The Jagged Orbit

The novel is set in the United States in 2014, when interracial tensions have passed the breaking point. A Mafia-like cartel, the Gottschalks, are exploiting this situation to sell weapons to anyone able to buy them. A split develops within the cartel, between the conservative old men and ambitious underlings prepared to use new computer technology to pull off some spectacular coups.

There are several separate strands of narrative following particular characters. James Reedeth is a young psychologist at New York's major mental health institution who is disenchanted with his job and his employer, the revered Elias Mogshack. Lyla Clay is a "pythoness," a young woman capable of metabolising certain psychedelic drugs to enter a trance in which she makes unconscious predictions. Matthew Flamen, a "spoolpigeon" (a variety of investigative journalist), is struggling to hold onto his job, and by his obsessive behaviour has driven his wife into Mogshack's asylum.

The plot is contrived to bring the strands together and resolve matters by a lengthy discussion between Flamen, Reedeth, Lyla Clay, Pedro Diablo (Flamen's African-American counterpart), Xavier Conroy (a long-time critic of Mogshack), and Harry Madison (a former patient at Mogshack's asylum).

Analog reviewer P. Schuyler Miller praised the novel as a "beautiful job -- intricate yet tightly constructed, thoroughly believable with as many important characters as a Victorian classic."[1] James Blish, however, lambasted The Jagged Orbit for pursuing an already exhausted mainstream model, producing a text "embodying almost none of Brunner's strengths, loaded to the gunwales with typographical tricks, as full of compulsive cuteness as Stalin-era Shostakovich, its very length pretentious and inhibiting, containing a vast cast of characters all of whom are in the end regressions to the funny-hat school".[2]

• "From Technique to Critique: Knowledge and Human Interests in John Brunner’s Stand on Zanzibar, The Jagged Orbit, and The Sheep Look Up" (essay in Science Fiction Studies)
• Review at SF Reviews
• Review at SF Site
• The Jagged Orbit title listing at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database