes unavoidable. Facing a threat to the most vulnerable event in his world's history, can the young Don prevent catastrophe?
Or will the glorious triumph of the Spanish Armada never have occurred?
(First published 1969)
Matthew Flamen, the last of the networks' spoolpigeons, is desperate for a big story. He needs it to keep his audience - and his job. And there is no shortage of possibilities: the Gottschalk cartel is fomenting trouble among the knees in order to sell their latest armaments to the blanks; which ties in nicely with the fact that something big id brewing with the X Patriots; and it looks as if the inconceivable is about to happen and that one of Britain's most dangerous revolutionaries is going to be given a visa to enter America. And then there's the story that just falls into his lap. The one that suggests that the respected Director of the New York State Mental Hospital is a charlatan.
Winner of the BSFA Award for best novel, 1970
Once the city of Carrig stood supreme on this planet that had been settled by space refugees in the distant, forgotten past. From every corner of this primitive lost world caravans came to trade - and to view the great King-Hunt, the gruesome test by which the people of Carrig chose their rulers.
Then from space came new arrivals. And with them came their invincible death guns and their ruthless, all-powerful tyranny.
Now there would be no King-Hunt in Carrig, or hope for the planet-unless a fool-hardy high-born named Saikmar and a beautiful Earthling space-spy named Maddalena, could do the impossible . . .
(First published 1969)
It was carnival time on Earth. Prosperity was at its peak; science had triumphed over environment; all human needs were taken care of by computers, robots and androids. There was nothing left for humans to do but enjoy, themselves . . . to seek pleasure where they found it, without inhibitions and without thinking of the price.
Then an android died - in a senseless, brutal murder. And young Derry Horn was shocked out of his boredom and alienation. His life of flabby ease had not prepared him for a fantastically dangerous mission to outlying, primitive stars - but now, at last, he had a reason for living. And even when he found himself a prisoner of ruthless slavers, even when he learned the shocking truth about what the androids really were and where they came from . . . even when he saw all the laws of the orderly, civilised universe he knew turned upside-down and inside-out . . . he fought on.
For that universe had to be shattered and reborn - even if Derry Horn and the Earth he had irrevocably left behind died in the process!
(First published 1968)
She appeared in our world naked, defenceless, unable to say a word anyone could understand.
Her origin was at first simply a puzzle, then a scientific enigma, and finally a series of terrifying surmises that her most fascinated investigator was afraid to probe. But probe he must, for somehow he knew that this strange girl was a key to the kind of information science had sought for centuries. But the more he uncovered from the depths of her mind, the deeper became the quicksand into which his own was sinking.
(First published 1967)
Until he became an alcoholic, Murray Douglas was one of Britain's leading actors. Now, after treatment, he's ready to resume his career, but his first come-back part isn't exactly what he thought it would be.
The idea was to create an avant-garde play where the actors made up the script as they rehearsed. Unusual but hardly frightening. What was frightening was the rest of the cast. Like Murray, they all had some kind of craving. And each of them was given access to whatever had addicted them.
It was doubtful if the play would ever entertain the public. But it seemed to entertain the director . . .
(First published 1967)
The time was the unguessably remote past - or perhaps the distant future. Throughout the universe, Chaos ruled. Scientific laws of cause and effect held no force; men could not know from one day to the next what to expect from their labours, and even hope seemed foolish.
In this universe there was one man to whom had been entrusted the task of bringing reason and order out of Chaos. He was a quiet man dressed in black who carried a staff made of light, and wherever he went the powers of Chaos swirled around him, buffeted him, tested him. He fought them, and little by little he drove them back.
But the Traveller in Black himself belonged to the anti-science universe. If he succeeded in his task of changing the order of the cosmos, could he continue to live?
(First published 1971)
Ciudad de Vados was the pride of Latin America - a gleaming city of the future where only ten years before there had been barren rock and wasteland.
But Vados had problems. When Boyd Hakluyt was called in, his brief seemed simple: reroute the traffic to drive out the shanty towns that disfigured the city. It was an easy job - until Hakluyt found himself unwillingly involved in a web of deadly political rivalries. Then came the first murder . . .
Hakluyt started getting answers to questions he hadn't asked. Too many people got too interested in him. And the pattern that started emerging was sinister, terrifying - and almost unbelievable . . .
First published in 1965.
The Corps Galactica, the Galaxy's police force, had pledged itself to a policy of non-interference with the backward Zarathustra Refugee Planets.
Langenschmidt, the Corps chief on the planet Cyclops, was content with this ruling. After all, if the refugee planets could form their own civilizations from scratch, logically they would come up with cultures suited to their own needs.
However, when the case of Justin Kolb came to his attention, Langenschmidt was forced to rethink the problem. Kolb's accident with the wolfshark revealed to the Corps' medicos the leg-graft that had been performed on him. It was a perfect match - only its gene-pattern wasn't Cyclopean, and limb-grafting wasn't practised on Cyclops.
Where had the leg come from, who had been the unknown repairmen, and wasn't this something that might be violating galactic law?
(First published 1965)
