Who Goes There?

John Brunner is kind of a puzzle box to me: he wrote a whole lot of garbage that was clearly written to pay the bills, and yet there’s a fraction of his output that people I know will swear by as being works of genius. Was Brunner a genius? Maybe. He actually reminds me a bit of Philip K. Dick, whom I do consider a genius, albeit a deeply troubled one. Both men entered the field around the same time and took to writing genre fiction as a full-time thing, which was certainly not the norm in the ’50s, the result being that much of what these men wrote was middling at best. Of course, Brunner was a teenager when he first got published, and his work (what I’ve read, anyway) reads like that of a man who was a decade older than he really was. Today’s story, “The Totally Rich,” is a more mature and downbeat affair than I was expecting—given Brunner would’ve only been 27 when he wrote it. This was not long before he would start work on arguably his magnum opus, Stand on Zanzibar, but even after the Hugo win for that novel his works did not sell. Brunner’s career reads in part like a bad joke.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the June 1963 issue of Worlds of Tomorrow, which is on the Archive. “The Totally Rich” has been collected a few times, most notably in The Best of John Brunner where it serves as the opening salvo (just mind the hideous cover). There’s also the early Brunner collection Out of My Mind, which can be found used and if you’re not up for that there’s an ebook edition—bearing in mind it’s Open Road Media (ugh).

Enhancing Image

The narrator is Derek Cooper, an inventor who normally would be the type to slave away at his work in some basement whilst surviving a shitty day job, but who had the good luck to help a very wealthy (unbeknownst to Derek at the time) man named Roger Gurney. In olden times a landowner would hire an artist for a certain project and act as their patron, providing them food and shelter and whatnot so the work could get done; so the same applies here, although the “shelter” Derek gets turns out to be a lot weirder. Derek moves to the South American fishing village of Santadora—only Santadora is not a real village, without real villagers and real fishermen. Even Derek’s colleagues during his time working on his latest invention turn out to be actors. The woman who’s been overseeing Derek’s project, Naomi, is herself an enigma; even her real name is unknown.

We’re just getting started, by the way.

I had never seen [Naomi] wearing anything but black, and tonight it was a black blouse of handspun raw silk and tight black pants tapering down to black espadrilles. Her hair, corn-pale, her eyes, sapphire-blue, her skin, luminous under a glowing tan, had always been so perfect they seemed unreal. I had never touched her before.

Derek’s project of the last year, so called the Cooper Effect, is only peanuts compared to what Naomi has in mind (she’s the one really running the show, no Roger), which turns out to be nothing less than the resurrection of a human being. Naomi is unspeakably rich; money is not an issue for her. We find that Naomi was, prior to this all this, in love with some man whose name we never learn (she only refers to him as him), who had unfortunately died prior to the story’s beginning. Being rich can get you virtually everything in the world, but it can’t bring back the dead—or can it? It’s hard to describe, but the idea is that Derek must construct, using materials Naomi has given him, a homunculus or robot reproduction of the lost lover. I think that’s the idea, anyway. Truth be told, the parameters of Derek’s new invention in progress are unclear (we’re not given a clear idea, for one, of what is and is not possible until towards the end, and even then…), but then this also seems to be part of the point: Naomi remains, to some degree, unknowable.

When I picked up “The Totally Rich” I thought it would be a more blatant satire of the wealthy, something akin to Roger Zelazny’s “The Graveyard Heart,” but Brunner has something more nuanced in mind. Derek, who is not a rich man himself but who had been basically living in luxury for a year up the time the story starts, is the modern equivalent of one of those painters and sculptors from the Renaissance who would accept patronage. We’re in the future, but it’s not clear how far in the future, the result being that it’s hard to point out something that now reads as dated. Certainly the unlimited credit cards Naomi offers Derek as compensation for his services still sound appetizing to pretty much all of us. Santadora, the propped-up fake village, is itself far from a “futuristic” location, which helps the story fulfill a sense of timelessness. I suspect Brunner intended this effect.

As we know, rich people are capable of some truly outlandish things. “Yes, Santadora had been created in order to permit me to work under ideal conditions,” Derek admits. And the unlimited credit cards. And even the fact that somehow there aren’t any mosquitos in this tropical climate. Naomi is capable of anything—except for one thing, and no, it’s not even being able to bring back the dead. There is something off about Naomi; she’s the mystery that keeps the whole plot going. No Naomi, no story. In a way this could be read as a romance, since while Naomi is trying to resurrect her lover, Derek senses his feelings for this mysterious woman grow—into what? Not love in the traditional sense, although given that these two have been basically working side by side for the past year it’s not like they’ve never talked about. It’s like Derek, who at heart is still the kid who fiddles with a Rubik’s cube, is drawn to Naomi because he doesn’t understand her.

This could easily devolve into cringe-worthy wish-fulfillment if Derek’s narration wasn’t so grounded in—not an average person’s view, but someone who knows what it’s like to create things for money. The artist as a plaything for the rich and idle. Brunner himself so desperately wanted to make a good living off of his writing, if not necessarily to become rich, though one has to think (I say this now, I’ve yet to read Jad Smith’s monograph on Brunner) he wanted to become one of idle class and not one of those who had to scrape by on pumping out mediocre fiction. Maybe he even wanted to be in Derek’s position and have some rich fuck bankroll his passion projects. Derek is a scientist, true, but his role here is much more easily understood as an artist whose patron is also his muse. The climax of the story, and the tragic epiphany contained therein, would not be if Derek was simply repulsed by the almost unbelievable scope of Naomi’s wealth.

There Be Spoilers Here

Something that does not occur to Derek until it’s too late is that there’s a reason why the passage of time in Santadora has seemingly frozen still; why nobody wears a watch and why there are no clocks around. Well, except for the one. Our Heroes™ find, sort of tucked away as if someone had hidden it and then fogot to retrieve it, “a tall old grandfather, bigger than me, its pendulum glinting on every ponderous swing.” It’s a normal grandfather clock, yet this sends Naomi almost into a frenzy, and Derek has to move the damn thing itself and dispose of it however he can. Time, for Naomi, is the enemy. After this event, Derek and Naomi hit the climax of their relationship, going to bed together (a bit of an unnecessary scene), only for Derek to find Naomi missing the next morning. Finally, coming in like a dark cloud or a raven, Roger shows up (he’d been offscreen up to this point) to give Derek the worst news he’ll hear for a long time.

Naomi drowned herself. “She couldn’t swim,” Roger adds. “Of course.” The prospect of wsiting years to see her lover resurrected proved to be too much. The worst part is that it needn’t be that way: Derek had figured out (too late) how he could finish his project in a relatively short span of time. But even then, that might not’ve been enough. Naomi had no time left—or rather she thought she didn’t have time left. She was getting older, though she put so much money and resources into keeping her looks. Some people die for love, but many more die from lack of it. Money can’t buy love, and it can’t buy time either. The rich, who in most ways are masters of the world, live as enigmas, unknowable even to each other. With Naomi dead, Derek’s work is over; he can’t even bring himself to accept those credit cards. There’s disgust (it’s clear that Brunner detests the rich, though this clashes with his desire to become one of them), but there’s also a great deal of pity for this class of people that has all but isolated itself from the human race. I did not think Brunner could do tragedy, but there it is.

A Step Farther Out

I had to reread some passages a couple times to get what was happening, but this is very much a story worth rereading. Brunner demonstrates a subtlety here that I did not previously know, even given the more experimental parts of Stand on Zanzibar. Yet “The Totally Rich” almost reads as allegorical, given its tight focus and leaning toward symbolism—a fact which, aside from a sly remark or two from Derek, passes us by without humor. Despite being very much science fiction the “science” aspect plays such a tangential role that I’m not even sure what the science here is; for one I still can’t recall what the Cooper Effect is supposed to be. This could’ve worked as fantasy, with Derek’s knack for invention replaced with wizardry. But the point I wanna make here is that while I can’t say for certain when Brunner “came of age,” given how vast his oeuvre is, I feel like “The Totally Rich” could serve as a benchmark for “mature” Brunner.

See you next time.