Children of the Thunder

Children of the Thunder is a 1988 science fiction novel by John Brunner.

The novel explores several themes: environment degradation of the modern world (which Brunner believed was shortening his own life), paternal irresponsibility (in the form of accepting cash for donating sperm to a sperm bank), and conservative (fascist) tendencies in British politics. The latter may reflect that the book was written during the Thatcher years.

Like other Brunner books, the novel lacks cohesiveness in various ways, and is best read as a series of interconnected vignettes, each of which explores the above themes in a different context, with a culminating scene at the end of the book which is frightening in various ways, including a partial role reversal of the protagonist and villain.

In those terms, the book can be seen as an attack of the author on excessive sexual freedom of men gained in the so-called sexual revolution. While sexual fulfillment itself is not demonized, the book catalogs extensive collateral damage in the form of single mothers and offspring not properly cared for. But this is not a kind-hearted appeal for better support systems for these people: they just might counterattack their oppressors which is to say the parents who abandoned (or neglected) them.