John Brunner

John Kilian Houston Brunner was a prolific British science-fiction writer whose bleak, prophetic novels of the late 1960s and 1970s — Stand on Zanzibar, The Sheep Look Up, The Shockwave Rider — extrapolated overpopulation, ecological collapse and the networked society. Stand on Zanzibar won the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1969. The Shockwave Rider is best remembered for coining the computing sense of “worm” — and, in passing, for a throwaway line about knowledge that long ago outran its author’s name.