In near-future Europe, modern civilization is fraying at the edges, if not coming totally unravelled. Urban decay and unemployment affect almost everyone. The Italian government has fallen to a coup triggered by labour unrest, threatening the integrity of the European Common Market (here, Brunner anticipates the European Union). In the UK, bands of "godheads"--self-appointed enforcers of the Campaign Against Moral Pollution--roam the streets unopposed, practicing their own brands of vigilante justice and extortionism. Speculation is that Europe teeters on the brink of World War III.
Amid the chaos of civilization's decline, Dr. Maurice Post works in obscurity on the development of self-replicating molecules. One of the molecules he creates, called VC, exhibits strange, unintended properties. When ingested by living beings, VC makes selective inattention nearly impossible. Lab animals exposed to it show vastly improved abilities to learn and remember, even seemingly inconsequential things. When Dr. Post turns up dead, an investigation reveals that a quantity of VC may have been removed from his lab before he died. His colleagues are forced to contemplate whether Dr. Post, a man deeply troubled by the social and political ills of Europe, might have done something desperate with the missing VC. Like fed it to a human.
Malcolm Fry is a newly unemployed teacher, dismissed from his job for alleged moral turpitude. One night, he meets a man in a bar who, hearing his story, demonstrates surprising empathy. Everything is just going to hell, he says, because people are such clumsy thinkers. The solutions to Europe's problems are straightforward enough, he says, but people are prevented from seeing them by their own lazy thinking and self-involvement. The man offers Malcolm some pills to make it all feel better. Malcolm, feeling dismal enough, accepts. Days later, troubled by an inability to forget even the smallest detail of his life and a mind that won't stop racing, Malcolm begins to wonder who the man with the pills was and what has been done to him. Soon, he is wondering how he can do the same thing to other people.
In The Stone That Never Came Down, John Brunner entertains briefly the conceit that humans will one day discover a pill that will solve all our problems. Through the character of Dr. Maurice Post, Brunner posits that all Man's woes could be ended if only we would smarten up, pay a bit more attention, love each other a bit more. And, moreover, that we might be able to pack all the necessary up-smartening, attention-paying, and more-loving into a tidy little self-replicating molecule.
As Brunner evidently chose not to dwell on the obvious naivete of his premise, neither will I. Although The Stone That Never Came Down takes its premise seriously throughout, it never aspires to be a carefully-reasoned philosophical essay. It's a short, to-the-point novel which simply states an idea in narrative format, without really exploring or questioning it. A handful of the main characters do briefly ponder whether they have the right to unilaterally effect a permanent biological change on the human species, but theirs is a wholly forgone conclusion. Despite the naivete of the plot, Brunner's willingness to be brief in the telling suckered me in. It's a cute idea, for exactly the 207 pages he spends on it.
For such a short novel with a large-ish cast of characters, Brunner does an admirable job with the characterization. His avoidance of lame stereotyping is nowhere more obvious than in the character of Billy Cohen, Malcolm's gay, Jewish tenant. When we first meet Billy, he is confronting a band of extortionist godheads at the front door of Malcolm's house. Billy bravely refuses their demands and then treats them to an incisive invective on the evils of modern Christianity. Billy is especially forward-thinking, for a gay character written in the early seventies. At one point, he casually reveals his homosexuality to Malcolm's girlfriend, then counters her flustered response with "I don't noise it around, but I don't make a secret of it, either. It's the way I am and I feel I'm entitled to live with it." Not quite a rousing chorus of "We're here, we're queer", but given the fundamentalist climate of his society, we can't help but admire his bravery. Ultimately, it is Billy's example which inspires some of the main characters to act decisively to prevent the oncoming global crisis.
You probably needn't rush out to get a copy of The Stone That Never Came Down. It's not especially important to either the broader genre of science fiction or the narrower genre of queer-themed SF. It is, however, an early example of a sympathetic portrayal of a gay man in modern science fiction (and a quick read).