John Brunner (novelist) - Literary Works

Literary Works

At first writing conventional space opera, he later began to experiment with the novel form. His 1968 novel Stand on Zanzibar, about overpopulation, won the 1969 Hugo Award for best science fiction novel. It also won the BSFA award the same year. It exploits the fragmented organizational style John Dos Passos invented for his U.S.A. trilogy, but updates it in terms of the theory of media popularized by Marshall McLuhan. The Jagged Orbit won the BSFA award in 1970. The Sheep Look Up (1972) was a prophetic warning of ecological disaster. Brunner is credited with coining the term worm and predicting the emergence of computer viruses in his 1975 novel The Shockwave Rider, in which he used the term to describe software which reproduces itself across a computer network. His pen names include K. H. Brunner, Gill Hunt, John Loxmith, Trevor Staines, and Keith Woodcott.

As well as his fiction, he wrote many unpaid articles in a variety of publications, particularly fanzines, but also 13 letters to the New Scientist and an article in Physics Education. Brunner was an active member of the organization Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and wrote the words to The H-Bomb's Thunder which was sung on the Aldermaston Marches. He was a linguist and Guest of Honour at the first European Science Fiction Convention Eurocon-1 in Trieste in 1972.