Literature / The Sheep Look Up

"Are you my mummy?"^note The bottom picture is closer to the world at the start of the novel.

The Sheep Look Up is a dystopian novel by John Brunner, published in 1972 and nominated for the Nebula Award.

Where the other three standalone novels in Brunner's "Club of Rome Quartet" each tackled social issues such as overpopulation (Stand on Zanzibar), racial tension and violence (The Jagged Orbit) or future shock (The Shockwave Rider), ecological concerns are at the heart of The Sheep Look Up.

Employing a similar structure as Stand On Zanzibar and The Jagged Orbit, the novel covers a multi-strand narrative featuring a variety of characters, all of whom are affected in one way or another by the growing environmental disaster. The story takes place over a single year.

It is the end of the twentieth century, and Earth has seen better days. Rampant industrialisation has resulted in a near-total destruction of the global biosphere. The Mediterranean Sea and the Great Lakes are poisoned beyond recovery, there is acid rain over New York, and the majority of American cities are covered by a constant layer of smog. Few people dare go outside without filter-masks any longer. Arable farmland is growing scarcer, with the overuse of defoliants having obliterated more than one breadbasket — the Mekong Delta is stated to have become the Mekong Desert — while household pests grow resistant to pesticides.

With the government of the United States refusing to take any significant action, numerous environmentalist groups have emerged, collectively known as "Trainites"; named after Austin Train, an academic who saw the disaster coming long ago. But Train himself has gone into hiding, disillusioned by society's failure to heed his warnings. And as the situation worsens, kick-started by a mass contamination of food and water in the United States, it is debatable whether a solution can still be found...

Unsurprisingly, Peter Watts has cited The Sheep Look Up as a major inspiration for his own work.

This novel contains examples of (beware unmarked spoilers):

• 20 Minutes into the Future: The exact year this is set in never gets specified, but a couple of clues scattered throughout the text, like Austin Train's age relative to his biography, hint at sometime around the 1980s. Oddly, many characters who logically should have been alive at the time John Brunner wrote his novel don't seem to remember the world being different, unless they're reminded of it.
  • That said, Brunner probably wasn't really expecting his dystopia to materialise only ten-to-fifteen years after publication. If anything, The Sheep Look Up is an indictment of his time, taking all the worst traits of America in The '70s and exaggerating them; the United States are bogged down in interventionist wars around the world to halt the spread of Communism, those gains made by the civil and women rights' movements during The '60s have stagnated, and hardly anybody in authority cares about the risks to human life posed by chemicals.
• An Aesop: There's the standard Green Aesop, obviously. Unchecked industrialisation is rushing us towards our doom, and if we don't wake up to that, one day it'll be too late. But there is also the Hard Truth Aesop that change is hard, and attempts to enact change will meet opposition from every corner, if the Establishment doesn't merely appropriate causes for its own profit instead. Also, technology is fickle and we should be careful in how much Enlightenment-style trust we place in it.
• Apathetic Citizens: Despite what could be inferred from the "Sheep" of the title, the trope is actually downplayed. While American culture is depicted as being, charitably put, a bit full of itself (see Eagleland), a lot of the people actually do want to do something to make things better, especially as it grows evident just how bad everything is getting. Unfortunately, as in the similarly-named Don't Look Up, society has reached a state where even those in a position to make changes will be blocked by a short-sighted, greedy minority.
• Black Comedy: The novel is not without a sense of humour. But the humour is overwhelmingly of the schadenfreude variety.
  • Best exemplified with the fate of Towerhill, Colorado. Since the beaches are polluted, people who can afford it have taken to going on holiday in the mountains, in turn leading to the establishment of new ski restorts catering to rich tourists. Unfortunately, because this is a novel in which everything that can go wrong will go wrong, the sonic boom off a passing supersonic jet provokes an avalanche, burying everyone.
  • Artistic Licence – Physics: Not to mention a rather nasty scene towards the end of the novel, when Jeannie, a pregnant woman, presses the button to start cooking chicken in the Instanter microwave her husband just got her, and immediately falls to the kitchen floor unconscious. The microwave's radiation leaked and cooked her baby in the womb. But this is flat-out impossible; for a woman to notice the painful warmth and move away, the microwave would have to put out tens of kilowatts, and the average home circuit breaker only provides 20 amps, far from enough to provide 10kW.
• Body Horror: American children born with defects such as an atrophied leg or missing lung, the imagery of starved and emaciated villagers in Honduras, acts of mutilation visited by Ergot-crazed people upon themselves and others, a lovely scene of the effects of napalm upon the human body, the many diseases which characters suffer throughout the novel... Yep, The Sheep Look Up does not skimp on descriptions of human grotesquery.
• Bulungi: The unnamed African nation home to the village of Noshri, where the first outbreak of madness derived from poisoned Nutripton is witnessed. The only clue as to its location is that it's getting swamped by refugees "from the North", who've been displaced by the sterilisation of the Mediterranean Sea. Notable in that the novel otherwise makes use of real third-world countries, such as Honduras, to illustrate its point.
• Cain and Abel: The Bamberly brothers and magnates of industry, Jacob and Roland. We are introduced to Jacob first and the novel invites plenty of reason to look at him with contempt, what with him being a "philantropist" who ships tasteless, possibly-deliberately (though actually not) poisoned food to starving nations and will only adopt orphans who are white... But then he dies halfway through and we meet Roland, who keeps his son Hector in a Gilded Cage to protect him from the polluted world outside, yet won't pay a ransom of water-filters for people who need it after his son gets abducted, and even expresses disgust at "how people can live like this" once Hector is brought back riddled with diseases common in the slums.
• Can't Stop the Signal: Double Subverted. At his televised trial, Austin Train launches into an inspirational speech, revealing the truth behind the Nutripton poisonings and exhorting the public to save the Earth. Then the word comes from the cameraman that the President has ordered the broadcast to be cut, and then a terrorist bomb goes off. Austin Train dies believing his words failed to reach anyone. However, the very next scene reveals that people did hear the broadcast, and are feeling motivated to act. It is nonetheless left to speculation as to whether this did any good in the end.
• Capitalism Is Bad: For it runs roughshod over the environment, not caring what damage it leaves in its wake, and it will keep finding ways to squeeze out just a little more profit from the calamity. Plus, efforts at living ethically, like eating "organic" food, will more likely than not get co-opted by the money men as well — the Puritan chain of organic food supermarkets is widely acknowledged by numerous characters to be a front for The Mafia.
• The Cassandra: Austin Train, of course. A widely-read academic who predicted exactly what horrors awaited the world if certain trends continued unchecked, but was unable to stop it from happening. Played With in that a lot of people did listen to what Train had to say, to the point of naming environmentalist movements after him, and the US government even appointed him as a spokesman for a while. Yet Train had a nervous breakdown after realising the government was turning him into their puppet, a useful talking-head for ultimately trivial and insufficient legislation, and so went underground.
• Crapsack World: Where do we even start? The world's dire state is established early on, during a meeting of executives at an American life insurance company. Philip Mason, the POV character and one of the executives, has to make his way through a smog-infested Los Angeles and into a heavily-guarded compound. Despite this heightened security, a toilet break leaves Mason wary of getting mugged in the stalls. The tap-water he uses to wash his hands is poorly-filtered, yet still needs to be paid for. And once Mason finally gets to the meeting, the day's topic of discussion comes up, and it is of some concern to the executives; life insurance premiums will have to be increased, because life expectancy is decreasing in the United States...
  Almost as soon as [Peg] started digging, though, she thought she might never be able to stop. It was out of the question to cover the entire planet. Her pledged total of twelve thousand words would be exhausted by North American material alone.
  • A small number of places are suggested to still be getting by, Ireland and New Zealand amongst them. Yet it is made out to be doubtful that they can weather the storm.
• Day of the Jackboot: In the face of the ever-increasing amount of environmental crises and ensuing unrest, the American government only responds with any kind of efficiency when it comes to silencing its opponents, until martial law is declared. Unusually for the trope, the novel's ending makes this out to have been short-lived, as not even their authoritarian policies could prevent a widespread uprising from burning the country to the ground.
• Defector from Decadence: Petronella Page starts off as a cynical, ratings-chasing talk-show host, just a gear in the vapid Bread and Circuses media culture which seeks to distract the American public from their rapidly-worsening reality. However, after meeting Austin Train, moved to tears by his words, Page resolves to stand in support of him during their interview. Following Train's arrest and death, Page is then the one to denounce the President and call for an uprising.
• Dirty Commies: Still considered by America to be their Arch-Enemy. Not surprising; the novel was written in the early 1970s, after all. Russia and China barely get touched upon, mind, although it is implied they're no better than the West at taking care of the environment^note Which would sadly be Truth in Television, and then some; if anything, both before and after the Fall of The Wall, Russia and China have had a worse track record than the West. The focus is given to the left-wing nations of Central America, as the US launches a Vietnam-style special military operation in Honduras, and Cuba is accused of being behind terrorist attacks.
• Distant Reaction Shot: A non-comedic example towards the end. Across the Atlantic, people in Ireland can see what the chapter's title pithily describes as "The Smoke of That Great Burning"...
• Downer Ending: Decidedly one of the darkest endings in any literary science-fiction novel ever written. The only note of ambiguity lies in how you choose to interpret the last lines, but even the slightly more optimistic interpretation is deeply pessimistic in tone.
  • In short, Austin Train dies during a terrorist bombing, but not before his words get out, encouraging widespread civil unrest and revolution against the now-fascistic government of the United States. Most of the main cast have already died long before this point, and the novel ends on a few people in Ireland seeing the fire of the American apocalypse.
  • What makes this ending ambiguous is the scene immediately preceding it. Throughout the novel, the intelligent, borderline-sociopathic actuary Tom Grey has been running a computer simulation for a solution to the ecological crisis. When the results are at last reported on the Petronella Page Show, the only answer which a super-computer could find is to cull the Earth of its two-hundred million most resource-draining inhabitants — e.g., Americans. Page seems to take him at his word, calling upon her viewers to commit the greatest act of Murder-Suicide in history as a "funeral pyre" to Austin Train.
  • So, America is effectively dead... But given how the Mediterranean Sea was already sterilised by pollution, and South-East Asia has desertified due to American imperialism, the rest of the world may not be far behind. Even if you buy that the burning of America might give the rest of the world a chance, the cost incurred still involved the genocide of two-hundred million people. And that isn't to say that, between the inevitable economic and environmental consequences, the massive continent-spanning fire may not have simply spelt the death knell of humanity. Either way, bleak. The final lines, a quote from Lycidas by John Milton, support the theory that it was All for Nothing.
• Eagleland: Firmly "America The Boorish". John Brunner wants you to know he doesn't think highly of the United States. While none of the novel's world is in great shape, the narrative hammers home that America is actually lagging behind the rest of the West in terms of living conditions, despite being the leading industrial nation on the whole choked-up planet; in fact, this excess of industry is the very reason why the country's in bad shape, for all its claims at progress and prosperity. And yet despite all of that, too many Americans stubbornly refuse to recognise how deeply they're wading in filth;
  What hurt [Michael] most of all, made him feel like a sick child aware of terrible wrongness and yet incapable of explaining it to anyone who might help, was that in spite of the evidence around them, in spite of what their eyes and ears reported—and sometimes their flesh, from bruises, stab wounds, racking coughs, weeping sores—these people believed their way of life was the best in the world, and were prepared to export it at the point of a gun.
  • Hypocrite: Continuing from the above, America is more than eager to send troops onto foreign soil for its own interests, but when the UN send an observer (Michael Adowson) to investigate and oversee the destruction of the contaminated Nutripton, complaints about him being a "foreign meddler" come flying.
• "Everybody Dies" Ending: In the last few scenes, Petronella Page, Tom Grey and Pete Goddard are the only spotlight characters still shown to be alive. And depending on how you read the ending, the entire human race looks to be on its way out.
• Failure Is the Only Option: The Sheep Look Up twists the knife hard like few other novels, in that having identified a problem, it will set up hypothetical solutions — only to systematically knock them down one by one. Sustainable-living communes? Too vulnerable to attack by conservative lynch mobs, or the sinister business concerns that they offend. Legislation? Can and will be ignored both by small-time dealers and the major corporations. Charities and relief organisations? At best, the West indulging its atrophied conscience; at worst, colonialism by another name. Alternatives to capitalism? The Communist governments of the world are as psychotic in their own way, and everyone in the middle is too weak to do anything. The moral of the story? Don't expect any single magic cure-all for the world's problems...
• Future Food Is Artificial: Nutripton, a shapeless and tasteless paste produced by Jacob Bamberly, who'll ship it out for a good price though he won't eat any himself. Amongst its other charms, samples of it turn out to be contaminated with Ergot, driving crazy anyone unfortunate enough to eat it. In a departure from the norm, though, Nutripton has not yet become standard nutrition for the working-classes of America itself. At first.
• Gaia's Lament: The oceans are dying. An entire generation of American middle-class children is growing up with birth defects. People must wear filter-masks when walking outside in most of the country due to air pollution. Real food is sold at a premium, and even then it isn't guaranteed to be free of contamination. Outside of America, the Mekong Delta is just gone, the entire area having been rendered unihabitable by the use of chemical weapons during the Vietnam War. Starvation in Africa is worse than ever, with the West resorting to shipments of artifical food for relief efforts, and famine is beginning to spread into Europe as well. All of this is just the setting; the novel proper recounts events going From Bad to Worse.
• Hanlon's Razor: While the novel is not kind to the United States government, and several characters theorise that the Nutripton food supplies were deliberately poisoned with Ergot nerve gas to pave way for a Western takeover of the remaining farmland in Africa and South America, the actual explanation provided by Austin Train turns out to be far more prosaic;
  • The Ergot was actually stored by the government in drums under the mountains surrounding Denver. One day, just before Christmas, an injection-induced earthquake caused a drum to rupture and leak its contents into the water table supplying the Nutripon factory. A later earthquake then caused a much larger leak, which poisoned all of Denver. Where the line of Hanlon's Razor grows thin is that the government knew the truth, but covered up their mistake and blamed it on Communist terrorism.
• Inherent in the System: Notably, The Sheep Look Up avoids using a singular Big Bad or group of characters on which to pin the blame for everything wrong in the world. Although the President and his administration (each of whom are rarely shown onscreen) are undeniably corrupt, they are also shown to be symptomatic of a larger problem. Shadowy organised-crime figures act against the protagonists at a couple of points, yet The Mafia is portrayed as just a logical extreme of uncaring exploitation by the capitalist system.
  • Jacob Bamberly, the one Establishment figure whose perspective we follow for an extended period, dies partway throughout the novel and was at least trying to provide philantropic aid, though the novel doesn't depict him in a very favourable light.
• Intrepid Reporter: Peg Mankiewicz, journalist for The New York Times and one of the few people who knows where to find Austrin Train. She makes it her mission to persuade him to return into the spotlight.
• Just Before the End: Civilisation is hanging by a thread at the novel's beginning, and we're treated to the spectacle of watching it steadily crumble over the course of a year. The scenes set in the city of Denver best capture this feeling of deterioration; while Denver is one of the few places in the United States where the air is still breathable, events ranging from the Towerhill avalanche to the Ergot gas leak conspire to leave it virtually a Ghost Town.
• Literary Allusion Title: "The hungry sheep look up, and are not fed..." (Lycidas, by John Milton).
• Ludd Was Right: Not exactly; the Trainites are willing to explore new, green technologies. But nor can technology be expected to provide all the answers, when industry has been causing so many of its own problems.
• Messianic Archetype: Austin Train. Characters who interact with him directly are struck by the almost-supernatural vividity with which he describes how beautiful Earth used to be. It's such that Petronella Page, who had even noted to herself that she planned to "crucify" him on national television, ends up won over to the Trainite cause.
• Never My Fault: The United States government can never, ever be held accountable for anything. Villagers in Africa are dying from poisoned relief food? Oh yeah, that must have been a Communist plot. Environmental activists are demanding you do something about things like how, you know, the beaches are utterly polluted and people can't go to work because everybody's sick? Hit them, and hit them hard! And let's not get into how the government knew the real cause of the poisonings all along, even if it wasn't done on purpose.
• Our Presidents Are Different: "Prexy", as he is affectionaly known by his voter base. Never appears in person, always remaining The Ghost over the course of the novel, only heard making quippy statements on his way to and from photo opportunities. A mixture of President Buffoon and President Personable on the surface, gradually gives way to President Evil as the government takes harsher measures against anyone who is even mildly critical of the United States.
• Psychological Horror: Sequences told from the perspective of people who've eaten Ergot-laced Nutripton are a... bad trip, to say the least.
• The Revolution Will Not Be Civilized: Trainism started off as a peaceful protest movement, in accordance with the wishes of Austin Train, who himself rejects the label of "Trainite". His reasons for doing so are understandable, considering that most Trainites resort to increasingly radical actions, including but not limited to shooting people in retaliation for cutting down trees, or kidnapping the son of a wealthy industrialist in exchange for a ransom of water-filters. Unfortunately, such extremism casts a shadow over those Trainites who just wish to live in environmentally-friendly communes, making them all targets for the government as it cracks down on them.
• The Stoic: Tom Grey, the Angel City insurance company's actuary. He never sweats, never raises his voice, his clothes always look pristine — even with all the particles infesting the air — and he seems completely unaffected by the diseases which everyone else comes down with at least once in the novel. His final appearance, on the Petronella Page Show, with his arm in sling due to getting caught up in a riot, serves as a visual hint at how matters have really gone to hell.
• Surprisingly Realistic Outcome: In the wake of the avalanche over Towerhill, heroic policeman Pete Goddard experiences a moment of Uninhibited Muscle Power when he has to lift a piece of metal-and-concrete in order to rescue a pair of trapped children. All subsequent chapters demonstrate that this was not free of consequence; once the adrenaline has worn off, Pete's muscle and ligament are as realistically torn as you'd expect them to be from someone who's lifted a greater weight than humans are meant to lift. He has to wear a cast, go into physical re-education, and can no longer work for the police, leading him to have to take on a job as a spokesperson for a shady walter-filter business. No Good Deed Goes Unpunished, indeed...
  • Ironically, Pete is the husband of Jeannie, the victim of the aforementioned not-at-all-realistic microwave incident. One wonders whether Brunner was taking the mickey, swerving from one end of the realism spectrum to the other on purpose.
• Technology Marches On: One of the "green" technologies employed by the Trainites are steam-powered cars. Steam is understood nowadays to be a source of pollution in its own right, contributing as it does to climate change with greenhouse gases. For all his prescience, Brunner did not account for electric cars.
• Undignified Death. See Black Comedy. Jacob Bamberly meets his demise after eating a bar of chocolate he'd earlier confiscated from one of his children, for fear of an allergic reaction; sure enough, he himself reacts badly to the less-than-pure milk in the chocolate, falls out the window and dies.
• What Happened to the Mouse?: Two UN investigators who feature in the first chapter, Leonard Ross and Isaiah Williams, are last mentioned as having gone missing in Honduras and never show up again. Ross's body is later stated to have been found in a ditch. The implication is that they were silenced by the American authorities, but this is never confirmed, and it is entirely possible their disappearance was unrelated.