Book Review: Web of Everywhere by John Brunner
Hans Dykstra is a criminal. Along with the blind poet Mustapha Sharif, he uses illegally obtained location codes to visit abandoned teleport stations and photograph their surroundings. This time they’ve found a surprisingly intact house in Sweden, the former owners dead of personal violence rather than war or plague. A person could, in theory, live here off the grid. Hans tucks away this idea for later.
Hans’ day job isn’t that different from his extracurricular activities. He works for the new world government as a scavenger, going to various wrecked locations in Europe and the former United States looking for stuff that can either be used as is or parts for technology that’s no longer made. A few decades back, a boom in teleportation booths, both public and personal, led to disaster. Only the invention of the “privateer”, a device that somehow prevents people from leaving the booth until the owner lets them, prevented the total collapse of civilization.
Christianity is a dead religion, and Islam not much better off, largely replaced by the pacifist Religion of Life. Fertile women are now relatively rare, and they know their value so convincing a woman to marry you is a social bonus. Which is why Hans is married to Dany, eighteen years his senior. This turned out to be a huge mistake for both of them. He’s a social climber and intellectual snob. She’s emotionally fragile and a dimwit. Dany comes off quite unpleasant, but we’re seeing her from Hans’ perspective and it’s clear he’s making no attempt at empathy.
One of Dany’s hobbies is going to “treasure hunt” parties where one follows a series of clues from teleport booth to teleport booth around the world until you arrive at the party. This party’s clues are particularly difficult, and Hans loses his temper with Dany repeatedly coming back to him for help, especially when she opens his darkroom and spoils his photographs. So he steals her invitation and figures out the clues himself. Hans is book-smart and is in fact the first person to arrive at the party location.
The party turns out to be a way of scouting for new people to get higher posts in the world government, so Hans gets to meet and impress some pretty important celebrities. Even better, he meets Anneliese, sole survivor of a Mennonite-like colony “rescued” after the slaughter of her people–as it happens, Hans is one of the few persons in the world who speaks her native language well due to growing up in the backwaters of Europe. They hit it off.
Then the party is attacked by anti-globalists. In the confusion, Hans takes Annelise through the teleport booth to relative safety. But his motives are ulterior, and the rest of the book is about the consequences of his actions.
Good: A grown man trying to manipulate a naive, traumatized teenage girl into having a “romantic” relationship with him is treated as the contemptible act it is. Hans’ pretense of moral superiority is stripped from him slice by slice even as he mistakes just who is pursuing him for what purpose.
The world is an interesting setup and I could see more stories being told in it.
Less good: The story does tend to treat women as prizes rather than characters in their own right, but that’s largely because we’re following Hans, who thinks that way.
Content note: Suicide.
The ending’s a downer, but if you’re okay with that, this is a decent minor work from Brunner.
