A review by trevorjameszaple
The Sheep Look Up by John Brunner
5.0
When I finished this book I went outside and took a deep breath of clean air. I then went inside, walked upstairs, and poured myself a glass of water from the tap. I drank it without compunction. It was tasty.
Don't get me wrong; Brunner isn't wrong. It might be the 2080s he's describing instead of the 1980s, but this is a path we could be on. Granted, we've cleaned up our act a lot since 1972; despite environmental disasters (oil spills, nuclear meltdowns) the oceans still live, the Mediterranean isn't a stinking cesspool, and you can still trust the water that comes out of the tap in the Western world. You can breathe the air without a filter in L.A., and you can walk outside in the rain in New York. Of course, thanks to Deng Xao Ping and the greed-is-good mantra of multinational corporations, the manufacturing base has moved to the Far East, where they are now facing air quality the approaches Brunner's depictions of California. Consequently, China may face Brunner's future much sooner than the rest of us, although green technology is likely to be a growth industry throughout the rest of the 21st Century.
Brunner's book has some definitely dated moments (the hippie vibe of the resistance movement, the strength of black militancy which abated sharply following the introduction of crack cocaine to urban ghettos) but overall it is a frightening prediction of an all-too-plausible future, where one environmental mistake snowballs into the collapse of the United States. A popular and prescient read at the time, it's still required reading for anyone who feels the need to worry at the future and our own existence in it.
Don't get me wrong; Brunner isn't wrong. It might be the 2080s he's describing instead of the 1980s, but this is a path we could be on. Granted, we've cleaned up our act a lot since 1972; despite environmental disasters (oil spills, nuclear meltdowns) the oceans still live, the Mediterranean isn't a stinking cesspool, and you can still trust the water that comes out of the tap in the Western world. You can breathe the air without a filter in L.A., and you can walk outside in the rain in New York. Of course, thanks to Deng Xao Ping and the greed-is-good mantra of multinational corporations, the manufacturing base has moved to the Far East, where they are now facing air quality the approaches Brunner's depictions of California. Consequently, China may face Brunner's future much sooner than the rest of us, although green technology is likely to be a growth industry throughout the rest of the 21st Century.
Brunner's book has some definitely dated moments (the hippie vibe of the resistance movement, the strength of black militancy which abated sharply following the introduction of crack cocaine to urban ghettos) but overall it is a frightening prediction of an all-too-plausible future, where one environmental mistake snowballs into the collapse of the United States. A popular and prescient read at the time, it's still required reading for anyone who feels the need to worry at the future and our own existence in it.