John Brunner, with his gritty dark worlds, was the precursor to modern Cyberpunk. His 1975 novel, Shockwave Rider, was required reading when I taught Artificial Intelligence and is considered the first Cyberpunk Novel by some. He was extremely prolific often writing three of four novels a year.

The Whole Man is the story of a severely handicapped man in a Dystopic world. Terrorist violence has nearly destroyed civilization. The hero is born with a twisted body and hemophilia and is the offspring of a mother who doesn’t love him and a terrorist who dies before he is born. Brunner goes over the top in giving the young protagonist a hard time. He is both physically and mentally crippled.

The story proceeds by making the crippled boy discover amazing ESP ability as he grows up and eventually being rescued from his homeless life in a ruined slum. He becomes an ESP doctor, using his telepathic abilities to treat mentally ill telepaths.

Although there are some Science Fiction plot lines involving the ability of a telepath to project a fantasy world and cause normal people to enter it while their bodies starve and eventually die, the story is mainly the life experiences of the hero as he arcs from a street urchin to a healer to an artist. It is the story of a soul that releases itself from the chains of a broken body and psyche, in spite of the grimy world and the inability of anyone to connect emotionally with him.

The story progressed from escapist Science Fiction to the transfiguration of the protagonist as an artist who has learned to express his inner art as thoughts that others can experience.

Brunner’s style is dark, full of information, and short on description. It is a difficult style and very much reminds you of the Cyberpunk novels that would appear 20 years later.

Published in 1964, The Whole Man marks a change in Brunner’s novels. Previously he wrote throw-away space operas largely for Ace Doubles. Ace paid writers a few hundred dollars for a novel that would appear in an Ace Double and maybe the author got half the royalties, but probably not. After The Whole Man, which was nominated for a Hugo, Brunner wrote many more important novels. He died of a stroke at a Worldcon convention in Glasgow – appropriate for a Science Fiction writer.