Employing a dazzling range of literary techniques, John Brunner has created a future world as real as this morning's newspaper ... With a new introduction by Ken MacLeod.

There are seven billion-plus humans crowding the surface of 21st-century Earth. It is an age of intelligent computers, mass-market psychedelic drugs, politics conducted by assassination, scientists who burn incense to appease volcanoes ... all the hysteria of a dangerously overcrowded world, portrayed in a dazzlingly inventive style.

Moving, sensory, impressionistic, as jagged as the times it portrays, this book is a real mind stretcher - and yet beautifully orchestrated to give a vivid picture of the whole.