John Kilian Houston Brunner was born on September 24, 1934, in Preston Crowmarsh, near Wallingford, Oxfordshire, England. In 1953 he graduated in modern languages, served for two years as an officer in the RAF, and later moved to London to work in the Industrial Diamond Information Bureau.

John Brunner read the classics of Verne and Wells when he was a boy and when he was just 17 he already published his first novel, “Galactic Storm”, under the pseudonym Gill Hunt. Only after a few years he decided to devote himself to writing and in 1958 another important moment in his life was marrying Marjorie Rosamond Sauer.

Initially, John Brunner’s science fiction works were adventurous and often superficial. He wrote in a professional manner, to earn a living, but he had to focus more on quantity than quality. He wrote some novels a year, sometimes under pseudonyms such as Keith Woodcott, and a number of short stories, sometimes also fantasy such as those collected in 1986 in the anthology “The Compleat Traveller in Black”.

Among the many science fiction novels written by John Brunner in the early years of his career, we can remember for example “The Atlantic Abomination” (1960), “Secret Agent of Terra” (1962), “Castaways’ World” (1963), then revised and republished as “Polymath” in 1974, “The Astronauts Must Not Land” (1963), then revised and republished as “More Things in Heaven” in 1973 and “The Repairmen of Cyclops” (1965).

A peculiar novel is “The Squares of the City” (1965), a story based on a chess game actually played by Wilhelm Steinitz and Mikhail Chigorin in Havana in 1892. The various game’s moves have their correspond to the novel’s plot.

The best novel of those years is probably “The Whole Man”, published in the UK as “Telepathist” (1964). It’s actually a reworking of three short stories written in the ’50s. Something like that would happen a number of times during John Brunner’s career.

Thanks to various trips made with his wife, John Brunner came into contact with the problems of the world that by the end of the ’50s were becoming very serious, from nuclear proliferation to overpopulation, from civil rights to ecology. Inspired by those issues, the author wrote an ideal trilogy that in many ways anticipates cyberpunk. It consists of: “Stand on Zanzibar” (1968), winner of the Hugo BSFA awards, “The Jagged Orbit (1969), and “The Sheep Look Up” (1972).

John Brunner wrote the screenplay for the 1967 movie “The Terrornauts” but it had no commercial success. His 1963 novella “Some Lapse of Time” and his 1964 short story “The Last Lonely Man” were adapted into two episodes of the TV show “Out of the Unknown”.

Between the ’70s and early ’80s, John Brunner went on to write several more novels and short stories such as “Total Eclipse” (1974), “The Shockwave Rider” (1975), “Players at the game of People” (1980), and “The Crucible of Time” (1983).

During the ’80s, John Brunner started having health problems, especially after his wife’s death, which occurred in 1986. In 1991 he married again, with Li Yi Tan. He died on August 25, 1995, due to a heart attack while he was at the World Science Fiction Convention in Glasgow. His novel “Case of Painter’s Ear” was published posthumously.

John Brunner was a writer who produced many works and sometimes this amount has gone to the expense of quality. However, in his best work, he reached very high levels and anticipated many of the themes in that subsequently became important in science fiction and problems that have now become very real. That’s enough to remember him as one of the very great in science fiction.