John Brunner

The Sheep Look Up

Bryan Alexander

This 1972 novel is a terrifying vision of a world being ruined by environmental crisis. I consider it an important ancestor for today's climate fiction.

The Sheep Look Up takes place mostly in the United States during a single year in the late 20th century, which means readers from the year 2020 get to enjoy discovering what it anticipated correctly (few people flying, a grocery chain close to Whole Foods, a ridiculously bad US president, environmental stress driving social breakdowns, American life expectancy declining) and what it missed (the internet, cheap and portable computing, supersonic air travel, acid rain being stopped). To be fair, this isn't a novel about the climate crisis, but it's hard not to read it as anticipating that way now. The environment has fallen badly. The Mediterranean Sea and the Mekong Delta have dried up, city air cannot be breathed without filtermasks, rivers and lakes are ruined, and agriculture is collapsing. People starve in Europe and America. Diseases spread at shocking levels.

The novel follows the social novel style of the author's near-contemporary classic Stand on Zanzibar. Dozens of characters crowd the pages, giving us not only multiple and intertwining plots to follow, but many different views into the environmental and social crisis. One aggregate plot concerns a dissident hero, Austin Train, who has gone underground but has also inspired a subversive mass movement. Another follows a controversial food product created by a deplorable family, and that seems to be driving eaters insane. These plots advance and collide straight into spoilers, so I'll hold off on summarizing the conclusion openly. (view spoiler)[By the novel's end many characters are dead. Train comes out of hiding, gives a passionate speech, and apparently dies in an explosion. We learn more about the food poisoning. Plagues of violent madness break out. Surviving characters try to keep living. Children are increasingly born sick and/or disabled, and those that grow lack motivation and engagement with technical civilization. 
 Insurrections and open civil war break out. (hide spoiler)]

The Sheep Look Up also follows Stand on Zanzibar stylistically, using John dos Passos' formal inclusion of mass media content and style. For example, in the first chapter we get these stark notices on the page, preceded by the header "SIGNS OF THE TIMES":THIS BEACH NOT SAFE FOR SWIMMING

NOT Drinking Water

UNFIT FOR HUMAN CONSUMPTION

 Now Wash Your Hands
(Penalty for noncompliance $50)

 FILTERMASK DISPENSER
Use product once only—maximum 1 hour

OXYGEN
 25¢Brunner switches between perspectives and stories quickly, even between individual paragraphs in a great sequence towards the end. The effect is a bit bracing, jarring, forcing you to pay careful attention, and nicely inculcating a sense of crisis in the reader's mind.

Gradually the novel partakes of horror, mostly body horror as people are increasingly sickened and injured.

The book also manages to work in humor, although of the blackest kind. One running gag concerns an analyst who's run a computer simulation of the world, and can't manage to share his results until nearly the last page. And those results: (view spoiler)[the world can be saved "if we exterminate the two hundred million most extravagant and wasteful of our species." (Kindle location 6773)  (hide spoiler)]. It's a dark parody of the Club of Rome, whose work inspired this novel along with three others by Brunner. Similarly, the Whole Foods-like grocery chain is openly owned by organized crime. There are also many puns in section headers ranging from obscure to (appropriately) toilet humor.

The Sheep Look Up is dated in some ways, of course. It references the American war in Vietnam frequently. Gender relations feel like mid-20th-century stereotypes, with women as homemakers focused on cooking and babies all too often.

There's a lot more to remark on here, like Brunner's portrayal of American blacks. Or his engagement with science fiction - one stray character is named after the author Zenna Henderson (Kindle location 4722).

Ultimately the novel is a powerful, bleak cry for environmental action. It addresses the reader point blank at various points:“We need something to break us out of this—this isolationism we’ve drifted into. I don’t mean that in the standard sense; I mean more isolationism in time, as it were. We’re divorced from reality, in the same way as the Romans went on thinking of themselves as invulnerable and unchallengeable long after it ceased to be true. The most awful warnings are staring us in the face—the stagnant Mediterranean above all, dead like the Great Lakes—yet we’re so proud of being the richest, the most powerful, the whatever, that we won’t face facts. We won’t admit that we’re short of water, we’re short of timber, we’re short of—” 
“Food,” Thorne said positively. “Or we shall be next winter. (Kindle location 3813)It also presents a call for violent, direct action against those driving ecological disaster:
“[Do y]ou think their anger is righteous, when all that we can foresee beyond it is anarchy, nihilism, a world where every man’s hand is turned against his brother?” 
“Not against his brother. The man who’s being poisoned by the additives Universal Mills put in his food knows who his brother is—a stranger, starving in Africa because a foolish war has destroyed his field of mealies. The brother of the man who has to waste half his income on treatment for a child who was born deformed is the peasant in Laos whose wife died aborting an egg-bundle fetus. No, not against his brother. Against the enemies of his species. That they also happen to be human—well, that’s regrettable. Is a cancer cell in your lung or liver any more welcome for being tissue spawned from your own body?” (Kindle location 5356)I am reminded of the ambiguous position of violence around climate change in Kim Stanley Robinson's Ministry for the Future, which our online book club is currently reading.

Yet these calls to action are not optimistic. We end with America literally on fire, and the horrific last lines are from Milton's Lycidas (1637), giving us the book's title:The hungry Sheep look up, and are not fed, 
But swoln with wind, and the rank mist they draw,
Rot inwardly, and foul contagion spread (125-127)
A dark, rich, damning novel, perfectly aimed at its time, and very apposite to our own.

"In this nightmare society, air pollution is so bad that gas masks are commonplace. Infant mortality is up, and everyone seems to suffer from some form of ailment. The water is polluted, and only the poor drink from the tap. The government is ineffectual, and corporate interests scramble to make a profit from water purifiers, gas masks, and organic foods. Environmentalist Austin Train is on the run. The Trainites, environmental activists and sometime terrorists, want him to lead their movement. The government wants him in jail, or preferably, executed. The media wants a circus. Everyone has a plan for Train, but Train has a plan of his own"--Publisher.

The Sheep Look Up

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