Europe in the early part of the 21st century is in the same shape as things are now under tRump's regime. The elites/1%-ers are the haves and everyone else is the have-nots. Homelessness and unemployment is rampant. The "Godheads," faux Christians, are the bullies of society, extorting "tithes" and gay-bashing (and burning). But three professors in a lab have come up with a replicating virus that, when ingested, is contagious and causes an awakening of conscience. A bit naive and contrived; not Brunner's best work. ( )

review of
John Brunner's The Stone that Never Came Down
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - October 28, 2018

I've been singing critical praises of John Brunner ever since I discovered him a few years back & every time I read another bk by him it's a pleasure. Here's the epigraph to "BOOK ONE Ascent":

Dissidentes Christianorum antistites cum plebe discissa in palatium intromuissos, monetbat civilus, ut descordiis consopitis, quisque nullo vetante, religioni suae serviret intrepidus. Quod agebat ideo obstinate ut dissensiones augents licentia, non timeret unanimantem postea plebem, nullas infestas hominibus bestias, ut sunt sibi ferales plerique Christianorum expertus.

"—Ammianus Marcellinus: Res Gestae" - p 1

"Ammianus Marcellinus (born c. 330, died c. 391 – 400) was a Roman soldier and historian who wrote the penultimate major historical account surviving from antiquity (preceding Procopius). His work, known as the Res Gestae, chronicled in Latin the history of Rome from the accession of the Emperor Nerva in 96 to the death of Valens at the Battle of Adrianople in 378, although only the sections covering the period 353–378 survive." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ammianus_Marcellinus

I didn't have much luck producing a coherent translation with online means so here's a bad approximation:

"The leaders of the Christians, with his people was divided up in the king's house: the dissident intromuissos, as per civil law, was executed, there was no opposition, otherwise they were allowed to serve their own religious feelings in an unsurpassed way. The license of which he had allowed so tenaciously that they will increase; they are causing the divisions, there is no fear of a united Christianity later on among the people, & no sense that they trouble the men, the wild beasts, that they are in disagreement with the majority of the Christians.

"—Ammianus Marcellinus: Achievements"

I took so many liberties w/ that that it's probably dramatically wrong. Latin scholars, feel free to add a corrective comment! The time & place seem dystopic. What is going on?:

"It was dreadfully cold in here. Filtered by the dervishes of the snow, a street-lamp beam lanced between the curtains and showed him his breath clouding before his face. The time-switch which had brought the radio to life also controlled an electric fan-heater, but the middle-element was broken and anyhow the power was usually browned out nowadays. If only he could afford to turn on the central heating . . ." - p 4

Then again, this could be a time from my life. There're confrontations w/ Christian bullies running amok. One of the protagonists won't give the bullies any money unless they can answer a question:

""You can have this if you name a weapon of modern wat that wasn't invented and first used by a Christian country!" - p 10

""Can't answer, hm? Not surprising! The whole lot is yours, from the hand-grenade to the hydrogen bomb! So stop wasting my time. I have to go to work. And it wouldn't do you any harm to work for a change, instead of sponging off the rest of us who do!"" - p 11

Needless to say, this, ahem, didn't go over too well. &, yeah, there's racism too:

"These days it was a common habit to pass over a black kid who talked back to teachers, and slap on his record a ribber stamp saying INEDUCABLE. And half of them were glad to be out of school, but furious at being out of work as well." - p 18

The action's taking place in England, where Brunner lived, but one of the characters is an American evangelist who's being recruited by an English Chrsitian crusader who he's dubious about joining forces w/:

"["]You join her in her New Year's Crusade, and you'll be on the map for good and all. It would make you—well it would make you the Billy Graham of the nineteen-eighties!"" - p 20

I don't know how many people remember Billy Graham these days. He only died on February 21, 2018, so it wasn't that long ago, but I think he was far beyond his prime by then. During the Vietnam War he was possibly the most public Christian apologist for the US invasion & continued oppression of the Vietnamese people — not that he put it that way, of course. I was raised in a conservative Christian family & when I was about 15, maybe in late 1968, my sister, later a missionary, took me to a Billy Graham Crusade at the Baltimore Civic Center — a place that held thousands of people. It was the closest thing to a nazi rally that I ever 'hope' to attend. One of the main things I remember about it was the showing of a movie about a teenager whose life becomes extremely degraded as a result of 'straying from the path.' It was very much in the spirit of the hyper-conservative TV show "Dragnet" in which doom & gloom & guilt were slathered on like leprous hog fat on a piece of nice clean white bread. I was horrified by Graham's obviously unscrupulous crowd manipulation. As such, Brunner really nails it w/ his reference here. This bk was published in 1973 when the war was still ongoing & Brunner was an anti-war activist so I'm sure he was fully aware of Graham's significance. Brunner was no fool when it came to his own country's future either as is demonstrated by shades of Brexit in the following:

"—Can it really be on the cards that we'll see a military coup in Italy, like the Greek one? And that a junta of generals would try to pull them out of the Common Market?" - p 30

"—And I said, "Do you really think there's no hope for us at all?" And he looked at me for a bit, with that odd quizzical expression, and then he produced that little phial of capsules, tiny little yellow things no bigger than rice-grains, and said, "This may be the answer. I hope it is." And I said . . . God, I must have been drunk by then! I said, "If that's the case, I'd like some." And he said, "Okay, here you are. You deserve it more than most people." And like a crazy fool I took it!"" - pp 30-31

Now, I've ridiculed the 2011 SF film called "Limitless" about drugs making someone smarter. My point has been that humans seem to want everything to be as easy as popping a pill. Alas, if you want to be smart, you might actually have to work at it & you might not get much respect for it either. Brunner's story might seem to be a precursor to "Limitless" &, to a small extent, it is — but it's much more nuanced.

"["]Living aimal tissue is ideal. Which is why we call it 'viral coefficient'."

""You mean it breeds?" Sawyer cried. "You mean it's infectious?"

""Not infectious!" Randolph snapped. "Cold air, sunlight, even dilution in plain water will inactivate it almost at once. But . . . Well, without being infectious, it may possibly be contagious.["]" - p 51

That's an interesting distinction, eh?!

"Strictly, a contagious disease is one transmitted by physical contact, whereas an infectious one is transmitted via microorganisms in the air or water. In practice there is little or no difference in meaning between contagious and infectious when applied to disease or its spread." - contagious | Definition of contagious in English by Oxford Dictionaries - https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/contagious

As you may've noticed by now, in an avoidance of spoiling the plot for you I've dropped hints w/o providing full coherence. As such, my review is somewhat akin to the note left by a dead central character. "These passages, however, were islands of clarity in a muddle of jargon, parasyntaxis, and abominable straining after pointless puns." (p 47)

"Chest Cee! 'Sdense! Corpo di barragio! you spoof of visibility ina freakfog, of mixed sex xases among goats, hill cat and plain mousey, Bugamy Bob and his old Shanvocht! The Blackfriars treacle plaster outrage be liddled! Therewith was released in that kingsrick of Humidia a poisoning volume of cloud barrage indeed. Yet all they who heard or redelivered are now with that family of bards and Vergobretas himself and the crowd of Caraculacticors as much no more as be they not yet now or had they then notever been."*

"Malcolm took the sheet of paper he was offered, glanced at it, and passed it to Ruth. Having read it more slowly, she exclaimed, "Why. it's like something out of Finnegans Wake!"

""Right! Professor, Dr. Post did leave a record of his experience—at any rate, as complete a record as he thought would be necessary, knowing that with total recall he could later compile as detailed an analysis as anyone might wish for. And here it is. Not a farrago of rubbish, but the result of trying to condense scores of different levels of experience—real and vicarious—into the narrowest possible compass. Language isn't designed to carry that kind of load, Not ordinary language, anyhow."" - pp 85-86

*Finnegans Wake p 48, Viking Press, February 1975 paperback edition

"We had done some French and Latin at school but I knew virtually no German or Italian and it was clear that Joyce exploited both of these languages continually. I would take a dictionary and work through a chapter, looking up any word I thought suited the language in question. I soon learned that the most cryptic elements were often pure English. Grotesque orthography was often repeated verbatim in the Oxford English Dictionary. I suspected that Joyce was delbierately revivifying many archaic snd dialectical usages. Partridge's Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English and the Oxford Dictionary of English Proverbs provided numerous identifications of items in FW or of words very close to Joyce's." - p 29, The Finnegans Wake Experience - Roland McHugh

""Urea stimulates activity in the nervous system," Malcolm said. "Loss of power to excrete it as allantoin has been compared to adding a permanent pep-pill to our diet."" - p 142, The Stone that Never Came Down

"Muscle loss, osteoporosis, and vascular disease are common in subjects with reduced renal function. Despite intensive research of the underlying risk factors and mechanisms driving these phenotypes, we still lack effective treatment strategies for this underserved patient group. Thus, new approaches are needed to identify effective treatments. We believe that nephrologists could learn much from biomimicry; i.e., studies of nature’s models to solve complicated physiological problems and then imitate these fascinating solutions to develop novel interventions. The hibernating bear (Ursidae) should be of specific interest to the nephrologist as they ingest no food or water for months, remaining anuric and immobile, only to awaken with low blood urea nitrogen levels, healthy lean body mass, strong bones, and without evidence for thrombotic complications. Identifying the mechanisms by which bears prevent the development of azotemia, sarcopenia, osteoporosis, and atherosclerosis despite being inactive and anuric could lead to novel interventions for both prevention and treatment of patients with chronic kidney disease."

[..]

"This unique ability of bears to recycle urea during hibernation is not present in other hibernating mammals, such as the Columbian ground squirrel or the hedgehog."

- "Hibernating bears (Ursidae): metabolic magicians of definite interest for the nephrologist" - PeterStenvinkel, Alkesh H.Jani, Richard J.Johnson - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0085253815557360

""How people delude themselves," Malcolm muttered. "Sooner or later all the finest ideals of mankind have led to overreaction. Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire and was perverted into a justification for slavery. The proud slogan of the French Revolution was inscribed over the guillotine. The oppressed victims of the tsars proceede to treat their former rulers with even greater brutality."

""It's a fearful pattern," Sawyer sighed."

Indeed. ( )

Although I am a big fan of John Brunner, none of his other works have quite come up to the level of "The Sheep Look Up" or "Stand on Zanzibar." I enjoyed the setting of this novel in Europe, and the idea that was raised in the story about a specie being aware of its own evolution, but didn't find the characters particularly engaging, though some were all too accurate in their depiction of contemporary political figures. ( )

(Original Review, 1980-09-12)

The classic tests on this subject were done something like 25 years ago, and became sufficiently well known that by the late 60's they were turning up (in cut-down versions with animal subjects) in high school science fairs. The test was fairly simple: a sensor was rigged to detect Rapid Eye Movements (characteristic of the deepest (fourth) level of sleep and generally simultaneous with dreams) and attached to various devices to wake up the sleeper whenever REM began. Other than this, the subjects were allowed to have whatever they considered a normal sleep period. Within a few days the number of attempted REM periods went from ~4 to >20 and the subjects were reported as becoming extremely irritable.

John Brunner wrote a story around this idea in one of the SPECTRUM anthologies (about what happened when someone didn't react with irritation and what happened when they stopped preventing him from dreaming) and has brought up the idea intermittently since then, particularly in THE STONE THAT NEVER CAME DOWN. Unfortunately, no one at the time thought to do the obvious control of waking people at completely random intervals, beginning with ~4/night and working up to >20 per night; when this was done the behavioural results (to the extent that behavior can be quantified and compared) were reported as being basically the same as in the REM experiments. At about this time, however, it had been found that for many people 2 3-hour periods of sleep separated by a short period of activity were as effective as one 8-hour period. It seems that regularity is as important a factor as duration in measuring the value of sleep. The one person I know who consistently gets by on ~5 hours seems to take basically the same 5 hours (0300-0800) every day, both at slack periods and during SF conventions. (He may be helped by the fact that he's basically a very tranquil type, though there is Shapiro's example of the frenetic type who survives on 4 hours. There are a number of cases of non-circadian patterns being adopted for various reasons; I have only apocryphal information on the person who allegedly converted his week to 6 28-hour days (his sleep period cycled completely around the day every week) but Frederik Pohl in his autobiography describes deciding that he just didn't have enough time for writing and going on a 48-hour "day", thus getting both time to deal with mundanes during their active periods and quiet periods in which to write undisturbed. There are also some developments which I've just seen the first glimmerings of; it seems that researchers have pinned down two nuclei in the hypothalamus as being potentially responsible for circadian rhythms (specific hormone release cycles corresponding to activity cycles have been found). I've gone through so many magazines in the post-Noreascon catchup that I've no certainty of where I found this or who was involved; has anyone seen any more detailed information?

[2018 EDIT: This review was written at the time as I was running my own personal BBS server. Much of the language of this and other reviews written in 1980 reflect a very particular kind of language: what I call now in retrospect a “BBS language”.] ( )

If there was a way to expand a way of thinking, of allowing people to see the broad strokes and big picture of their actions, how would people react to those new insights? Cynical and hopeful at the same time; not one of Brunner's best novels, but a good read. ( )