Set in an overcrowded 2010 in which seven billion people strain a world governed by eugenic birth laws, the novel follows two men who share a New York apartment. Norman Niblock House is a Black executive rising fast at the conglomerate General Technics, which has taken on the development of Beninia, a small and improbably peaceful West African state. Donald Hogan is his flatmate, a mild 'synthesist' who reads widely for the government and is abruptly activated as a spy and dispatched to the South-East Asian nation of Yatakang, where a geneticist claims to be able to optimise unborn children. Around these threads Brunner assembles a teeming mosaic of advertising slogans, news fragments, sociological riffs from the pundit Chad Mulligan and the muttered logic of Shalmaneser, the supercomputer at the heart of General Technics. Borrowing the collage method of John Dos Passos, Brunner turns the form itself into an argument about information overload. Prophetic in its detail, from random massacres to genetic anxiety, the book is really about how a species copes, or fails to cope, with sheer density: too many people, too much data and a planet with no more room to stand.
