He served as an officer in the Royal Air Force from 1953 to 1955. He married Marjorie Rosamond Sauer on 12 July 1958.[2]
Brunner had an uneasy relationship with British new wave writers, who often considered him too American in his settings and themes. He attempted to shift to a more mainstream readership in the early 1980s, without success. Before his death, most of his books had fallen out of print. Brunner accused publishers of a conspiracy against him, although he was known to be difficult to deal with. His wife, Marjorie Brunner, had handled his publishing relations before she died.[3]
Brunner's health began to decline in the 1980s and worsened with the death of his wife in 1986. He remarried, to Li Yi Tan, on 27 September 1991. He died of a heart attack in Glasgow on 25 August 1995, while attending the World Science Fiction Convention there.[4]
Literary works
At first writing conventional space opera, Brunner later began to experiment with the novel form. His 1968 novel Stand on Zanzibar exploits the fragmented organizational style that American writer John Dos Passos created for his U.S.A. trilogy, but updates it in terms of the theory of media popularised by Canadian academic Marshall McLuhan, a major cultural figure of the period.
These four novels Stand on Zanzibar (1968), The Jagged Orbit (1969), The Sheep Look Up (1972) and The Shockwave Rider (1975), 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.[6]
Brunner's pen names include K. H. Brunner (Kilian Houston Brunner), Gill Hunt, John Loxmith, Trevor Staines, Ellis Quick,[5] Henry Crosstrees Jr., and Keith Woodcott.[1]
In addition to his fiction, Brunner wrote poetry and published many unpaid articles in a variety of venues, particularly fanzines. He also published 13 letters to the New Scientist and an article about the educational relevance of science fiction in Physics Education.[7] Brunner was an active member of the organisation Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and wrote the words to "The H-Bomb's Thunder", which was sung on the Aldermaston Marches. He was a linguist, translator, and Guest of Honour at the first European Science Fiction ConventionEurocon-1 in Trieste in 1972.[1]
Two of his short stories, "Some Lapse of Time" and "The Last Lonely Man", were adapted as TV plays in the BBC science fiction series Out of the Unknown, in series 1 (1965) and series 3 (1969), respectively.
Works
Brunner's short novel "The Wanton of Argus" was originally published in Two Complete Science-Adventure Books in 1953, before appearing in book form as The Space-Time JugglerBrunner's novelette "Rendezvous With Destiny" was cover-featured on the March 1958 issue of Fantastic Universe
Interstellar Empire, DAW 208 (1976); a collection of a novella and two "Ace Double" halves: The Altar on Asconel, "The Man from the Big Dark" and The Space-Time Juggler (under the title of The Wanton of Argus)
Victims of the Nova, Arrow (1989). Complete Zarathustra Refugee Planets series. Omnibus of Polymath, Secret Agent of Terra and The Repairmen of Cyclops
The Man Who Was Secrett and Other Stories, Ramble House (2013)
Poetry
Life in an Explosive Forming Press (1970)
Trip: A Sequence of Poems Through the USA (1971)
A Hastily Thrown Together Bit of Zork (1974)
Tomorrow May Be Even Worse (1978)
A New Settlement of Old Scores (1983)
Nongenre
The Crutch of Memory, Barrie & Rockliff (1964). Conventional novel set in Greece.[9]
Wear the Butchers' Medal Pocket (1965). Mystery set in Europe featuring neo-Nazis.[9]
Black Is the Color, Pyramid (1969, republished in 2015). Horror fiction about the "swinging London" underground in the 1960s.
The Devil's Work, W. W. Norton & Company (1970). Centres on a modern-day Hellfire Club.
The Great Steamboat Race, Ballantine (1983). Historical fiction based on an actual event.[10]
^"The John Brunner Archive". University of Liverpool Library, Special Collections and Archives. Archived from the original on 25 January 2015. Retrieved 24 January 2015.
