peteg's blog - noise - books - 2020 09 07 JohnBrunner TheAstronautsMustNotLand

John Brunner: The Astronauts Must Not Land.

Mon, Sep 07, 2020./noise/books | Link

Kindle. More thin Brunner, with a very thin conceit stretched very thin over some druggy imaginings of alien physiologies. He made bank on his word count here with a lot of repetition at the macro level; the first-person sentences seem finer than usual, which is a bit of a waste. The spirit is (once again) Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End alloyed with some South American exoticism / essentialism. It ends in a damp squib. As idealisation is what I do (poorly), I don't think there's a lot to philosophise about: it's entirely instrumental.