John Killian Houston Brunner was born at Preston Crowmarsh, Oxfordshire, in 1934 and educated at Cheltenham. He wrote his first novel at the age of 17 under the pseudonym Gill Hunt. His writings tended to be intellectual rather than popular, and even at the peak of his career he sometimes found it difficult to get his books published. A leftwing activist, with particular connections to the peace movement, much of his best and most mature fiction is involved in a complex analysis of social trends and where they will take us--novels like Stand on Zanzibar which deals with overpopulation, among other things, and The Sheep Look Up, which is one of sf's most telling presentations of environmental degradation, are also technically innovative with their multiple viewpoint storylines, interspersed newspaper headlines and fragments of author characters' expository prose. The Shockwave Rider is more conventional in technique but was one of the first sf novels fully to understand the information technology revolution.