review of
John Brunner's Now Then
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - April 28, 2014

"After a lot of discussion we arrived at the conclusion that, were someone to make a serious attempt at forecasting the events of the year 2000—political, social, technological—he would have to spend at least two years simply gathering facts before putting a word on paper; then during the 6 months the book would take to write, things would happen to invalidate his careful prophecies." - from Brunner's PREFACE, p vii

I don't know when Brunner wrote the above-quoted preface but I reckon it was 1965, the date of the original publishing of this bk. Brunner goes on to use this statement as a buttress for the novella form used here in the 3 stories in the bk. None of them particularly 'forecasts' its future. That aside, I think Brunner succeeded in prophesizing in the research-backed manner described above in his The Sheep Look Up (1972) so I think he took his own pessimistic statement as a challenge that he rose to.

Back to Now Then: for Brunner enthusiasts, this will be a collection of note if for no other reason than that it has as its last story, Thou Good and Faithful, the 1st story Brunner ever sold to a science-fiction magazine when he was still a teenager. I was 13 when I submitted a story to Analog magazine, my 1st & only submission to a SF mag. It was rejected. My story deserved the rejection (altho I wish I still had a copy of it!), Brunner's definitely deserved its acceptance.

The 1st tale is "Some Lapse of Time".

"The disease which had killed Jimmy was one of the latest to be identified. Max knew the man who had given it its name—had studied under him, in fact. he called it heterochylia, because the poison which jaundiced the skin, discoloured the whites of the eyes and eventually so disturbed the nervous system that death resulted, was found in the chyle—the fluid which transfers ingested fats from the small intestine to the bloodstream. Jimmy's chyle had been typical: thick, discoloured, foul-smelling at the autopsy. A compound had appeared in it which made it biologically useless.

"How such diseases occurred: that too was beginning to be known. They were among the statistically most likely consequences of radiation gene-damage; a mere nudge could disturb the delicate structure responsible for conveying the complex information about normal metabolism." - p 14

I made a feeble attempt to find a definition for "heterochylia" online & got alotof prmises of Arabic-to-English translations that led 'nowhere'. I wanted to know if Brunner invented this disease. I'm none the wiser.

The 2nd tale, "Imprint of Chaos", justifies the bk's cover copy: "science fantasy" - in other words, this is the 2nd thing I've read by Brunner that's sortof Sword & Sorcery. The 1st one being his The Space-Time Juggler. "Imprint of Chaos" begins:

"He had many names, but one nature, and this unique nature made him subject to certain laws not binding upon ordinary persons. In compensatory fashion, he was also free from certain other laws more commonly in force.

"Still, there was nothing to choose as regards rigidly between his particular set of laws and those others. And one rule by which he had very strictly to abide was that at set seasons he should overlook that portion of the All which had been allotted to him as his individual responsibility." - p 60

A 'God'? Do you, dear reader, ever think about what you might be a 'God' in relation to? Everytime I find a stinkbug in my house I scoop it onto a moveable flat surface & take it to an egress, usually a window, & put it outside. I like to imagine the stinkbugs having a myth about a 'God' who delivers them from the world-of-famine (my house) to the world-of-plenty (the outdoors where there's lots of tasty vegetation).

"Laprivan heaved in his underground prison, and the road shook. Cracks wide enough to have swallowed a farm-cart appeared in its surface. From them, a great voice boomed.

"'What do you want of me, today of all days? Have you not had enough even now of tormenting me?'

"'I do not torment you,' was the calm reply. 'It is your memory that torments you.'

"'Leave me be, then,' said the great voice sullenly. 'Let me go on wiping away that memory.'

"'As you wish, so be it,' the traveller answered, and gestured with his staff. The cracks in the road closed again; the dust-devils re-formed, and when he looked back from the crest of the hill his footsteps had already been expunged." - p 61

Mythology as abstraction, as metaphor:

"Once—twice—a third time something burgeoned, which had about it a comforting aura of rationality, of predictability; about this aura, time was created from eternity. Time entails memory, memory entails conscience, conscience entails thought for the future, which is itself implied by the existence of time. Twice the forces of utter chaos raged around this focal point, and swallowed it back into nonexistence; then the will of Tuprid and Caschalanva, of Quorril and Lry, and of an infinite number of elemental beings, reigned once more. But none of them was supreme, because in chaos nothing can endure, nothing can be absolute, nothing sure or certain or reliable." - p 72

Or is it even metaphor? Imagine the stinkbug's perception of me: I doubt that it has the perceptual apparatus to perceive me at the scale I think of myself in - instead of seeing me as a being x-number of times larger than itself w/ a body not so dramatically different from its own (we both have legs, eg), it might, at 'best' see me as a 'hand' holding the piece of paper that it's being transported on. What if there were something comparable in our own lives? We, at least, have developed tools for perceiving on scales not intrinsic to our usual sensory means: our eyes, our ears, our proprioception. The "elemental beings" are anthropomorphisms of forces that are harder to wrap out heads around otherwise. How capable are we, even w/ our tools, of perceiving the weather as a totality that a tornado in our proximity is only a 'limb' of?

2 pp later, Brunner shifts the scale of the tale to something easier for most of us to relate to: "To park a car while one goes for a walk in the woods is not uncommon. To return and find that the care is no longer there is not unprecedented. But to return and find that the road itself, on which the car was parked, has likewise vanished, is a different matter altogether." - p 74

The man who finds himself in this dilemma, who finds himself outside his version of predictability, also finds himself being worshipped as a "God':

"They found Bernard Brown, much worried, to judge by his appearance, seated on a large silver and ebony throne on an enormous altar. Before the altar the townspeople were coming and going with gifts—their most prized possessions were heaped there now, from their inherited silverware to their newest garments. Around the throne itself, on the altar, were piles of luscious fruit and choice cuts of meat, together with bottles of delicious wine. bernard Brown was sucking at one of the fruits and attempting to question the people. But the people would not answer him; they merely listened respectfully and then went and wrote down what he had said, with a view to creating a canon of mystical precepts from it." - pp 85-86

Entropy personified?:

"'I've seen you before,' said Bernard slowly. 'Who are you?'

"The black-clad man chuckled. 'He to whom the task was given of bringing order out of chaos in the universe,' he replied. 'And who are you?'" - p 97

The final tale is Brunner's aforementioned 1st sale, "Thou Good and Faithful". It's from an era that's hard to imagine these days, an era when smoking a pipe on a spaceship is somehow ok: "The Captain nodded, pipe clenched between his teeth". (p 100) Things become garbled so fast in retellings that the idea of a story known to us staying recognizable in a distant future in wch its written form may no longer exist is similarly amusing:

"'It's against all possibility for an Earth-type planet to evolve metallic intelligence.'

"Another bombshell. 'Who said that they evolved?'

"'Frankenstein!' said Deeley in an awed voice.

"'what was that Deeley?'

"'I said Frankenstein, Captain. It's the name of a pre-atomic story dating back to the late Dark Ages on Earth, about a man who built the first robot and it killed its creator.'" - p 123

All in all, these are more juvenile efforts of Brunner's but I enjoyed them nonetheless. ( )