The Sheep Look Up is a 1972 dystopian science fiction novel by British author John Brunner, dealing with the deterioration of the environment in the United States. It was nominated for the 1972 Nebula Award for Best Novel.
The novel is the third in Brunner's "Club of Rome Quartet", each novel dealing with a separate social issue. The Sheep Look Up explores a future dystopia occurring as a result of rampant consumerism and pollution. It follows 1968's Stand on Zanzibar (overpopulation), 1969's The Jagged Orbit (racial tension and violence) and precedes 1975's The Shockwave Rider (technology and future shock).
Background
The novel takes place in a very near future United States, not dated explicitly but clearly as near as the late 1970s. Austin Train's biographic entry (December section, chapter "Entrained") gives his birth as 1938 and his last publication 1975, shortly before he went into hiding. Soon after ("The Moral of the Twentieth Century") he admits to being "Nearly forty" (and born in Aries, i. e. early spring). In the same scene "The president of the United States is sixty-six", just like Ronald Reagan, whom the novel's "Prexy" caricatures in broad brushstrokes. Later it is reiterated that Train's 1975 bestseller was "three years or so ago" (January, "Earthmover"). The most recent date is a poem from the fictional "Our Father Which Art in Washington, 1978" opening November. In December / "House to House", one of Angel City managers discussing the need to adapt to the upcoming changes says "I'd go straight into scrap-reclamation and sewage-plant construction. They're the growth industries of the eighties. You'll see your investment double in no time." Human activities have resulted in wholesale destruction of the environment.
Water pollution is so severe that "don't drink" notices are frequently issued, water taps in public toilets are coin-operated and household water filters are popular. Air pollution has reached the point that people in urban areas cannot go outside without "filtermasks". Such fumes left behind by aircraft cause air sickness in planes trailing behind. California is blanketed by a thick layer of smog that prevents the sun from shining through. Acid rain forces people to cover themselves in plastic so that their clothes are not ruined. The sea has become so polluted and the beaches so strewn with garbage that Americans now vacation in the mountains. Environmentally minded people drive electric or "steam cars" with clean exhaust, but these in turn become target of their haters.
Coastal waters are mostly covered by a stinking, oily film made up of sewage, detergents, industrial effluent, and cellulose microfibers. The Mediterranean Sea is poisoned beyond recovery, which leads to famine, refugee waves, civil unrest and even wars in Europe and Africa. "… we killed the Great Lakes. They're in a fair way to killing the Baltic, with help from the Russians who have already killed the Caspian." The use of defoliants and herbicides created "the Mekong Desert" or dustbowl. The heavy use of chemicals has made large swathes of farmland unsuitable for growing anything, resulting in high food prices.
Many animal species and surface sea fish are on the brink of extinction, and birds are not as common as before, the bald eagle dead for years. Overuse of antibiotics has created a host of resistant bacteria and infections are rampant. Household pests have also developed pesticide resistance, and a new type of worms destroying all crops, known as Jigras, causes food shortages.
Several years ago there had been attempts to rein in the destruction with Environmental Acts, but these are weak, formalistic and made little difference. Even so, a Republican Senator claims that "chlorophyll addicts are hamstringing American business … by insisting that our manufacturers comply with regulations ignored by foreign competition."
Crime and unrest, both civil and racial are growing. Travel abroad is discouraged because of terrorist attacks on planes, and fewer and fewer people graduate with science, engineering, or business management degrees, as agriculture and food-related degrees are most in demand and most likely to lead to emigration from the US. Poverty is growing while the decreasing number of wealthy people enclose themselves in walled communities guarded by armed mercenaries.
The right-wing administration is indifferent to those problems. The President, known as Prexy, is a vulgar, populist former actor who can only offer snappy soundbites in response to various disasters. After poisonings, famine and unrest become rampant, the government scapegoats Honduran Tupamaro rebels and puts the US under martial law, resorting to violence and oppression to silence its critics.
The US had been defeated in several wars in Asia, similar to the Vietnam War, which was nearing its end when the novel was written. Many men (increasingly not just young ones) dodge the draft despite frequent crackdowns. The latest intervention in Honduras is hampered first by American soldiers coming down with an epidemic and then by the need for troops to quell unrest in the United States.
A growing, unorganised group of citizens and activists turn to environmental terrorism to stop the corporations from spoiling the Earth. They are called Trainites after Austin Train, an environmental scientist and popular writer who despite predicting and interpreting social change, has become disillusioned by society's failure to listen and had to go into hiding. (He himself prefers to call the movement "commensalism", though this led to abbreviation/slur "commies".) His character is used to drive the plot and to explain the backstory to the reader.
Plot "The Sheep Look Up" takes place over the course of a year (December to November), with each part or chapter depicting one month. The story is a multi-strand one, involving a variety of characters whose paths cross as the world's ecological disaster brings them together.
December The novel starts with a man running across the Santa Monica Freeway and getting killed by a car. The traffic jam delays Philip Mason, a Denver-based executive at the Angel City insurance company, for a meeting. The company will have to increase life insurance premiums because of the declining life expectancy in the US. — Peg Mankiewicz, a journalist, identifies the dead as her friend Decimus Jones. Later, Peg meets with her and Decimus's friend, influential ecologist Austin Train. He has gone underground, working as a mall Santa. — In Honduras, a group of UN investigators is looking into a famine nation ridden by civil war. They examine a ruined coffee farm and discover mysterious wormlike insects destroying the plants. They are known as Jigras and are immune to every known insecticide, which the owner had been using on them for years. — Jacob Bamberley, an oil heir and head of Bamberley Trust, a charitable institution that manufactures Nutripon, a hydroponically grown cassava product to provide relief in places afflicted by famine, gives his adopted son Hugh Pettingill a tour of the factory in Denver. — In African town Noshri, devastated by a war caused by the Mediterranean famine, the nurse Lucy Ramage has distributed a shipment of Nutripon when the locals seem to go insane and start murdering each other. She is saved by UN soldiers, who put down the riots.
January A supersonic airliner flying over the Rockies causes an avalanche with its sonic boom that destroys a brand-new ski resort in Towerhill, Colorado. A policeman Pete Goddard, becomes a hero after he saves a group of children trapped in the snow from being crushed by a steel beam. — Peg learns from an autopsy that Decimus had a psychedelic drug in his system. Knowing that he was not a drug user, she decides to get to the bottom of it even though losing her job. — Jacob, trying to debunk allegations that Nutripon was responsible for the violence at Noshri, is a guest on Petronella Page's popular talk show. She goads him to eat a bowlful but before he can, a bomb threat forces the studio to be evacuated in much panic and violence.
February In Ireland (whose cattle industry also suffers), Dr Michael Advowson is treating a young girl, badly infected playing on a farm that served as a garbage dump, and is called up to the United Nations investigation of Noshri. — Philip is diagnosed with gonorrhea from a one-night stand in Las Vegas and has exposed his wife. — Lucy finds herself in a mental hospital in England after she had been afflicted with the same insanity as the people of Noshri. She describes the horrors of the riots. — A similar occurrence happens in Honduras. — Hugh runs away from home after he confronts Jacob about his role in the Noshri disaster.
March Peg and Decimus's sister Felice drive to the Colorado commune that Decimus was a part of, known as the "wat", and pick up Hugh, whose car had broken down. They present the wat with a canister of imported earthworms. — A Honduran man from a boat on the heavily polluted Pacific sets off balloons carrying napalm that cause death and destruction all over San Diego. — Philip loses his job, the result of Angel City's woes from the Towerhill disaster. He is drawn into a business scheme by his friend Alan Prosser, who runs a plumbing firm, to sell household water filters manufactured by the Mitsuyama Corporation of Japan. Alan wants to use Pete Goddard as their spokesman to take advantage of his hero status. — Michael analyses the Nutripon at Noshri and discovers that it contained ergot, a substance known to cause hallucinations and dementia. Flying to New York, he meets Lucy who tells him her theory that the food was intentionally poisoned to weaken the governments of third world countries to allow the exploitation of their resources.
April Gerry Thorne, a Bamberley Trust executive, is at his home in the (still cleaner) Caribbean. His wife, out swimming, gets exposed to lewisite dumped into sea by the military after World War I and "one of these new deep-trawling fishing boats hauled a lot of it up". She dies, and Gerry naively vows to get justice. — Hugh is becoming accustomed to life at the wat, smoking marijuana with Pete's brother-in-law Carl Travers. They wind up making love. — In New York, Michael meets Jacob to discuss potential poisoning of Nutripon. Jacob wants Michael to certify the plant's new safety equipment. During the meeting, a Trainite car bomb goes off and destroys the office. — Mitsuyama sends Hideki Katsamura on a tour of the US as the company launches its water filters. Throughout the journey, Katsamura is afflicted with diarrhea. He winds up being patient zero for an outbreak of acute enteritis that ravages the country. It is left unstated whether it was an intentional poisoning to increase water filter sales.
May The epidemic hits America hard: 35 million people become infected. Many are unable to work; businesses are forced to run on skeleton crews; public services such as police, mass transit, and garbage collection are severely disrupted. — At the wat, it is discovered that Felice's worms included Jigras, which ruin the vegetable crop. The Jigras spread across the nation, resulting in a dire food shortage. — Jacob publicly swears to destroy his Nutripon inventory in a public relations exercise. — Hugh and Carl, having left the wat and wanting to take more serious action for the environment, meet a man calling himself Austin Train, one of many imposters.
June