The Shockwave Rider

Proto-cyberpunk that thinks harder than it feels.

Brunner was writing about network worms, identity fluidity, and information-as-power in 1975, a decade before Gibson made it cool. The ideas are prescient. But prescience isn’t narrative, nor is it cool. The Shockwave Rider reads is in the PKD tradition of idea-first fiction, where the world-building does the heavy lifting and the characters only exist to walk through it.

The problem is that none of it sticks. The protagonist is too changeable, and the remaining cast barely registers. There’s a flatness to the human layer that makes the ideas fade. Cyberpunk, when it works, makes you feel the dystopia in your gut (like modern 2026!). This stays in your head, and slips away like lost Claude contextual memories. I finished it and couldn’t tell you what the main character wanted beyond escaping the system.

Worth reading as a historical artifact or if you like blueprints.