The Shockwave Rider

The Shockwave Rider is a science fiction novel by John Brunner, originally published in 1975. It is notable for its hero's use of computer hacking skills to escape pursuit in a dystopian future, and for the coining of the word "worm" to describe a program that propagates itself through a computer network. It also introduces the concept of a Delphi pool, perhaps derived from the RAND Corporation's Delphi method – a prediction market on world events which bears close resemblance to DARPA's controversial and cancelled Policy Analysis Market.

Origin of the title

The title derives from the futurist work Future Shock by Alvin Toffler. The protagonist is a survivor in a world of quickly changing identities, fashions, and lifestyles, where individuals are oppressed by a powerful, secretive state apparatus. His highly-developed computer skills enable him to use any public telephone to punch in a new identity, thus reinventing himself, within hours. As a fugitive, he must do this from time to time to avoid capture.

Plot introduction

The novel shows a dystopian early 21st-century America dominated by computer networks. The hero, Nick Haflinger, is a runaway from Tarnover, a government program intended to find, educate and indoctrinate highly gifted children to further the interests of the state in a future where quantitative analysis backed by the tacit threat of coercion has replaced overt military and economic power as the deciding factor in international competition. In parallel with this, the government has become a de facto oligarchy that is effectively an offshoot of organised crime.