Signed
The Sheep Look Up
Signed first edition, 1972
The Sheep Look Up (1972) is the third novel in John Brunner's dystopian quartet and the one most critics consider his most sustained exercise in rage. Set in a near-future America (the action runs month by month, from December through the following year), it depicts a country where air pollution has made filtermasks a daily necessity, tap water is undrinkable without filtration, the Mediterranean has been poisoned into ecological collapse, and a right-wing government responds to every crisis with denial and scapegoating. At the center is Austin Train, an environmental philosopher whose ideas have generated a mass movement of "Trainites" willing to take direct action, though Train himself has gone into hiding and watches his name being used in ways he never intended. The novel has no single protagonist; instead it accumulates dozens of characters across a year of escalating catastrophe, until the final pages, when the smoke from a burning America drifts across the Atlantic. The title and closing epigraph come from Milton's "Lycidas": "The hungry sheep look up, and are not fed."
Signed copy. This copy is signed by Brunner on the title page. Signed copies are uncommon.
Hardcover. First Edition, First Printing. Octavo, cloth-backed boards. New York: Harper & Row, 1972. Nebula Award nominee (1972). Jones & Newman, Horror: The 100 Best Novels (69). ISBN: 0060105585. #10030.
Scattered foxing to top edge of pages, else nearly fine, attractive copy in dust jacket.
Signed copy. This copy is signed by Brunner on the title page. Signed copies are uncommon.
Hardcover. First Edition, First Printing. Octavo, cloth-backed boards. New York: Harper & Row, 1972. Nebula Award nominee (1972). Jones & Newman, Horror: The 100 Best Novels (69). ISBN: 0060105585. #10030.
Scattered foxing to top edge of pages, else nearly fine, attractive copy in dust jacket.
Additional Details
Of the four novels in Brunner's dystopian quartet, The Sheep Look Up is the one that most fully abandons the formal pleasures of fiction in favor of something closer to an indictment. Where Stand on Zanzibar uses its fragmented structure to create the sensation of inhabiting an overpopulated world, The Sheep Look Up uses a similar multi-strand approach to document a collapse already underway. The book opens in December and moves forward month by month, not with narrative momentum but with accumulation, one piece of environmental and social damage piling onto the next until the whole structure gives way. There is no resolution because Brunner didn't believe one was coming.
The novel's title comes from John Milton's pastoral elegy "Lycidas" (1637), written in response to the death of a friend and containing a bitter digression about corrupt shepherds who leave their flocks unfed. Brunner places the relevant lines from Milton at the very end of the book, after the catastrophe has played out, as a kind of epitaph. The "sheep" of his title are the American public, and the shepherds are the politicians, corporations, and media figures who have managed public attention so effectively that most people remain passive while the environment collapses around them. Austin Train, whose ideas have inspired the Trainite movement, coined a different word for what he was trying to build: "commensalists," from the ecological term for organisms that share the same table. The movement has been misnamed and partly co-opted by the time the novel begins, and Train himself is a reluctant symbol rather than an active leader.
The novel's other central institution is the Bamberley Trust, a philanthropic organization whose hydroponics operations are unknowingly producing contaminated food aid for developing nations. The Bamberley plot allows Brunner to show how well-intentioned corporate benevolence can cause harm at a global scale without any individual acting with malice. The novel is full of this kind of irony: characters trying to do the right thing, or at least not actively doing wrong, while the system they participate in produces disaster. Philip Mason, one of the few characters followed across the entire span of the novel, installs water purification units he believes will help his community, and is shot for it on the last page by a man who blames him for contaminating the water supply. The closing sequence cuts between a talk show where a scientist is about to reveal that the only solution to the ecological crisis is the elimination of two hundred million of the world's most wasteful consumers, and a woman in rural Ireland smelling smoke on the wind blowing in from America.
Brunner drew on a considerable body of environmental literature in writing the novel. Barry Commoner's The Closing Circle (1971), Paul Ehrlich's The Population Bomb (1968), and the Club of Rome's The Limits to Growth (1972) were all published in the years immediately surrounding the novel's composition, and their arguments are embedded in its texture. Austin Train's published works, quoted in fragments throughout the novel, read like composites of these sources filtered through fiction. Brunner was not simply extrapolating from this literature but dramatizing it, giving faces and circumstances to statistics and projections that had not, in his view, produced sufficient public response.
Joe Haldeman, in his endorsement of the Stand on Zanzibar reissue, wrote that Brunner was an angry man and that The Sheep Look Up, alongside Zanzibar, was intended as a direct wake-up call. The anger is more naked here than anywhere else in the quartet. The book offers no redemptive arc, no character whose survival suggests the possibility of recovery. The last image is smoke. Brunner told interviewers that he had hoped the novel would frighten readers into action, but found instead that it simply depressed them. Whether that constitutes a failure of the book or a confirmation of its thesis is a question the novel itself seems prepared to leave open.
The novel's title comes from John Milton's pastoral elegy "Lycidas" (1637), written in response to the death of a friend and containing a bitter digression about corrupt shepherds who leave their flocks unfed. Brunner places the relevant lines from Milton at the very end of the book, after the catastrophe has played out, as a kind of epitaph. The "sheep" of his title are the American public, and the shepherds are the politicians, corporations, and media figures who have managed public attention so effectively that most people remain passive while the environment collapses around them. Austin Train, whose ideas have inspired the Trainite movement, coined a different word for what he was trying to build: "commensalists," from the ecological term for organisms that share the same table. The movement has been misnamed and partly co-opted by the time the novel begins, and Train himself is a reluctant symbol rather than an active leader.
The novel's other central institution is the Bamberley Trust, a philanthropic organization whose hydroponics operations are unknowingly producing contaminated food aid for developing nations. The Bamberley plot allows Brunner to show how well-intentioned corporate benevolence can cause harm at a global scale without any individual acting with malice. The novel is full of this kind of irony: characters trying to do the right thing, or at least not actively doing wrong, while the system they participate in produces disaster. Philip Mason, one of the few characters followed across the entire span of the novel, installs water purification units he believes will help his community, and is shot for it on the last page by a man who blames him for contaminating the water supply. The closing sequence cuts between a talk show where a scientist is about to reveal that the only solution to the ecological crisis is the elimination of two hundred million of the world's most wasteful consumers, and a woman in rural Ireland smelling smoke on the wind blowing in from America.
Brunner drew on a considerable body of environmental literature in writing the novel. Barry Commoner's The Closing Circle (1971), Paul Ehrlich's The Population Bomb (1968), and the Club of Rome's The Limits to Growth (1972) were all published in the years immediately surrounding the novel's composition, and their arguments are embedded in its texture. Austin Train's published works, quoted in fragments throughout the novel, read like composites of these sources filtered through fiction. Brunner was not simply extrapolating from this literature but dramatizing it, giving faces and circumstances to statistics and projections that had not, in his view, produced sufficient public response.
Joe Haldeman, in his endorsement of the Stand on Zanzibar reissue, wrote that Brunner was an angry man and that The Sheep Look Up, alongside Zanzibar, was intended as a direct wake-up call. The anger is more naked here than anywhere else in the quartet. The book offers no redemptive arc, no character whose survival suggests the possibility of recovery. The last image is smoke. Brunner told interviewers that he had hoped the novel would frighten readers into action, but found instead that it simply depressed them. Whether that constitutes a failure of the book or a confirmation of its thesis is a question the novel itself seems prepared to leave open.
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