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Children of the Thunder (1988)

Tekijä: John Brunner

Muut tekijät: Katso muut tekijät -osio.

JäseniäKirja-arvostelujaSuosituimmuussijaKeskimääräinen arvioMaininnat
301486,589 (3.25)6
In CHILDREN OF THE THUNDER, Brunner creates another near-contemporary vision of a world gone awry and proposes a peculiarly disturbing and frightening solution. Starting separately, a small number of very smart and uniquely talented children, none more than fourteen years old, create lucrative designer drugs, kill a Marine commando in unarmed combat, run a sex-ring of chilling depravity. None of them are even punished for their crimes. Combine powers of mental control and irresistible suggestion with creative and completely amoral intelligence and you have the recipe for a super-race of world-savers--or for the subjugation of all humanity to a new form of collective evil. "One of the most important science fiction authors. Brunner held a mirror up to reflect our foibles because he wanted to save us from ourselves." --SF Site For each generation, there is a writer meant to bend the rules of what we know. Hugo Award winner (Best Novel, STAND ON ZANZIBAR) and British science fiction master John Brunner remains one of the most influential and respected authors of all time, and now E-Reads is pleased to re-introduce many of his classic works. For readers familiar with his vision, it's a chance to re-examine his thoughtful worlds and words, while for new readers, Brunner's work proves itself the very definition of timeless. … (lisätietoja)
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    Resurrection Day (tekijä: Brendan DuBois) (Sassm)
    Sassm: These books are quite different in terms of story-type and writing style, but the settings have a similar feel - a sort of dystopic rundown shabbyness. Both are entertaining works with a definite grim streak. I think that someone who enjoyed this would probably enjoy Resurrection Day.… (lisätietoja)
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näyttää 4/4
review of
John Brunner's Children of Thunder
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - December 23, 2013

This might be called Brunner's 'Demon Seed' novel, it centers around exceptionally successfully manipulative children. I'm reminded of the grim picture of children in the background of his Players at the Game of People (1980) (see my review here: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/147542.Players_at_the_Game_of_People ) & of Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange (1962), wch I've read, & of John Wyndham's The Midwich Cuckoos (1957) (filmed as Village of the Damned), wch I probably haven't read but wch I might've experienced in movie form.

As is typical of so many of my reviews of Brunner novels, I find it difficult to write about w/o spoiling the plot for interested readers. However, it's 'safe' to quote from the 1st page's promotional excerpt:

"Crystal Knight was thirteen, and she didn't mind saying so to her johns. To the police, of course, she indignantly claimed she was sixteen. She knew there wasn't going to be any argument. For some reason she couldn't fathom, she'd grown very good at persuading people to do as she wanted.

"Not long after she embarked on her career she'd even talked a drunk, sadistic john out of slashing her with a knife . . . and into turning it on himself. For the rest of her life, she would be able to visualize again that squalid room, that rumpled bed, liter after liter of blood spewing out, so red, so red . . ."

This is the 1st post-AIDS Brunner novel I've read, its copyright date is 1988, & AIDS has a substantial presence: "Yet another group of famine-desperate black refugees had penetrated the cordon sanitaire the South Africans maintained along their northern border, and duly been shot down on the grounds they were "biological warfare vectors" . . . There was no doubt who was going to win this particular war of attrition: the Afrikaners, like other wealthy advanced nations, had the AIDS vaccine while their opponents just had AIDS." (p 11) As w/ Brunner's groundbreaking The Sheep Look Up (see my review here: http://www.goodreads.com/story/show/344636-a-review-of-john-brunner-s-ecological... ), humans are destroying the planet in short order & the children may be a reaction against this or a major contribution to it.

In Brunner's future, email is here but voice-mail isn't, "he remembered he had checked neither his answering machine nor his email" (p 21), "Maybe email would be more interesting. His modem still being up, he entered his net-code and dumped the contents of his mailbox into local memory." (p 22) "The rest was junk mail. Thank goodness they'd been forced to abandon the idea of billing users for incoming messages!" (p 22) "Some day he was going to buy one of those new gadgets that wiped junk automatically unless countermanded." (p 22)

There's also Minitel, wch I 1st read of in a bk about French artist ORLAN (see my review here: http://www.goodreads.com/story/show/315420-orlan-review?chapter=1 ): Admittedly, it would be a lot more fun to log on to Minitel—he understood French pretty well—and spend a while with AMY or AMANDINE or one of the other erotica service, the like of which had never been permitted in Britain although they thrived across the Channel." (p 23)

The dismal presence of the Reagan-era fundamentalism plays a major background role: "At first they related to attempts by fundamentalists to take over major centers of American education, using the vast monetary leverage they had accumulated as the millennium approached and the faithful grew less and less confident that the Rapture would save them seven years before the onset of Armageddon." (pp 58-59) ""The funders moved in with an offer of a million-dollar endowment for a department of 'creation science'"—she made the quote marks audible—"on condition that funding for my sabbatical was withdrawn and my tenure cancelled." / ""Can they do that? I thought once you had tenure—"" (p 105) Can they do that? Ask political conceptual artist Adrian Piper: "For her refusal to return to the United States while listed as a Suspicious Traveler on the U.S. Transportation Security Administration’s Watch List, Wellesley College forcibly terminated her tenured full professorship in philosophy in 2008." ( http://www.adrianpiper.com/biography.shtml )

The reader is warned against secret police computer censorship:

"And even as he pursed his lips, the lines on the screen wiggled into illegibility for a moment, then reformed as garbage. He jumped to his feet, abruptly furious.

"The bastards! The bastards!

"He recognized the warning. Special Branch (or SIS, or whichever—there wasn't much distinction between the various British police agencies any longer) had been prompt to obey Big Brother at Langley. Here were data the ordinary citizen of the UK was not supposed to access." - p 59

While I certainly found this Brunner to be stimulating & like that it's the longest of his bks that I've read yet (I usually like long as an opportunity for greater detail to develop), it was, alas, entirely too predictable. When I got to "who knew so much about advances in modern science and had suggested that Constanza visit England, where doctors were making amazing new discoveries in the field of infertility. / "The treatment had been like a miracle! Within a month or her return she had come smiling to him to report her pregnancy." (p 92), I wrote a note to myself: "Exactly the explanation I've been waiting for!" In other words, none of the big surprises were a surprise at all.

Since I think some of these 'revelations' are pretty obvious from the get-go, I don't feel like I'm 'spoiling' by quoting another crucial part: ""Not one of them is the natural child of his or her ostensible father. They were all conceived by artinsem. Or, as you may have known it before its initials clashed with a well-known disease, AID."" (p 131) HOWEVER, I stop there. There's one other quote that I cd add that clinched the predictability of it all, & it's very tempting to quote it, but that really wd be spoiling it.

Brunner has the potentially sympathetic characters ultimately compromised in ways that make them unsympathetic - even the investigative reporter comes down quite a few notches b/c of his neglect of his daughter. An Italian farmer who might be initially admirable is shown to be an intolerant & violent despot. "And lately it had emerged that for some reason to do with fertilizers or other chemicals, or some such kind of modern aids to husbandry which Renato had enthusiastically adopted under Fabio's guidance, the buyer from Genoa whose firm had for half a century purchased olive oil from the Tessolari estate at an advantageous price, had this year offered more to the cooperative, on the grounds that theirs could be exported to the health-conscious USA as "organically" grown. / "This was of course an affront not to be tolerated." (p 95)

The construction of the Channel Tunnel, or "Chunnel", wd've just started when this bk was written (even tho it was conceived of as early as 1802) & didn't get finished until 1994, 5 yrs after this was published. Here, "more doubt had been cast on the viability of the Chunnel by a psychiatrist who had carried out tests at the Fréjus runnel under the Alps on a group of long-distance lorry-drivers, normally supposed to be a stolid bunch. A third of them had declined to complete the four successive runs that he had asked of them, because they had developed claustrophobia." (p 103)

The success of the manipulation of the children ties in w/ the onset of puberty. In the case of the girls, their menstrual cycle effects it.

"Later, to Matthew and Doreen's horror, the police confiscated the contents of the drawer in Tracy's bedside table, calling them stolen goods. Yet, when the case came to court, it was the other girls who were reprimanded and put on probation, and ordered to return everything to the defiant Tracy, still wearing plaster on her many wounds.

"That, though, was in the middle of her month.

"It was her greatest triumph so far. In between wheedling her parents around to the view that she absolutely must move to a different school—which wasn't hard—she savored the discovery that her "magic" could be made to work on adults, too.

"Provided, of course, the time was right." - p 111

Each chapter begins w/ an italicized TV news report text that sets the mood for the chaos & for the rise to political power of a race-baiting & ultra-militarist figure: "Many claim they were beaten up because they weren't wearing the red-white-and-blue ribbons lately adopted by supporters of General Thrower." (p 121)

Of course, some of the news is faked & one character calls out another for doing this: ""The first time a hoax like that was pulled, as I recall, was during the Spanish-American War." (p 165) That one was William Randolph Hearst's baby.

Much of the dystopia in the novel reflects what were then current events in the US. In 1985, President Reagan visited a cemetery near Bitburg in Germany to honor dead German soldiers as a diplomatic move to indicate that Germany & the US were now allies who had left their enemy past behind. Unfortunately, many of the soldiers thus 'honored' were SS, the elite of the genocidal nazi forces. "Speaking in West Germany at a rally organized by descendants of servicemen who dies in World War II, General Sir Hampton Thrower praised the valiant spirit of the fallen . . ." (p 199)

W/o giving away the page number, there's one quote that I can give wch doesn't exactly spoil anything & wch does sum up nicely a philosophical thread: ""We cannot afford the luxury known as a conscience. The enemy we are up against certainly doesn't have one, so we are obliged to be absolutely rational."" ( )
  tENTATIVELY | Apr 3, 2022 |
A very slow-moving dystopian tale. Here the imagined future projects the late 80s. AIDS, facism and corporate environmental vandalism are the themes. Bulletin boards, pay-phones, email and early Internet hacking are the tools. Journalist Peter Levin teams up with academic Claudia Morris to search for a clutch of mysterious children who can seemingly get away with crimes.

This book took a long time to set up, the investigation was painfully slow, and the conclusion was obvious (to me at least) for a long time. Each of the children had a section but ultimately their differences did not matter. I found the interlude TV reports repetitive and annoying. ( )
  questbird | Jul 7, 2021 |
Some reactions of mine upon reading this novel in 1989.

This book is sort of the '80's version of Wyndham's The Midwich Cuckoos. Here the children are mutations who will take the world over for themselves and, maybe, save us in the bargain.

I have mixed feelings about this book. I'm not sure whether my reaction is what Brunner intended. Brunner may be posing an ethical dilemna at novel's end: Is the brutality, scheming, manipulation of the children justified to save humanity and produce a better world? (Put another, balder, way it's a classic but modern question: Is terrorism ever justified?). Or he may be stating that we deserve the children's maleovelence for our short sightedness and callousness. If that is Brunner's unpleasant statement then I heartily disagree. If we are to feel sorry for the children (or, at least, empathize with them), to be put on trial by our creations, our future, for sins of the past and to feel it is morally justified, Brunner fails.

For one thing, Brunner's children seem quite sociopathic in seeking excuses for their murderous actions outside themeselves. Others are "victims" of their parents. Perhaps the children bring disaster with their self-prescribed solutions. If that's Brunner's point -- and I don't think it is -- it's done with enough subtlety as to be almost invisible.

Perhaps Brunner, in his traditional way, is writing a cautionary tale. He is not justifying the children perhaps as much as documenting the vehement hatred the next generation will revile us if we keep up our ways. If that wasn't his intent, Brunner wrote either an ambivalent novel or a very distasteful one.

Brunner used his skill at laying out a lot of background exposition in a casual way. Yet, the effort seemed less casual, less skillful (limited to TV broadcasts and asides), less mosaic than his The Jagged Orbit (although this novel had a much clearer ending). The characterization was good but nothing exceptional as were the shifting viewpoints (again, a technique better used in The Jagged Orbit).

I had two main problems with the technical parts of the novel -- as opposed to the emotional problems listed above. First, the novel seemed too contrivedly gloomy. The disasters came too fast, too frequently without respite to be entirely believable. Nothing good happens in this future; technology provides no hope, only harm. Secondly, the revelations about some of the characters are intended to be surprising but are really obvious early on.

Finally, incredibly persuasive, mind-reading children are nothing terribly new in sf. I did like Brunner's insightful look at computer's effects on our lives (here he delves into the related areas of surveillance and intelligence agencies) and his extrapolations of social institutions like Neighborhood Watches under increasing totalitarianism. In fact, I found of the novel's best features to be Brunner's casual, understated look at life in a virtual police state. Brunner's characters valiantly carry on. ( )
  RandyStafford | Jun 16, 2012 |
Alternate chapters in this novel tell the stories of a group of teenagers with extraordinary charisma who use it to get what teenagers all over the world want: their own way. The second set of chapters tell the story of a popular science journalist trying to survive in an increasingly dystopian England. He has heard rumors about the teenagers and is trying to track them down.

The best thing about this book were the dystopian aspects. Written in 1988, there are news headlines that could have been written yesterday. In fact, at one point in reading the book, I found myself looking in the New York Times for a follow-up to one of the news stories which I finally remembered had been in the book.

However the story itself isn't all that interesting. I didn't like the teenagers. The journalist and his friends were somewhat more interesting, but they don't do a whole lot. There is a mystery about how the children got their powers and what they're going to do with them, which kept me reading. Still I didn't find the end satisfying and I'm not likely to read it again. ( )
1 ääni aulsmith | Aug 16, 2008 |
näyttää 4/4
ei arvosteluja | lisää arvostelu

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Englanninkielinen Wikipedia (2)

In CHILDREN OF THE THUNDER, Brunner creates another near-contemporary vision of a world gone awry and proposes a peculiarly disturbing and frightening solution. Starting separately, a small number of very smart and uniquely talented children, none more than fourteen years old, create lucrative designer drugs, kill a Marine commando in unarmed combat, run a sex-ring of chilling depravity. None of them are even punished for their crimes. Combine powers of mental control and irresistible suggestion with creative and completely amoral intelligence and you have the recipe for a super-race of world-savers--or for the subjugation of all humanity to a new form of collective evil. "One of the most important science fiction authors. Brunner held a mirror up to reflect our foibles because he wanted to save us from ourselves." --SF Site For each generation, there is a writer meant to bend the rules of what we know. Hugo Award winner (Best Novel, STAND ON ZANZIBAR) and British science fiction master John Brunner remains one of the most influential and respected authors of all time, and now E-Reads is pleased to re-introduce many of his classic works. For readers familiar with his vision, it's a chance to re-examine his thoughtful worlds and words, while for new readers, Brunner's work proves itself the very definition of timeless. 

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