review of
John Brunner's The Stardroppers
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - August 27, 2013

Ah ha! This is the type of science fiction that helped form my young brain! &, yet, it didn't.. b/c I hadn't really read anything this good yet.. or had I? The early SF I remember being exposed to was by Heinlein, & Clarke, & Asimov, & many others.. none of whom do I remember being quite this sympatico w/ me.. But there must've been something I read akin to this b/c it resonates so much w/ me now that it's amazing!

According to the back of the title page, "A considerably shorter and different version of this novel appeared in 1963 under the title Listen! The Stars! and is copyright © 1963 by John Brunner." Perhaps I read that. This version of the story is copyrighted 1972. On Groundhog's Day of 1981, I performed a "Mad Scientist DidAction" called "attempt to undermine "reality" maintenance traps". You can read about that & see stills from it here: http://idioideo.pleintekst.nl/MereOutline1981.html or see a movie from it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ababbr_8Xas . It wasn't until I'd finished the novel that I realized that I'd (sortof) tried to do in 'real' life (in the form of the above-mentioned action) what the characters in this novel were doing.

I'm usually pleased to have my vocabulary expanded. Any writer I like is bound to introduce me to an interesting word. A popular writer will introduce them less often being restricted by the 'need' to keep their lesser-educated readership engaged. Brunner: "He moved it a little further, and a susurrus of noise began, like surf on a distant beach" (p 8): "susurrus" is a word I 1st remember encountering as the title of an electro-acoustic piece by my dear departed friend James "Sarmad" Brody. Merriam-Webster Online defines it as a "whispering or rustling sound" & cites its 1st known use as in 1826. Fascinating.

Brunner consistently satisfies my desire for details: "["]All in all I feel rather pleased with myself today, which is why I'm treating myself to this cigar. Oh, I'm sorry—I should have asked you if you'd like one. I imagine Havanas are something of a forgotten luxury as far as you people in the States are concerned."" (p 14) Yes, the famous Cuban cigars, unavailable to most people in the US b/c of the boycott on Cuban products - but, apparently, legally available to people in London. Nice touch, Brunner. Was it a Cuban cigar that Clinton used as a dildo w/ what's-her-face? Or is that an urban myth? Pretty funny either way.

In the novel, "Stardroppers" are devices used for eavesdropping on the stars - or so people believe, for tapping into signals from alien minds. Brunner is great at evoking their cultural omnipresence:

"In a drugstore window, as he approached Marble Arch, he saw single earplugs on sale, labeled TO AID CONCENTRATION WHILE STARDROPPING.

"Waiting to cross at a stoplight, he heard a boy in his late teens hailing a friend: "Dropped any good stars lately?"" - p 26

Not being sure what the original story is like & not being sure what LSD culture wd've been like in London as of the time of the original story, 1963, I don't know how much, if at all, Brunner is playing off of Acidheads. It seems like alot. I probably 1st took LSD in 1972, when this bk was published, & the lingo wd've been firmly in place by then. IE: a person "dropped" acid. I don't know when headphones became a common tool "TO AID CONCENTRATION" but they were still somewhat of a novelty, albeit widespread, in my teen yrs in the late 1960s. As such, both of these references wd've probably been pretty fresh at the time of this bk's release.

From the British policeman's perspective, the Stardropper craze is like the popularity of LSD from a time presented as being in the novel's past, but actually in its writing's present: "There hasn't been anything like it since that crazy outbreak of LSD addiction in the middle sixties. I was a brand-new detective-constable then, and I used to hate bringing those kids in—but what else could you do, when they were drooling and playing with their fingers?" (p 47) Brunner is subtle here, he has the sympathetically portrayed cop say "LSD addiction", a somewhat realistic representation of how a cop might see any drug use - w/o distinguishing between the various drugs's effects. William S. Burroughs references the harm that such blanket generalizations can do & did do in his own life by telling about how marihuana was lumped together in the anti-drug propaganda w/ heroin. Burroughs tried pot & found it fine & tried heroin & got addicted.

Perhaps I'm wrong, but it seems to me that Brunner recognized that amazing new insights cd be gained from what I prefer to call consciousness-expansion drugs (or experiences - I don't think drugs need be a part of it) & shifted it from LSD to Stardroppers. At the same time, he was trying not to be irresponsible, as so many people in the psychedelic subculture cd be, so he walks the reader thru the scenario carefully.

Anyone familiar w/ the culture of getting "high" has encountered the situation of someone playing guitar or drawing, eg, while tripping & thinking that their music & their art is profound. But can they explain why? & does anyone else agree w/ them? & does the product even seem to be that special when they come down? Now, I don't mean that the music & art can't be profound under such circumstances, what I do mean is that there's more to be done than to just only half-comprehendingly meander thru such experiences - esp when it's just treated as 'recreation' as so many people sadly do. Brunner captures the conundrum well:

"Making a helpless gesture, she closed her eyes and swayed a little. She said thinly, "Suppose you had a dream, a very important dream, in which you saw something you desperately wanted to remember—a bit of the future, say. And you woke up and you remembered you'd seen it, but not what it was. It's a little bit like that, except that what you can't quite remember is a matter of life or death. If you don't get back to it, you might as well cut your throat."" - p 30

If you have a truly profound experience, will you be able to express it adequately in words? IMO, probably NOT. What makes it PROFOUND is its very ineffableness. But I don't mean that in a religious sense, AT ALL, even tho that may very well be the way many people experience religion. Religion tends to make people stupid enuf to be manipulated by its unscrupulous leaders, consciousness-expansion tends to make people smart enuf to resist such manipulation. The important thing here is to try to make the ineffable comprehensible by understanding the significance of one's relationship to it. Hence, a great writer like Brunner, writes a great bk like The Stardroppers - he doesn't just scribble while he's high & then expect other people to get the same thing out of it that he did - he tries to bring the ineffable into the realm of the comprehensible w/o destroying it in the process - & I think he does a pretty good job. The ineffable is frequently brought up:

"Lilith made a frustrated gesture. "Things that don't go into words. And yet they make this weird kind of sense!" (p 31), "'It's so hard to capture in words—so remote from everyday experience—that I get the feeling it may really come from an alien mind.'" (p 45), "Others were struggling, their eyes haunted, to get across meanings they were convinced no words could properly express." (p 65)

Hypnosis is important again, as it was in Brunner's The Evil That Men Do (see my review here: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18106412-the-evil-that-men-do-the-purloined-p... ) & his The Productions of Time (see my review here: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18374935-the-productions-of-time ) & its this emphasis on hypnosis that's one of the reasons why I brought up my "attempt to undermine "reality" maintenance traps" earlier insofar as I attempted to use autohypnosis in it.

"Next he had been made to learn the code, pumped into him under deep hypnosis. The Agency used hypnosis a great deal, having refined the traditional techniques with the aid of drugs." - p 62

"Well, it was notorious that in certain abnormal mental states, including a hypnotic trance, the human being was capable of improbable feats: displays of incredible strength, for example, or recollection of the minutest details of some otherwise long-forgotten past event." - p 108

I'm also reminded of the "Nuclear Brain Physics Surgery's cool" that I founded in 1978. This was/is a school to be slept thru. The lessons were created by the graduates & no-one was supposed to hear the lessons while awake. The curious can read a little about this in some Cognitive Dissidents posts here: http://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/14164-nuclear-brain-physics-surgery-s-cool . I intend to make all of the lessons available for awake (or asleep) listening on the Internet Archive SOON.

Of course, what can engage any reader in a story is a high quantity of points of intersection w/ their own lives. Brunner surprised me w/ this one: "I can think of where they're launching spacecraft—Kennedy, Woomera, Baikonur" (p 103) - well, motherfucker!, I've been to Woomera!! A scene in my "The Lab Rats Explain Their Veggie-Oil Powered Van" movie was shot at the dump there! You can witness this on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X0RsOO9W0hs . Woomera is an outback town where there's a US military base, the people drive on the right side of the road there instead of on the left like they do in the rest of Australia. It's also the place where refugees from Afghanistan were kept in a Detention Centre. There's a wonderful publication called "Desert Storm" by political activists exposing this Detention Centre. You can read about its closure here: http://peril.com.au/featured/10th-year-anniversary-of-the-closure-of-the-notorio... .

Brunner is always prescient, astonishingly so, an excellent characteristic in anyone but one that's esp hoped for in SF writers. "thanks to the availability at long last of TV tubes no deeper than a picture frame": flat screen tvs are commonplace now but they certainly weren't when Brunner wrote this.

"This time he found a handwritten sheet he had previously disregarded, and on it he found what the abbreviation "CPF" stood for. The writer—Watson, presumably—had put:

""Straightforward enough. It's the cocktail-party factor, and there's no avoiding that."

"Dan frowned. That was a standard slang in information theory, the nickname for the process of sorting a particular series of data from a jumble of background noise, like carrying on a conversation with one other person in competition with fifty more talking at the top of their lungs." - p 117

This cd also be called the PBLF, the Penguin Baby Locating Factor - anyone who's seen the marvelous movie, March of the Penguins might get that one.

The main investigating character, Dan, is from "The Agency" in the US. One might conclude that this means the CIA. But Brunner's unlikely to have such a sympathetic character be associated w/ an agency notorious for inculcating the genocide that the CIA has, unfortunately, been associated w/. ""I'm an operative of the United Nations Special Agency."" (p 128) After all, Brunner was probably an Internationalist Optimist, as am I. Alas, as the movie The Whistleblower has revealed, even the UN can be used by corrupting forces - such as the members of the IPTF (International Police Task Force) who were involved in human trafficking in Bosnia under the protection of their UN status. Beware of PMCs (Private Military Contractors)!! ( )