The Jagged Orbit

The Jagged Orbit (1969) is John Brunner's second entry in his dystopian quartet, following Stand on Zanzibar. Set in a racially fractured New York of 2014, it depicts a society in which racial segregation has calcified into mutual armed enclaves, the weapons trade is controlled by a sprawling family cartel called the Gottschalks, and paranoia has become the organizing principle of daily life. The novel's three main threads follow Matthew Flamen, the last surviving "spoolpigeon" or investigative broadcaster, whose institutionalized wife draws him into the orbit of the controversial psychiatrist Elias Mogshack; Dr. James Reedeth, a staff physician at Mogshack's facility who grows increasingly uneasy about the treatment philosophy being imposed on his patients; and Lyla Clay, a young woman with an unusual talent for inhabiting other minds. Structurally, the book consists of exactly 100 numbered chapters, opening with the fragment "I-" and closing, at chapter 100, with "-nification" — the word "isolationism" split across the entire length of the novel as a bitter formal joke. Brunner won the British Science Fiction Award for Stand on Zanzibar in 1970, the same year The Jagged Orbit was published in the UK, and the quartet he was building had by then established him as one of science fiction's most serious social critics. The novel has never appeared in hardcover and remains the least discussed of the four.

Softcover. First Edition, Paperback Original. Ace Science Fiction Special 38120 ($0.95). Cover art by Leo and Diane Dillon. New York: Ace, 1969. Nebula Award nominee (1969). British Science Fiction Award winner (1970). #10549.
The book has minor crinkling to the spine Otherwise, it is unread and a nearly fine copy.