A lot of his books have "time" in the title

I'm getting deja vu about this topic, so apologies if I have covered it before. See a couple of days ago I wrote about how aspects of Robert Sheckley's work has not dated so well. So now I'm looking at a collection of John Brunner stories written about 10 years before the Sheckley stories. Interestingly it is called No Future In It. More interestingly it has held up better over time. See there are some obvious things relating to the time the stories were written - man landing on the moon is still in the future and covered by a couple of the tales. But it does not seem to stand out so much. It isn't really Brunner's best work - the collection is quite uneven. But even the weaker stories don't feel all that dated.

I think part of it is that it is actually the little everyday things that catch the attention more. Sheckley's work is full of the specifics of such little things while Brunner tends to gloss over them. Brunner is more interested in the interaction of people rather than the detail of physical situation (absurd situations in Sheckley's case). The way people interact with each other and the way they react to situations is something that changes more slowly over time. I think this is part of the key to understanding why the work stands up well. There is something else about Brunner. He writes about fundamental social issues - often in allegory. So many of those issues are still with us over 40 years later. Some are much worse now than they were then.