Stop, you're killing me (a book review)
The first thing I have to tell you is that "The Sheep Look Up" by John Brunner is a really good book. I'm going to quibble a bit in this review, but let me tell you up front that this is well-written, with a tight plot that emerges in a wonderful collage style of writing. It's deeply literate yet easy to read.
It's a dystopian novel set roughly in 1984 (which isn't specified, but the allusion is easy to guess). It was probably written in the late 1960's and reading it 40+ years later it holds up surprisingly well.The author extrapolated a great many trends in this novel and some are dead on: the sexual references must have seemed shocking in the 1960's: gays and lesbians and bi's, lots of venereal disease, references to masturbation and shockingly revealing clothes. Yes, he got that part right. The lack of nutrition in the bulk of items sold as "food" is another dead-on hit. So is the water scarcity of clean water, and the child-free movement. He caught that the media would be the boot-licking lackeys of the government. He realized that the cost of medical care would be a huge part of future budgets.
He missed the communication revolution: people have land lines and no one finds out that an earthquake is about to roll over them by getting a tweet a few seconds before it hits. Also, the author puzzlingly appears to think that women's lib is a passing fad that went out of style before 1984. Uh, sure. (Niven thought this in Lucifer's Hammer, too.) He also missed climate change, although he alluded to more frequent earthquakes, so he sort of got that concept.
The basic premise is that Evil Corporations and Evil Government have ruined the land. Overuse of antibiotics have made all diseases resistant. Overuse of pesticide made pests more vicious and harder to kill. (Everyone has lice and rats, for example.) Overused defoliants and herbicides are running around in the rain cycle killing food crops. Acid rain ruins clothing. Smog ruins lungs. Lead is making children dumb. Through-out the book there is a cascading range of illnesses and breakdowns in the natural world: crop failure and dysentery and poisoned water and deformed children. It's Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring" taken to the final level where the cascade of failure ends.
One of my pet peeves is when innocent victims are victimized by evil geniuses. Seriously, no one is THAT good at central planning. The customers have a HUGE hand in this when they deliberately CHOOSE to buy things to misuse. Yes, there's a role for government safety standards, but the guy making the microwave with the bad seal wasn't evil, it was a quality control failure. (Probably because he had the shits.)
Furthermore, the government that didn't do the toxic waste cleanup was made up of citizens JUST LIKE THE HEROES of the story. You can't point a finger at "government officials" without having three other fingers point back at you. Seriously, bad government is what happens when everyone thinks they're a victim and no one actually DOES anything to help. The Town Water Commission in My Small Town is entirely staffed by volunteers. In the spring they walk around and do testing and charting of town wetlands. If you think wetlands are important, how about you volunteer? But this concept is not anywhere in this book. This book was all about how the little people have been BETRAYED by their Overlords who didn't take better care of them.
Furthermore, it was limited to the United States. The socialist countries didn't have capitalism run amok and largely escaped environmental degradation as a result. (LOL - seen China lately?)
I lived through the entire era of his future. We cleaned up the stack emissions and reduced the acid rain. We banned DDT. We started using ladybugs and beetle traps. Backyard beekeeping became trendy to help the little critters along. The sewage treatment plants pay attention to the oxygen demand of the treated wastewater as it goes into the rivers: it needs to not suck all the oxygen out of the ecosystem. Our rivers are alive. Our oceans are alive. Our air sucks in LA, but it's pretty sweet everywhere else. Yes, we have resistant MRSA, but we also have liver transplants.
I thought this was an excellent characterization of the concepts I share: if you don't change the path you're on then you're likely to end up where you're going. It was thought-provoking. I also really liked the style of the book, made up with lots of snippets that were all interwoven, notes from the trenches that emerged into a coherent theme. I see the world like that, too, always trying to make sense of the trends I see emerging.
But it was too cynical, too powerless, too annoyingly anti-American. Americans are not the only people who exploit the commons. (That group would be the Humans.) The foundation under his assertions that culture wars would develop where some Americans think pollution is hunky dory and others don't? I found that a bit ridiculous. In my world, fighting against environmental contamination is a knee-jerk reaction that the Great Unwashed Masses take even when the environmental impact is worth it. (I.E., install windmills that might hurt bats to avoid burning coal that kills coal miners and ruins air quality... they come out AGAINST the wind mills because it's the new hazard they're not familiar with.) We can't site any new power plants or oil refineries in the United States. This is not a country that is timid about asking for clean air.
So someone who self-identified as a victim would have found this quite a call to righteous indignation. Someone (not me) should get on this, right away! The motto, "stop, you're killing me" just never got revised to "I'm going to stop doing harmful things myself", which happens to be a position each individual has the power to implement. The book fell short there. The ending involves, essentially, a Christ-figure getting crucified for their sins to save them. Uh, sure. Isn't that handy.
It's a dystopian novel set roughly in 1984 (which isn't specified, but the allusion is easy to guess). It was probably written in the late 1960's and reading it 40+ years later it holds up surprisingly well.The author extrapolated a great many trends in this novel and some are dead on: the sexual references must have seemed shocking in the 1960's: gays and lesbians and bi's, lots of venereal disease, references to masturbation and shockingly revealing clothes. Yes, he got that part right. The lack of nutrition in the bulk of items sold as "food" is another dead-on hit. So is the water scarcity of clean water, and the child-free movement. He caught that the media would be the boot-licking lackeys of the government. He realized that the cost of medical care would be a huge part of future budgets.
He missed the communication revolution: people have land lines and no one finds out that an earthquake is about to roll over them by getting a tweet a few seconds before it hits. Also, the author puzzlingly appears to think that women's lib is a passing fad that went out of style before 1984. Uh, sure. (Niven thought this in Lucifer's Hammer, too.) He also missed climate change, although he alluded to more frequent earthquakes, so he sort of got that concept.
The basic premise is that Evil Corporations and Evil Government have ruined the land. Overuse of antibiotics have made all diseases resistant. Overuse of pesticide made pests more vicious and harder to kill. (Everyone has lice and rats, for example.) Overused defoliants and herbicides are running around in the rain cycle killing food crops. Acid rain ruins clothing. Smog ruins lungs. Lead is making children dumb. Through-out the book there is a cascading range of illnesses and breakdowns in the natural world: crop failure and dysentery and poisoned water and deformed children. It's Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring" taken to the final level where the cascade of failure ends.
One of my pet peeves is when innocent victims are victimized by evil geniuses. Seriously, no one is THAT good at central planning. The customers have a HUGE hand in this when they deliberately CHOOSE to buy things to misuse. Yes, there's a role for government safety standards, but the guy making the microwave with the bad seal wasn't evil, it was a quality control failure. (Probably because he had the shits.)
Furthermore, the government that didn't do the toxic waste cleanup was made up of citizens JUST LIKE THE HEROES of the story. You can't point a finger at "government officials" without having three other fingers point back at you. Seriously, bad government is what happens when everyone thinks they're a victim and no one actually DOES anything to help. The Town Water Commission in My Small Town is entirely staffed by volunteers. In the spring they walk around and do testing and charting of town wetlands. If you think wetlands are important, how about you volunteer? But this concept is not anywhere in this book. This book was all about how the little people have been BETRAYED by their Overlords who didn't take better care of them.
Furthermore, it was limited to the United States. The socialist countries didn't have capitalism run amok and largely escaped environmental degradation as a result. (LOL - seen China lately?)
I lived through the entire era of his future. We cleaned up the stack emissions and reduced the acid rain. We banned DDT. We started using ladybugs and beetle traps. Backyard beekeeping became trendy to help the little critters along. The sewage treatment plants pay attention to the oxygen demand of the treated wastewater as it goes into the rivers: it needs to not suck all the oxygen out of the ecosystem. Our rivers are alive. Our oceans are alive. Our air sucks in LA, but it's pretty sweet everywhere else. Yes, we have resistant MRSA, but we also have liver transplants.
I thought this was an excellent characterization of the concepts I share: if you don't change the path you're on then you're likely to end up where you're going. It was thought-provoking. I also really liked the style of the book, made up with lots of snippets that were all interwoven, notes from the trenches that emerged into a coherent theme. I see the world like that, too, always trying to make sense of the trends I see emerging.
But it was too cynical, too powerless, too annoyingly anti-American. Americans are not the only people who exploit the commons. (That group would be the Humans.) The foundation under his assertions that culture wars would develop where some Americans think pollution is hunky dory and others don't? I found that a bit ridiculous. In my world, fighting against environmental contamination is a knee-jerk reaction that the Great Unwashed Masses take even when the environmental impact is worth it. (I.E., install windmills that might hurt bats to avoid burning coal that kills coal miners and ruins air quality... they come out AGAINST the wind mills because it's the new hazard they're not familiar with.) We can't site any new power plants or oil refineries in the United States. This is not a country that is timid about asking for clean air.
So someone who self-identified as a victim would have found this quite a call to righteous indignation. Someone (not me) should get on this, right away! The motto, "stop, you're killing me" just never got revised to "I'm going to stop doing harmful things myself", which happens to be a position each individual has the power to implement. The book fell short there. The ending involves, essentially, a Christ-figure getting crucified for their sins to save them. Uh, sure. Isn't that handy.