I must have last read The Long Result (1965, UK) almost 45 years ago – I’ve had a copy on my bookshelves since at least the 1980s, and it’s a paperback published in 1979 and bought new, so probably 1980 or 1981. And pretty much nothing from the book had stayed with me over the decades. Except…

Many, many years ago in my late teens I remember creating an alien race for something – a story, a role-playing game adventure; I don’t remember. I later used a variation on that alien race for a spoof space opera story written in the late 1980s and published in the very early 1990s. It wasn’t a very good story, and has thankfully vanished into obscurity. The alien – if I ever named the race, I no longer recall the name – was slightly larger than a human, with four arms, blue skin, and a vaguely equine head.

So I was a little surprised on this reread of The Long Result to discover the book was the inspiration for the alien race. In Brunner’s novel, they are the Regulans, and are pretty much indestructible. Only one appears in the book (at least until the epilogue, when a ship-full makes an appearance).

The narrator, Roald Vincent, is an assistant chief at the Bureau of Cultural Relations, the organisation which keeps tabs on Earth’s two colonies, Starhome and Viridis, and the handful of alien races so far discovered. When Starhomers turn up at Earth with a delegation of newly-contact chlorine-breathing aliens, this kicks off a series of attacks by the Stars Are For Man, a previously crank human supremacist group now turned terrorist. Vincent is in the thick of it, and manages to figure out the conspiracy before too much damage is done.

He’s supposed to be extremely clever, destined for great things, but a bit of a coaster. The narrative makes much of his uncanny ability to uncover what’s going on, yet he continually misses the most suspicious person in the entire novel.

I’ve never been a fan of Brunner’s fiction. I’ve read some of his better known works – Stand on Zanzibar (1968, UK), The Jagged Orbit (1969, UK), The Squares of the City (1965, UK) – but I didn’t like them all that much. And he wrote a lot more bad novels than he wrote good ones. So if I didn’t like the good ones… He strikes me as a writer whose reach mostly exceeded his grasp. Or is it the other way round? The Long Result makes a couple of good points, but the world-building is thin (and dated, but in an interesting 1960s futurist aesthetic sort of way), and the plot relies too much on Vincent being almost psychic at times and not at all bright at others. It’s a slight book – it took me an afternoon to read the 186 page Penguin paperback – and I’m not in the least bit surprised I remembered none of it.

Except for the Regulans. Which was a bit weird.