Gateway Essentials: John Brunner

Following on from Friday’s mini-review, we thought we’d continue the Brunneresque theme, but highlighting the Gateway Essentials for . . . well, John Brunner. Who did you think it would be . . . ?

Best known for his Hugo Award-winning classic Stand on Zanzibar – widely regarded as one of the greatest SF novels of all time – John Brunner produced an impressive body of work that spans conventional space opera to highly inventive experimental SF. In 1951, he published his first novel, Galactic Storm, at the age of just 17, and went on to write dozens of novels under his own and various house names until his death in 1995 at the Glasgow Worldcon. He won the Hugo Award and the BSFA Award for Stand on Zanzibar and the BSFA Award for The Jagged Orbit, and is credited with having predicted the computer virus in his 1975 novel The Shockwave Rider.

Stand on Zanzibar

SF Masterworks paperback | SF Gateway eBook

If coming to John Brunner for the first time, Stand on Zanzibar is the obvious place to start, although it is a far from straightforward work. Instead you might like to try one the Gateway Essentials we’ve chosen to act as introductions to our authors’ work:


You can find more of John Brunner’s work via his Author page on the SF Gateway website, and read about him in his entry in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction.