Book Review: Webs of Everywhere, by John Brunner
Originally posted on my old blog October 2nd, 2004:
Web of Everywhere, by John Brunner, is a story about Earth as it's slowly pulling itself up from a population crash. The crash was facilitated, it seams, by devices called "skelters," which are no more than teleportation devices. In the years after the invention of the skelter, plagues spread across the planet, being carried by travelers that could step from country to country as easily as popping into a phone booth. Terrorists and governments alike could attack their enemies with similar methods. All told, the world's population was reduced by more than two thirds.
As with any good science fiction story, however, this is all just backdrop to the actual human story taking place. This is actually the story of Hans Dykstra, an intelligent (as it turns out, very intelligent) man who has a secret and very illegal hobby, which is visiting abandoned homes through the use of illegally obtained skelter codes. He rationalizes his criminality by telling himself that he is trying to preserve a record of the past for future generations.
It seems that he may, in fact, be content with that much deceit, but that would be a very boring book. Instead, he makes another deceit, and when that one begins to unravel, he is forced to make another one, and another one, until he is so tangled up in his web that he is inescapably trapped in it. It is this web, I'm sure, as well as the "web" created by the network of skelters around the planet, that the title refers to. This is driven home even further by an image in the first scene, beautifully written, in which Hans' partner in crime demonstrates his ability to actually touch a spider web to admire it without destroying it.
"Plump fingers, with the slyness of a stalking fox, moved in air and located a web-strand, traced along it musician-precise without breaking it; found another; broke both in a deliberate gesture and savored the sensation of contact.... To stroke the full length of that spider-silk and leave it intact until the moment of his decision to snap it: such abilities sometimes made Mustapha seem inhuman."
This image, in the first scene of the book, is a useful allegory for the web of deceit spun by Hans as the book goes on.
