James Nicoll Reviews

John Brunner’s 1973 The Stone That Never Came Down is a stand-alone near-future¹ science fiction novel.

The future looks like the 1970s dialed to eleven. Society’s leaders being the self-serving liars that they are, every social issue (minority unrest, inflation, decaying cities, rampaging Christians, energy shortages, and the Irish) has been allowed to spiral out of control.

Disgraced teacher Malcolm Fry has more immediate problems. Targeted by deranged Christians, he has lost his job, his wife, his car, and his children². While this did leave him free to hook up with Ruth, this just makes the unmarried couple the sort of people the Godheads hate and persecute.

A depressed Malcolm goes to a pub and gets hammered. While not in his right mind, he takes a drug from a stranger. The drug is called VC, Was this a tragic error or the best thing ever to happen to Malcolm?

Malcolm wakes to discover that VC has given him an altered state of consciousness. No surprise, given that that’s what party drugs are supposed to do. In this case the effects enhance cognition. Malcolm is more aware of his surrounding and far more able to make detailed deductions based on meagre evidence than he was before taking VC.

Malcolm’s exploration of his new power is interrupted by a visit from the local Campaign Against Moral Pollution³. Boarder Billy Cohen engages the Godheads in heated discussion. Sensing they’re losing the rhetorical battle, the Godheads beat Billy bloody. It’s off to the emergency room for Billy. Malcolm accompanies Billy. On a whim, Malcolm donates blood while he’s there at the hospital⁴.

VC has many interesting properties. As noted, it makes it harder for humans to kid themselves and much easier to make swift logical deductions. Additionally, in the right conditions it replicates itself. A human with a little VC in their blood, like someone who received a blood transfusion from a VC carrier, would soon end up with the maximum load of VC in their blood. This chain of events is not an episode of Doomwatch so the effects of VC are merely startling, not lethal.

The stranger who gave Malcolm VC was organochemist Maurice Post, whose colleagues are even now searching for Maurice. Alas for Maurice, he inadvertently exposed himself to VC. One early side-effect is enhanced argumentativeness. As a consequence, Maurice is quite dead, having been attacked after leaving the bar.

Maurice may have been lucky to have checked out when he did. Alarming news from across Europe, from Italy in particular, leads Malcolm to an inescapable conclusion. Europe is sleepwalking towards another total war. This will be the first Great War fought with thermonuclear weapons. As a consequence, it will be the final Great War.

Malcolm and chums would like not to be incinerated — but what can a small number of people armed with a cognition-enhancing, replicating drug do to save the world?

~oOo~

Some readers may find various characters’ bombastic criticisms of Christianity a bit much. However, the critiques are nothing that were not previously uttered by unbiased observers like Ammianus Marcellinus (quoted in the novel), Suetonius, Tacitus, and Nero. Fans for whom Harry Harrison’s critiques of Christianity are too understated may enjoy this aspect of Brunner’s novel.

Readers may also struggle with the characters’ tendency to lecture each other at length. Not only is this the standard mode of conversation in many SF novels, in this particular case it’s a known side-effect of VC. How interesting will be the days immediately after VC’s introduction into the general population!

There are two extremes to which enhanced cognition could lead. It might enable wildly divergent conclusions, due to divergent assumptions. Alternatively, everyone might be forced by common facts and iron logic to zero in on the single correct answer. This novel assumes that all those affected will fall into the second category.

Billy Cohen is, in addition to being Jewish, gay. Generally speaking, 1970s SF was not the place to look for sympathetically portrayed gay characters. To the extent any of the rather irritable characters in this book can be called sympathetic, Billy is sympathetic. Unfortunately for Billy, being Jewish and being gay makes him an ideal figure to play inspirational martyr for his friends.

There are only 191 pages in the DAW mass-market paperback. Brunner does not have room for a nuanced argument about whether it’s moral to inflict vastly improved cognition on people without their consent. Brunner sidesteps this issue by introducing VC at a point in history when World War Three is at best weeks away. It’s essentially the ticking time bomb question applied to dietary supplements rather than torture.

Still, this book stands out in contrast to other Brunners of this period such as The Jagged Orbit, Total Eclipse, and Stand on Zanzibar⁵. The means used are a bit questionable, but the results leave most of humanity⁶ much better off. If you’re looking for a Brunner with an unambiguously optimistic ending, this is a good choice.

The Stone That Never Came Down is available here (Amazon US), here (Amazon Canada), here (Amazon UK), here (Apple Books), here (Barnes & Noble), and here (Chapters-Indigo).

1: Near-future from the standpoint of 1973. Now it would be an alternate timeline.

2: The protagonist’s off-screen family likely have names, but we are never told what they are.

3: The leader of the Campaign Against Moral Pollution, Lady Washgrave, may be based on the real-life Mary Whitehouse. Lady Washgrave’s faithful secretary Tarquin Drew reminded me of Thunderbirds’ cockney chauffeur Parker. This meant that I couldn’t help but imagine Lady Washgrave and Tarquin as super-marionation characters.

4: Malcolm donates once he learns that NHS will now pay for blood.

5: Come to think of it, Stand on Zanzibar also features a chemical with the potential to beneficially alter human behavior.

6: The characters are a bit puzzled that there are people for whom VC has no obvious effect, but have to admit that such people exist. It is interesting that the would-be Mussolini figure is not such a person, whereas various people connected to real estate development are.