Books by John Brunner

An electrifying novel about identity in the digital age from the Hugo and BSFA Award-winning author, John Brunner.

In three fascinating and ground-breaking novellas, John Brunner weaves an ingenious tale of a divergent and compelling timeline, and poses complex questions of how we perceive the fourth dimension and its relation to our own identity.

The legendary John Brunner wrote the original Threshold of Eternity in 1957. Sixty years later Damien Broderick revisits the world Brunner created in that classic, forward-looking story and modernizes it to retell the exciting tale of time travelers, augmented intelligences and aliens. When Korean war vet Ret. Corporal Lawrence “Red” Hawkins stumbles across a doctor from the future, he embarks on the most important journey of his life…with the future of humanity at stake. For he must travel thousands of years into the future to join in a galactic Time War where alien beings are poised to eradicate humanity in a conflict that never ends. Spearheading the fight against the alien race (known only as the Enemy) is Artesha, a human so advanced, so damaged by a war she’s been fighting across endless time and space, that her physical form has been destroyed; she not only has been uploaded into the Center’s web where she runs humanity’s vast communication network—she has become it. While Artesha tries to calculate the best way to victory in a playing field being continuously altered by time surges, it is all that she and her fleet coordinators, Paulo Magwareet and Burma Brahmasutra, can do to keep up with the fallout. For there is also another presence at play whom the humans know as the Being, and the Enemy label the Beast. It will take all of the time travelers, across many different eras of humanity, working together to uncover this mysterious entity’s goal, to make right a time torn asunder so they can forge a future for the human race. 

Employing a dazzling range of literary techniques, John Brunner has created a future world as real as this morning's newspaper ... With a new introduction by Ken MacLeod.