Brunner's best is pretty spectacular, whether in thoughtful fables like Traveler in Black or crumbling futures like The Sheep Look Up. This, I regret, is not his best. Humorous SF has been around for years. "The Hitch Hiker's Guide" was relatively recent when this came out, and Pratchett's Discworld saga was well under way. Perhaps Brunner felt that he needed to write something in that genre to prove himself as a well-rounded writer.
It gets off to a promising start. There are potentially humorous misunderstandings just before the start of his centuries-long cryogenic sleep, more just before the end of it, and a steady stream that carry him on a wild ride through the weirdness of that far-future Earth. For some odd reason, he wakes from his hibernation with after-effects that initially flatten his emotions. That's a clue, dear reader: the dullness within him goes well with the dullness that drags him from one laugh-track episode to the next. Every skit in the sequence falls somehow flat, from the in-jokes of the 1990s SF world to the outlandish names assigned to hero Rinpoche Gibbs, the faux Tibetan, and Nixy Anangaranga-Jones. Perhaps naming the poor girl for a traditional Indian sex manual was to have been mitigated by the fact that she's genetically engineered for irresistable beauty, but that plan fell flat as well.
It doesn't really end, so much as collide with the back cover of the book, something it could have done long since without losing anything that mattered. I really did read it all the way through out of remembered loyalty to Brunner's finest work, but I'm not sure I should have bothered.
-- wiredweird