He was "The Visitor" in a civilization that had been transformed and disturbed by a means of travel that allowed anyone to immediately travel anywhere in the world by walking through a door. The world was in a period when unrestricted travel had violently killed untold millions of people and the survivors were trembling in terror. Importantly this novel depicts a society where violating someone's privacy was the worst possible crime. The protagonist, who unfortunately had a fixation with going to areas he had no business going, embarked on a treacherous journey that ultimately led to his own demise. ( )

A post-apocalyptic fiction about a much-reduced population, due to an epidemic that caused women to be outnumbered by men. The result is, even more unhappy marriages than the norm of reality, as having a wife, any wife,is a status symbol. Moreover, one can travel instantly to almost any part of the world via a "skelter," a shelter that sends you on your way instantly, if you possess the correct code. Humans are still causing the same problems as ever--there are the ones with power who use it to oppress others. There are men who want to dominate and use women...

Not my favorite Brunner. ( )

review of
John Brunner's Web of Everywhere
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - October 30, 2013

1st off, this is "A Frederik Pohl Selection" as the front cover announces. That's immediately promising for me insofar as Pohl is one of the better politically minded SF writers in the US (IMO). As the inside proclaims:

"Frederik Pohl, four-time Hugo Award winner, editor of some thirty science fiction anthologies and author of more than forty books [Web of Everywhere having been published in 1974, the number of Pohl books would now be, of course, much larger.], is an acknowledged master of his field.

"Each book that bears the crest "A Frederik Pohl Selection" reflects the taste, integrity and discrimination that have made his own works so highly respected by critics and enjoyed by millions of readers."

A device called the skelter has been invented wch enables instantaneous traveling. As an unexpected side-effect, Earth's population has been devastated. "Close to two-thirds of the planet's population had been killed by violence or disease within twenty years of the marketing of the first skelters". (p 14) As such, each private location now has an encoded protection against unwanted intrusion. Traveling between locales w/o permission from the destination encoder is a serious crime. Hans, the main character here, is one of these criminals. He & his companion Mustapha have illegally entered a deserted location using the instantaneous travel device. The reader gets hints of why it's deserted:

""There is a smell of death, but it is so faint, it is more likely to issue, I think, from food which has rotted through several summers and been frozen again. Those documents: they say where we have come to. Do they also hint at what became of the people who lived here?"" - p 10

"Recovering almost at once, he said, "No, but we can dismiss fallout, I think. This area must have been well out of range of the big blast at Kiruna and Trondheim." - p 10

""Disease, possibly? So many epidemics were imported here by the skelter . . . " - p11

I'm reminded of Richard Preston's book about Ebola called The Hot Zone. In it, one of the things that I learned that stuck w/ me the most was how this highly infectious & deadly disease spread w/ the assistance of modern transportation. A disease that might've stayed localized in Africa traveled widely thanks to infected persons & monkeys traveling worldwide by airplane.

Hans finds bodies at his illegally accessed destination & sends their bodies to be secretly incinerated: "He didn't bother to rehearse any prayers as he consigned the bodies to the skelter. In Norther Europe these people would presumably have been either atheist—in which case they wouldn't have cared—or Christian. As a moderately devout follower of the Way of Life he regarded Christianity with the same revulsion as black magic." (p 15) Ha ha! My personal experience w/ Christinanity certainly makes it worthy of being considered the true Satanism.

Each chapter begins w/ a poem by the Mustapha character. These poems largely center around the consequences of skelter culture. here's the one that prefaces chapter 4:

"Time was when any lover, seeing his mistress
Was gone from the room, might call for her
And be assured that she would hear his cry.

O my beloved I do not treat you coldly.
rather am I haunted by the knowledge
That one step may have put the world between us." - p 23

""What it comes down to," Mustapha said, "is that mankind from now on must be governed by artists, not by politicians. There is no other conceivable manner in which a survival-prone society can be organized. We must evolve an aesthetic of government, free from ideological trammels; we must commit our fate into the hands of those who derive artistic satisfaction from seeing a well-ordered community, who will crack their skulls into the small hours of the morning over a flaw in their scheme as I may worry myself sleepless over a line in a poem until it suddenly turns head over heels and comes out right." - p 37

Alas, history proves that artists turned to world rulers are just as liable to create disaster as anyone else. Regardless of whether artists want to admit it or not, Hitler was an artist & Mussolini put Italian Futurist Marinetti into a high cultural position. Would you trust Bruce Naumann, a prominent American artist who's against audience participation & who represented the US at La Biennale di Venezia, w/ political power? I wdn't. Not that Naumann's anywhere close to Hitler or Mussolini of course. Remember, famed American poet Ezra Pound supported Fascism & was visited by the leader of the American Nazi Party when he was incarcerated in St Elizabeth's Hospital for being a traitor during WWII. NO-ONE & NO PARTICULAR SUBCULTURE ARE 'FIT' FOR GOVERNING. Not even those lovable cuddly artists.

As usual, Brunner's story is fascinatingly explored & I enjoyed reading it very much. On the other hand, I don't really have much to say about it. I recommend it to every 3rd person on the left - how's that? ( )

Next he came to a small study, with an open bureau bearing a Halda typewriter, documents in pigeon-holes, a pile of dusty correspondence papers which he blew at gently until the name and address were legible. From it he learned that the house's owners had been called Eriksson, that they were indeed in Sweden, near a place called Umeå, which he would have to look up on a map when he got home, and something else which struck him as simply incredible!
Their skelter code was printed on the letterhead!

The skelter is a transportation device that lets you walk through its door and out of any other skelter on the planet, as long as you know its code. There are even skelters that open straight into to the heart of an incinerator, although their codes are strictly controlled to stop people making use of them to dispose of dead bodies and other evidence of criminal activity, rather than just rubbish.

Supposedly the invention of the skelter caused worldwide devastation, as there was originally no way of preventing access to anyone who knew the code. As well as facilitating robbery and crimes of violence, it also allowed terrorists and saboteurs easy access to plant bombs and make a quick getaway to the other side of the world, and allowed diseases to spread with impunity. The human race has been decimated by the skelter, and a disease called contagious puerperal fever has led to a gender imbalance, with 5 men to 3 women (and not many of them are fertile, since any woman not immune to CPF is sterilised for their own safety). Now that a device called the privateer has been invented that allows you to screen incomers to your skelter, and deny them access, the elite, skelter using population tend to live on islands, although there are some people who are 'stuck', unable to bring themselves to walk through the door of a skelter, for fear of what might happen, and there are also skelter-hating populations living at a lower technological level. Stealing skelter codes or using them to invade someone's privacy is punishable by being forced to wear a bracelet that prevents access to the skelter system.

I can't see that anyone would actually want to have such an insecure device providing access to their homes. In reality, the rich might have private skelters (although I am sure that they would be placed just outside their well-guarded perimeter defences), but I am sure that everyone else would just use public skelters. ( )