Billy Conn

Overall, a read, but has some technical flaws a review would be remiss not to mention:

Brunner was cyberpunk before cyberpunk was cyberpunk. The Shockwave Rider was written years before Neuromancer, and ARPAnet less than 50 nodes. As far as I know, the first recorded use of the word worm to describe a self-replicating - without human intervention - computer program. He brought up the concept of “Information wants to be free” years before Brand, if only his wording had been more clever. Much of the high concept sci-fi narrative is excellent. His dystopic vision is excellent. Basically, if you're reading sci-fi because you like good ideas, go, read it. It's short, which compensates for the flaws nicely.

So, why only three stars? It's a personal thing. There's something about Brunner's style - his one-dimensional characters, his deus ex machina, his flat writing style which just seems somehow... boring. The closest comparison I could make was Ayn Rand - but Brunner is several degrees better than that.
Still, once I had mentally made the comparison, it wouldn't go away. Every time a new character was introduced, I could tell almost immediately which side in the coming finale that person would be on. And the reports that broke up some of the ending chapters were some of the most interesting writing in the book!

5/5 for ideas, cleverness. It's still applicable today, though in different ways than when it was written. 2/5 for execution.

The main character is pretty bland. The story is... well, it does one clever thing, but in brutal honesty? It's not that great. The ending is... pretty bad, actually. And it's not enjoyable, in the sense of just-fun-to-read, either.So why the hell am I giving this 4 stars?It's the atmosphere. The writing, I can just get behind. Remember when you were a teenager and you first read Lovecraft? You got that eerie feeling from his work, because the narrator(s) didn't strike you as particularly sane, and frequently unreliable? Or maybe [b:Gateway 218427 Gateway (Heechee Saga, #1) Frederik Pohl https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1388262265s/218427.jpg 1668837], where everything had a feeling of emptiness (from the character looking out) and suspense (from how little the character knows, how dangerous the universe is, and how aware he is of it).It's one of a very few books in many years that made me feel that again. It takes a lot to take a rather unenjoyable book and turn it into something worth reading. Bravo.

This is what people should mean when they say “Lovecraftian Horror'. It's not about being part of the mythos, it's about feeling afraid of the unknown and unexplained in a universe that doesn't care.

While the setting is vaguely interesting, the writing isn't. It's aggressively boring. I don't mean the plot - which is pretty generic filler plot - but the writing itself. I can say that I didn't put it down for the last half of the book - but only because I knew that if I did, I'd never pick it back up.

tl;dr: Heinlein wrote a great book about a powerful alien coming to Earth and learning about humanity as an outsider, but unfortunately he only had one hand on the typewriter while he wrote it.