Two of the central characters, Donald Hogan and Norman House share a New York apartment but don't have much else in common. Norman is an African American junior executive at General Technics, a huge multi-national corporation with ownership in everything from chemicals, nano-technology, the aerospace industry and "Shalmaneser", a mega-brain classed supercomputer which is used for everything from advising the future direction of the company to forecasting social and pop-culture trends. Donald works as a Dilettanti, a sort of academic in cross-disciplinary studies, but secretly signed up to be a spy for the US government ten years previously and is waiting anxiously, hoping that he is never called up for active duty. When the US ambassador to the tiny, under-developed African nation of Beninia requests help from General Technics to invest finances into the country on the eve of it's long-standing president's impending retirement, Norman is given the reigns on the project to bring the nation up to twenty-first century standards. Shalmaneser is used to plan a program of development that will improve the economic output and standard of living in Beninia, with financial gains for the company in access to a key shipping port and by providing labour for a mid-atlantic mining project owned by the company. The rest of the story thread deals with themes of racial politics, the growing divide between rich and poor and neo-colonialism of the third world by mega-corporations, albeit in a slightly less cynical flavour than one might expect from reading the surrounding stories. When Norman travels to Beninia, he is enchanted by the people who live there and is fascinated by the reasons why the small nation had not already been gobbled up by colonialism and the greed of it's bigger, war-mongering neighbours; later developments at the end of the novel reveal that the people living there contain a gene mutation that causes a pheromonal signal of pacification. Meanwhile, Donald's worst nightmare comes true and he is called up for service in the south-east asian country of Yatakang, a military dictatorship at odds with the US. Yatakang has claimed that it's top medical researcher, Dr. Sugaiguntung has just discovered a breakthrough in genetics that allows for parents with un-desirable genes to have perfectly healthy babies (in fact ones even superior to the regular stock). The claim has caused political pressure in the US because citizens have demanded that their government also make such treatments available to them. Donald is "eptified" (a sort of mental programming) in the art of assassination and sent into Yatakang with the secret cover of a reporter to either prove Dr. Sugaiguntung's claims false or return fruitful research data into the hands of the US. By an act of fate, Donald saves Dr. Sugaiguntung from a mucker, and indebted to Donald, the doctor confides that the claims are false, that the current dictatorship of Yatakang forced him to make the claims for political reasons, and agrees to defect to the US. When the doctor has second thoughts at the final stages of a lengthy and bloody attempt to steal him from the country, Donald's eptified killer instincts kick in and he accidentally kills the doctor. Donald is left a broken man, never able to return to normal society and never able to repair the psychological damage wrought by his eptification.
Brunner creates some pretty decent extrapolations from the 1960s to the present day; he was very close in his population estimate and managed to capture well the themes of growing divide between rich and poor, mega-corporations vs. the third world, media monopoly/control of social opinion; other predictions such as eugenics legislation and the hysteria and social disorder following over-population are not quite as accurate but still convincingly portrayed. Political meddling in the third world by superpowers is a definite theme of the novel, perhaps reflecting the war-by-proxy politics of Vietnam and the cold war, within which timeframe the book was written. The use of the "context", "the happening world" and "tracking with close-ups" chapters is really nice, and to me is what makes the book. Brunner paints a vivid tapestry of life in his dystopian future through the snippets of minor character's lives, snatches from newspaper articles and screenplays for television ads and pop-music videos. The continuity chapters started off well and built up the interest and tension but both Norman and Donald's story threads had reasonably disappointing endings. I didn't really see the point in threading together the stories at the end and the "revelation" of the genetic explanations for the "Shinka effect" seemed a bit far fetched; I didn't really get the point. Also, there were characters like Bronwyn which seemed to be important to the story, like she might be a counter-agent, but then were just abandoned. The book is is bit difficult to follow and work through for the first couple of non-continuity chapters, but you get the hang of it after a while. Brunner's prose gets a bit challenging to follow at times, particular in the opening sentences of some chapters .. he has this habit of placing the context of the sentence right at the end so sometimes you find yourself having to re-read the sentence a few times to make sense of it.
Overall, an interesting and ambitious work that is worth reading because it's intelligent and different, and gives a nice insight into the new-wave science fiction genre.
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