John Brunner's best work is related to the tradition of literary naturalism. His fictions offer projections into the relatively near future—a few decades—of trends that are clearly detectable in the present. He works with large canvasses, building worlds out of many individual lives. He himself has expressed his indebtedness to John Dos Passos for his naturalistic blend of fiction and documents from the communications media, but he has altered the technique of Dos Passos in several crucial ways. First, by attempting to "document" the future he has set himself a task which is more demanding and more interesting than documenting the present. Put simply, documenting the future requires imagination as well as some skill at social science.

But even more important, a naturalism of the future radically alters the deterministic quality that makes literary naturalism so oppressive and even unesthetic. Brunner gives us a fictional world...