It follows 1968's Stand on Zanzibar (overpopulation) and 1969's The Jagged Orbit (racial tension and violence) and precedes 1975's The Shockwave Rider (technology and future shock).

Coastal waters are mostly covered by a stinking, oily film made up of sewage, detergents, industrial effluent, and cellulose microfibers.

The heavy use of chemicals has made large swathes of farmland unsuitable for growing anything, resulting in higher food prices.

A growing group of environmentally-conscious activists calling themselves "Trainites" (from their hidden leader Austin Train) turn slowly to terrorist acts in an attempt to stop the corporations from spoiling the Earth.

The character of Austin Train is an academic who despite predicting and interpreting social change, has become disillusioned by society's failure to listen.

The accident and the ensuing traffic jam results in Philip Mason, a Denver-based executive at the Angel City insurance company, being late for a meeting.

They examine a ruined coffee farm and discover mysterious wormlike insects filling the roots of the plants with holes.

January A supersonic airliner flying over the Rockies causes an avalanche with its sonic boom that destroys a brand-new ski resort in Towerhill, Colorado.

A police officer, named Pete Goddard, becomes a hero after he saves a group of children trapped in the snow from being crushed by a steel beam.

February In Ireland, Doctor Michael Advowson is treating a young girl, who injured her toe after she played on a farm that was being used as a garbage dump.

A Honduran man from a boat on the heavily polluted Pacific, sets off balloons carrying napalm that cause death and destruction all over San Diego.

He is then drawn into a business scheme by his friend Alan Prosser, who runs a plumbing firm, to sell household water filters manufactured by the Mitsuyama Corporation of Japan.

Michael conducts an analysis of the Nutripon at Noshri and discovers that it contained Ergot, a substance known to cause hallucinations and dementia.

As he is flying to New York, Lucy happens to be on the same plane and tells him her theory that the food was intentionally poisoned in an attempt to weaken the governments of third world countries to allow the exploitation of their resources.

Gerry's wife, Nancy, who was out swimming, has been exposed to a nerve agent that was dumped into sea by the military at the end of World War I and is contained in barrels that periodically surface.

Many are unable to work; businesses are forced to run on skeleton crews; and public services such as police, mass transit, and garbage collection are severely disrupted.

Hugh and Carl, having left the wat and wanting to take more serious action for the environment, meet a man calling himself Austin Train, one of many imposters.

They bomb gas stations, blow up a new highway interchange in Alabama, sabotage a lumber mill in Georgia, and murder loggers who are trying to cut down California's remaining Redwood trees.

Roland has become the West Coast distributor for Mitsuyama water filters, and Hugh, Carl and their compatriots want to extort him into giving them away for free.

After a major at a nuclear missile base in North Dakota suddenly goes crazy and almost murders his two kids, the government becomes convinced that the United States is under attack.

September Hugh, Carl, and Ossie are worried about Hector's health and have given up hope that Roland will pay the ransom, let him go.

In the chaos, Philip drives Pete home, but once he gets to his own apartment, his wife, Denise, reveals that their son Harold has viciously murdered his sister Jodie.

Peg comes across him, and he reveals that Carl had given Decimus Jones a carton of Nutripon as a Christmas present, which explains why he suddenly ran across a freeway.

One morning, Pete is discovered by Carl in the living room scribbling notes from a book and says that he is learning how to make a bomb.

He also reveals the source of the Ergot poisonings: in 1963, the government stored drums of Ergot-based nerve gas in the mountains surrounding Denver.

One day, just before Christmas, an injection induced earthquake caused the drum to rupture and to leak its contents into the water table supplying the Nutripon factory, which contaminated the food it produced.

Tom Grey, an actuary at Angel City, had been throughout the novel, devising a computer simulation of Earth to figure out a solution to the world's ecological problems.

The new edition contains a foreword by David Brin and an afterword by environmentalist and social change theorist James John Bell.

In the afterword, Bell treats the book almost as prophecy, drawing parallels between events in the book and subsequent real-world developments: "His words have a kind of Gnostic power embedded in them that gives his characters passage into our world," and notes that "Brunner's puppet of a president, affectionately called Prexy, is a dead ringer for our Dubya".

Writer William Gibson made a similar remark in a 2007 interview: No one except possibly the late John Brunner, in his brilliant novel The Sheep Look Up, has ever described anything in science fiction that is remotely like the reality of 2007 as we know it.