Review of The Sheep Look Up by John Brunner

Cli-fi has slowly and unsteadily become a sub-genre of science fiction. Works have appeared here and there—Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake, Paolo Bacigalupi's The Water Knife, Kim Stanley Robinson's New York 2140, Matt Bell's Appleseed, Lily Brooks-Dalton's The Light Pirate, and Ned Beauman's Venomous Lumpsucker among them, all with varying visions of nature's power in relation to human life. Whether they know it or not, most of these visions owe a debt of gratitude to the granddaddy of all the environmental novels, The Sheep Look Up (1972) by John Brunner.

If something could go wrong for humanity in The Sheep Look Up, it has. A Greta Thunberg wet dream, pollution chokes cities, forcing people to wear masks in public. Epidemics of food poisoning, accidental and intentional, occur with the randomness of clouds. Potable water doesn't exist anymore save through treatment. Viruses and infections sweep through society like granny's Saturday morning broom. Oily sludge covers coastal and inland waters. Agricultural practices have denuded prairies, forming dustlands. It's bad.

And it all has economic and social effects. Costs for basic food and water are through the roof. People struggle to find work. Crime increases steadily. Walled communities appear, separating the haves from the have nots. And through it all—the real dream, the Just Stop Oil dream—a group of environmental terrorists calling themselves Trainites attempt to damage and sabotage the corporations and governmental organizations still trying to extract resources from the Earth. It's a proper disaster.

Through this milieu, Brunner follows the perspectives of a handful of people. One is British nurse Lucy doing volunteer work in Africa. She is hit hard when a corporate food additive wrecks havoc on the local population. Hugh Pettingill is the son of the corporate magnate manufacturing the food additive, and at the start of the novel he is coming to understand the realities behind the corporation's facade. Philip Mason is an insurance executive who is attempting to ride through the environmental issues by living as normal life as possible, something that is ever more daunting as he faces the task of increasing life insurance premiums due to decreasing life expectancy. And lastly is reporter Peg Mankiewicz who has a grim task at the outset of the novel: identifying the corpse of a friend involved in a car accident. The circumstances suspect, Peg tries to get to the bottom of what is an unlikely suicide.

For readers familiar with Brunner's novels Stand on Zanzibar and The Jagged Orbit, they will be aware of the technique and style used in The Sheep Look Up. Brunner doesn't break the (successful) mold. Structure is a rotating set of character point-of-views with interludes featuring a random assortment of snippets from the novel's wider setting—radio adverts, newspaper clippings, sounds bites, police radio chatter, telephone calls, evening news, etc. These fill the interstices of the characters' lives, creating an effective panorama to the setting as a whole. Simple but highly effective, and Brunner should be commended for switching voice on a dime, imitating as needed.

Of Brunner's three dystopias, The Sheep Look Up is the most over-the-top. It's an unending string of disasters—avalanches, disease outbreaks, food contamination, riots, cancer, and on, and on. If I'm being honest, they start to lose their potency for it. The reader eventually becomes conditioned, not only to the relative trauma of the scene at hand, but to the pseudo-trauma of such an event occurring in the real world. What's next? the reader starts to ask. What's the next track in disaster's greatest hits?

But what truly makes The Sheep Look Up the granddaddy of cli-fi is Brunner's razor focused style focusing on character realism. The string of disasters may begin to feel unnatural, but Hugh, Peg, Lucy, Philip and the other characters are rendered in 3D in just a few, deft lines. Their reactions are not over the top. They're adapted, responsive, human. They have their relative wits despite the circumstances and prognosis—the same as we did during COVID. Combined with the snippets of wider culture, The Sheep Look Up is formidable character-wise.

In the end, history is threatening to wash The Sheep Look Up from our collective memory. But it still stands, not only as a reminder how fragile human existence is, but likewise in opposition to the techno-positivism that has gripped such a large portion of the West in the decades since the novel was published. (For a deeper dive into this latter aspect, see bormgans' review of the novel here.) Readers will find Brunner's variety of disasters relatable for the manner which they have manifested themselves in our lifetime yet perhaps wearying for the sheer volume—the unrelenting parade of calamaties. Character and plotting, however, possess a better degree of subtlety, demonstrating the concepts can be delivered in sophisticated fashion not ignorant of human inner realities. But do ignore that cover...