No, but I believe he was the first to describe network-based interactions as occurring in a 3-d virtual graphic environment.
The first modern "cyber-" novel is probably Algis Burdys'Michelmas.
Did Michelmas come before Brunner's Shockwave Rider?
Another thing which SF has mostly been unsatisfacotry at doing is predicting future science-not future technology which is par for the course, or trying to create new branches of science something which everyone from A.E. Van Voght to Greg Egan has tried, but trying to describe what doing science would be like in the future.
Vernor Vinge does this well in his "Bobble" novels, and also in A Deepness in the Sky. Greg Benford does a fine job of describing scientists at work in several of his novels. Cosm comes immediately to mind.
Shockwave Rider was published in 1975, and Michelmas was published two years later, so it looks like the honors go to Brunner.
Greg Benford does a fine job of describing scientists at work in several of his novels. Cosm comes immediately to mind.
He indeed does a superb job, but in those novels where he focuses on scientists at work-in addition to Cosm, there's Timescape, Eater and the as yet unread by me Artifact-take place in a very near future, where the practices are much the same as they are today. While the basic scientific method has remain unchanged (to paraphrase Winston Churchill, all the other methods of gaining knowledge are worse), the new technological and mathematical innovations do affect the workplace. Look at the enormous leaps which took place at Cambridge alone, which lept from projects done solely by "string and sealing wax" to becoming the world's first hi-tech nuclear laboratory in a space of twenty years-but was considered cutting edge even at the beginning of that period. What new tools, both material and mental, will tomorrow's scientists have at their disposal, and how would this change how we do science? I would very much like to see some contemporary hard-science writers (maybe Benford or Vinge, or up-and-comers such as Ken Wharton), try to write a story around this.