Thanks. Speaking about Brunner, I am also totally amazed by such a profound coincidence. I recall that in late 1960s to 1970s he became estranged from British science fiction New Wave writers and editors due to his experimental (even for them) style, bordering what later would be vaguely christened slipstream, and gloomy, often dyspeptic, settings. Maybe that’s why his main works from that time, the so-called American quadrilogy, from Stand on Zanzibar to The Sheep Look Up, are centering on different facets of the 21st century United States (or just Continent) instead of Britain, as one could expect. It’s a pity that The Shockwave Rider lacks the proper attention of readers: not only it predates cyberpunk and hacker-on-the-run canonical works by Gibson, Sterling et al. by almost a decade, but can be also read as a very neat prediction of the current crisis, if we substitute his Great Californian Earthquake (ca. 2020), which devastated American economy and tightened a complex tangle of cultural phobias in the novel, with Great Coronavirus Pandemics (2019 ongoing).

I have one minor, but necessary, correction: you misread my gender, for I’m male. I choose that avatar not for catfishing (and here’s not Tinder, after all), but

1) due to my rule of implementing new userpic for each new site discovered and found sufficiently interesting to register on, because it’s far too easy for dedicated hater to trace a person by identical avatar and usher the onslaught in a holy war,

2) as a reminder about Fujitsu business notebooks lineup which I used for some time and the girl in mention (indeed eye-candy!) had been spearheading on their advertisement banners.

Also it seemed to me that practice of using “she/her” instead of “he/him” as a gender stub by default in English sentences, at least in scientific works, intensifies.

In Slavic languages, among them Russian, masculine, feminine and neuter genders are easily recognized; however, it seems something akin to roadblock for translation services you might have been using to look upon articles of mine.

And, surely, young, pretty and clever women can be find here, though more often than not one has to choose any two of the three features listed. Processes of EU integration between such mightily different (in terms of HDI or GDP) countries as, on the one hand, Romania or Lithuania and, on the other hand, Germany or the Netherlands, take their toll on carpet bombshells… tee-hee.