John Brunner

John Brunner was a highly respected British author, best known for his science fiction, thriller, and fantasy novels. He has written a number of successful standalone novels in the science fiction/fantasy genre, as well as several spy fiction stories, short story collections, poetry, non-genre, pornography, and translation works. Brunner was born as John Kilian Houston Brunner on September 24, 1934, in Preston Crowmarch, Wallingford Oxfordshire, United Kingdom. He attended St. Andrew's Prep School in Pangbourne and completed his college studies at Cheltenham College.

Brunner began his writing career by publishing his first novel, "Galactic Storm," at the age of 17 under the pen-name Gill Hunt. He did not start writing full-time until 1958. In the beginning of his writing career, Brunner wrote conventional space opera pulp science fiction. However, he later began to experiment with the novel form, incorporating unconventional structures and styles. His 1968 novel "Stand on Zanzibar" uses a fragmented organizational style inspired by John Dos Passos' USA trilogy and updates it in terms of Marshall McLuhan's media theory. Similarly, "The Jagged Orbit" (1969) is set in a United States dominated by weapons proliferation and interracial violence, and has 100 numbered chapters that vary in length from a single syllable to several pages. "The Sheep Look Up" (1972) depicts ecological catastrophe in America. Brunner is also credited with coining the term "worm" and predicting the emergence of computer viruses in his 1975 novel "The Shockwave Rider." Together with "Stand on Zanzibar," these novels have been called the "Club of Rome Quartet," named after the Club of Rome whose 1972 report The Limits to Growth warned of the dire effects of overpopulation. Brunner's pen names include K. H. Brunner, Gill Hunt, John Loxmith, Trevor Staines, Ellis Quick, Henry Crosstrees Jr., and Keith Woodcott.