If there’s one thing BDP [the Federal Bureau of Data Processing] has brought to a fine art, it’s preventing the public from digging unpleasant truths from behind the scenes in government… right?” The explosion of human knowledge has accelerated to the point where even the most brilliant can’t cope with it any more. Theories have rigidified into dogma just as they did in the Middle Ages. The leading experts feel obligated to protect their creed against the heretics.” JESSE HUDSON, one of our guest reviewers, reads in most fields. He lives in Poland where he works for a big corporation by day and escapes into reading by night. He posts a blog which acts as a healthy vent for not only his bibliophilia, but also his love of culture and travel: Speculiction. A rattle of agreement: from the students on principle, but from several reporters too, who looked so glum one might presume they’d encountered that kind of trouble. Spider Robinson gave the novel a mixed review, saying that while "the book reads well..., [i]ndividual sections are often brilliant, [and] the message is incisive and timely", that "as a story it limps" and that many characters, including the main antagonists, "are cut from cardboard". [6] The New York Times reviewer Gerald Jonas was even more critical, saying that while Brunner was attempting to write "slice-of-life" fiction about a future society, the result of his arbitrary choices about social details is that "the entire fictional edifice collapses like a house of cards." [7] Themes [ edit ]

The Shockwave Rider - Wikiwand

Precipice turns out to be a Utopian community of a few thousand people. The nearest comparison would be an agrarian, cottage industry community designed by William Morris. Precipice is also the home of Hearing Aid, an anonymous telephone confession service accessible to anyone in the country. Hearing Aid is also known as the "Ten Nines", after the phone number used to call it: 999-999-9999. People call the service, a human operator answers, and they simply talk while the operator listens. Some rant, others seek sympathy, still others commit suicide while on the phone. Hearing Aid's promise is that nobody else, not even the government, will hear the call. The only response Hearing Aid gives to a caller is "Only I heard that, I hope it helped." But the habit patterns, inevitably, had survived. To the air, with a wry grin, he murmured, “How long, O Lord? How long?” In his private estimation: not long now.”

It’s not because my mind in made up that I don’t want you to confuse me with any more facts. It’s because my mind isn’t made up. I already have more facts than I can cope with. So SHUT UP, do you hear me? SHUT UP!” Vanessa Armstrong Horror Film It Follows to Get a Sequel, Reasonably Titled They Follow 6 hours ago

John Brunner’s The Shockwave Rider: A sci-fi classic from the John Brunner’s The Shockwave Rider: A sci-fi classic from the

Theoretically any one of us has access to more information than ever in history, and any phone booth is a gate to it. But suppose you live next door to a poker who's suddenly elected to the state congress, and six weeks later he's had a hundred-thousand-dollar facelift for his house. Try to find out how he came by the money; you get nowhere. Resilience is a program of Post Carbon Institute, a nonprofit organization dedicated to helping the world transition away from fossil fuels and build sustainable, resilient communities. That this is a rich planet. Therefore poverty and hunger are unworthy of it, and since we can abolish them, we must.How can an Australian open-pit coal mining project unequivocally denied by a joint review panel as well as two courts of appeal still be regarded as an “advanced coal project” by Alberta regulators? Just one example - the protagonist is in the business of creating digital worms to make changes to the net. At the time (1975), not only was ARPANet, the internet's predecessor very limited, the first actual network worm wouldn't be launched for another 13 years (Brunner originated the term in this novel). Brunner's hero is a young man who is bent on changing the world. He struggles to evade the officials and uses all skills available to him, whether inherent skills or technological ones, to the best of his ability, to put an end to the misuse of power that is so much a part of his world which involves the entity of the world wide datanet.