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The brilliant 1969 Hugo Award-winning novel from John Brunner, Stand on Zanzibar, now included with a foreword by Bruce SterlingNorman Niblock House is a rising executive at General Technics, one of a few all-powerful corporations. His work is leading General Technics to the forefront of global domination, both in the marketplace and politically—-it's about to take over a country in Africa. Donald Hogan is his roommate, a seemingly sheepish bookworm. But Hogan is a spy, and he's about to show more discover a breakthrough in genetic engineering that will change the world...and kill him.
These two men's lives weave through one of science fiction's most praised novels. Written in a way that echoes John Dos Passos' U.S.A. Trilogy, Stand on Zanzibar is a cross-section of a world overpopulated by the billions. Where society is squeezed into hive-living madness by god-like mega computers, mass-marketed psychedelic drugs, and mundane uses of genetic engineering. Though written in 1968, it speaks of now, and is frighteningly prescient and intensely powerful.
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2010's world of 7 billion humans as seen from 1968.
This tour de force of world building combines broad strokes through media snapshots and a focus on a few characters. Much of John Brunner's vision has come true and much has not, and it's worth pondering what trends continued into the present confirming his predictions and what trends suffered discontinuities.
It's in the relationships between the main characters and particularly between the main characters and their "shiggies" that the difference between the prediction and the reality is most glaring but nevertheless, I am glad to have revisited this book because despite the gloomy atmosphere, it is fun.
This tour de force of world building combines broad strokes through media snapshots and a focus on a few characters. Much of John Brunner's vision has come true and much has not, and it's worth pondering what trends continued into the present confirming his predictions and what trends suffered discontinuities.
It's in the relationships between the main characters and particularly between the main characters and their "shiggies" that the difference between the prediction and the reality is most glaring but nevertheless, I am glad to have revisited this book because despite the gloomy atmosphere, it is fun.
Spoiler alert. Several things annoyed me about this dystopian overpopulation novel:
1. Swearing. Why? Why, John Brunner? Why did you decide that in 2010 the English language would be unchanged in any respect, except for bad words, which would not have evolved but been forgotten and replaced by entirely new ones?! And why did you pick such stupid words, and having picked them, why must you use them so often? If I ever again read "sheeting hole" where I ought to read "bloody hell", or the dire "whatinole" for "what the hell" or "hole in corner" to describe a benighted location, I will know I am reading this novel again, and that I must therefore have lost my mind, and will therefore kill myself.
2. Shiggy Culture. The idea, I suppose, is an show more extension of the 1960's free love ethos. People have sex with no emotional hangups, coming and going as they please. Fine - but in Brunner's world it's strictly one-way. Well-off men - sorry, "codders" or "zecks" - allow women - that is, "shiggies" - to live indefinitely in their apartments and eat their food, in exchange for sex. Well, great... if you're a man who wants a young woman in his apartment who he doesn't have to talk to. This theme permeates the book, and the only woman called a woman rather than a "shiggy" is the geriatric and past-it chairwoman of the mega-corp General Technics. Every other female in the book is either a passive child-bearer or a vapid "shiggy". There are many scenes of men sitting together, chomping cigar-like objects, discussing world-domination. Was this really how the future seemed in 1968?
3. Inconsistencies. Hogan is "eptified", i.e. rapidly trained by futuristic means, into a deadly assassin. Great, and this sets up a nice psychological conflict in the guy which is handled OK. So why does this master of the lethal arts accidentally stab to death the man he's meant to be rescuing/kidnapping? It doesn't make any sense. Brunner could have made it a deliberate murder easily enough, but no... And while we're taking someone with a knowledge of Yatakangi and making them into a killing machine, would it not have been easier for the government to train one of their existing killing machines in Yatakangi and send him (or even, god forbid, her)?
4. Chad C. Mulligan. A.k.a. the author. This novel spends a luxuriant 250-300 pages worldbuilding, some of which are given over to excerpts from the works of sociologist Chad C. Mulligan. Chad is a crashing explicatory bore who initially serves only to chant the author's sneering opinion of hoi polloi. But later Chad comes into the novel as a character, a sort of beardy, shambling visionary who eventually, and with minimal effort except hiring dozens of scientists, which no-one had apparently thought to do before, discovers the secret of the Shinka. Well done, Chad, i.e. John Brunner, you're a genius.
5. Race. Other races are very much other in this novel. This would be understandable, perhaps, if it was written from a white/American/Caucasian point of view, but it's explicitly not. One of the main characters is a black Muslim American. We know this because on two occasions (in a 550-page novel) he declines a drink, and on about 550 occasions he prefaces his speech with the exclamation "Prophet's Beard!" This is poor writing. There are two minor French characters, brother and sister, who are drenched in ennui and sometimes even talk in French and end up screwing each other. The Asiatics (principally Sugaiguntung) are insrcutable and unpredictable. The Africans are full of wisdom, and (this almost qualifies as point 6.) the Shinka have a prophet who Brunner spends about 10 ghastly pages on in the form of pseudo-parables, like Aesop written by an eight-year old. The parables are lifted directly from the Bible and there is no point in reading them. What lingers is Brunner's deep anxiety about people of other races and skin colours.
The only time the prose feels alive is in a few brief passages of manly adventure deep in the jungle. It seems to me that Brunner was an adventure writer with a zillion 1960's hangups which he tried to expiate in "Stand on Zanzibar" but failed, despite the reasonableness of the premise. "Stand on Zanzibar" reads like a tour of a frightened mind, but frightened for all the wrong reasons and not those ostensibly treated by the novel. Vision of the future? This book is the usual false prophet, forecasting doom very specifically, in a way that will only be invalidated 50 years from time of writing, or, generously, from time of review. Well I will stick my neck out and say this book will never be as relevant as when it was written, 1968, if it was relevant then. show less
1. Swearing. Why? Why, John Brunner? Why did you decide that in 2010 the English language would be unchanged in any respect, except for bad words, which would not have evolved but been forgotten and replaced by entirely new ones?! And why did you pick such stupid words, and having picked them, why must you use them so often? If I ever again read "sheeting hole" where I ought to read "bloody hell", or the dire "whatinole" for "what the hell" or "hole in corner" to describe a benighted location, I will know I am reading this novel again, and that I must therefore have lost my mind, and will therefore kill myself.
2. Shiggy Culture. The idea, I suppose, is an show more extension of the 1960's free love ethos. People have sex with no emotional hangups, coming and going as they please. Fine - but in Brunner's world it's strictly one-way. Well-off men - sorry, "codders" or "zecks" - allow women - that is, "shiggies" - to live indefinitely in their apartments and eat their food, in exchange for sex. Well, great... if you're a man who wants a young woman in his apartment who he doesn't have to talk to. This theme permeates the book, and the only woman called a woman rather than a "shiggy" is the geriatric and past-it chairwoman of the mega-corp General Technics. Every other female in the book is either a passive child-bearer or a vapid "shiggy". There are many scenes of men sitting together, chomping cigar-like objects, discussing world-domination. Was this really how the future seemed in 1968?
3. Inconsistencies. Hogan is "eptified", i.e. rapidly trained by futuristic means, into a deadly assassin. Great, and this sets up a nice psychological conflict in the guy which is handled OK. So why does this master of the lethal arts accidentally stab to death the man he's meant to be rescuing/kidnapping? It doesn't make any sense. Brunner could have made it a deliberate murder easily enough, but no... And while we're taking someone with a knowledge of Yatakangi and making them into a killing machine, would it not have been easier for the government to train one of their existing killing machines in Yatakangi and send him (or even, god forbid, her)?
4. Chad C. Mulligan. A.k.a. the author. This novel spends a luxuriant 250-300 pages worldbuilding, some of which are given over to excerpts from the works of sociologist Chad C. Mulligan. Chad is a crashing explicatory bore who initially serves only to chant the author's sneering opinion of hoi polloi. But later Chad comes into the novel as a character, a sort of beardy, shambling visionary who eventually, and with minimal effort except hiring dozens of scientists, which no-one had apparently thought to do before, discovers the secret of the Shinka. Well done, Chad, i.e. John Brunner, you're a genius.
5. Race. Other races are very much other in this novel. This would be understandable, perhaps, if it was written from a white/American/Caucasian point of view, but it's explicitly not. One of the main characters is a black Muslim American. We know this because on two occasions (in a 550-page novel) he declines a drink, and on about 550 occasions he prefaces his speech with the exclamation "Prophet's Beard!" This is poor writing. There are two minor French characters, brother and sister, who are drenched in ennui and sometimes even talk in French and end up screwing each other. The Asiatics (principally Sugaiguntung) are insrcutable and unpredictable. The Africans are full of wisdom, and (this almost qualifies as point 6.) the Shinka have a prophet who Brunner spends about 10 ghastly pages on in the form of pseudo-parables, like Aesop written by an eight-year old. The parables are lifted directly from the Bible and there is no point in reading them. What lingers is Brunner's deep anxiety about people of other races and skin colours.
The only time the prose feels alive is in a few brief passages of manly adventure deep in the jungle. It seems to me that Brunner was an adventure writer with a zillion 1960's hangups which he tried to expiate in "Stand on Zanzibar" but failed, despite the reasonableness of the premise. "Stand on Zanzibar" reads like a tour of a frightened mind, but frightened for all the wrong reasons and not those ostensibly treated by the novel. Vision of the future? This book is the usual false prophet, forecasting doom very specifically, in a way that will only be invalidated 50 years from time of writing, or, generously, from time of review. Well I will stick my neck out and say this book will never be as relevant as when it was written, 1968, if it was relevant then. show less
I think a lot of the scorecarding of how well Brunner predicted our current world misses the fact that this is a very detailed and internally consistent story. It also thoroughly looks at eugenics, AI, and the relationship between the developing / developed world in such a way as to be perpetually relevant. I both read and listened to this work and the audiobook is fantastic.
Dense. Complex. A uniquely structured novel that envelopes you in the (then) future world of 2010 as imagined by John Brunner. It's not an idealistic or even vaguely positive vision. But it is eerily accurate in some of it's predictions. Which makes the darker aspects of Brunner's past future hit closer to home. In a way this novel has a renewed and different sense of relevance now it's date of prediction has passed. Highly recommended and don't let the setting of a prediction of a future that has now passed put you off, in many ways this has made it more compelling to read in 2016
Simultaneously reading like a deadly earnest Illuminatus! Trilogy scrubbed of all the conspiracy nuttiness*, a fictionalized parable of Toffler's classic Future Shock, a finger-wagging sermon about the evils of overpopulation, and a whacked-out Jeff Noon media scramble, Stand on Zanzibar is one of the coolest bits of New Wave science fiction a reader could pick up.
A lot of people who pick up a John Brunner novel -- or indeed any older science fiction novel -- in the 21st century get hung up on either the eerie prescience the author seems to have had about our contemporary world (the book was written in 1968 but set in 2010) or on what the author got wrong about it, but to do either is to miss the point here. Good fiction is good show more fiction, whether or not someone guessed there would be smart phones; ditto good social criticism. Stand on Zanzibar is both.
The title comes from an observation made by a wag/sage of the novel's world that the world's current population of 7 billion (yes, one of things he got right; we hit that number pretty close to the same time he projected) if stood together in one place shoulder-to-shoulder, would take up the area of the island of Zanzibar (when the book was written, the world's population could fit on the Isle of Man, a much smaller bit of land). The world he depicts will remind fans a bit of that in Soylent Green**; its be-domed New York might also make one think of the be-domed city-as-spaceship New York in Cities in Flight. And as I suggested above, I kept thinking of Jeff Noon's fiction, particularly Channel Sk1n.
The plot Brunner chooses from among the billions of possible stories on that/this overcrowded world concerns a mega-corporation that is getting ready to buy a country, the men chosen to spearhead the project (which takes a long view of a Third World nation's economic development into a new kind of global economic powerhouse as just another opportunity to increase shareholder value -- eerily, kind of the way our modern private prison industry works!), and some of their friends. Because the nation in question is in Africa, the company's single African-American (abbreviated "Afram") vice president, Norman Niblock House, gets the nod, along with the U.S.'s equally Afram ambassador to that little nation, Elihu Masters, who's been best friends with the country's president-for-life for some twenty years. Said president*** being a tired old man now, who has been pretty much single-handedly holding his little nation together since the British abandoned the whole colonialism thing and more or less forced him into the role of someone to whom they could hand off all their problems. But there is no good prospect for a successor, so why not bring in a corporation? The project is not viewed as the president selling out so much as a father with hundreds of thousands of helpless dependents trying to secure a future for them. Believe me, it sort of works.
This is largely because there is so much else going on in this novel, which is apparently modeled on John Dos Passos' U.S.A. trilogy ****, at least structurally, for the narrative, plot forwarding chapters are interspersed with all sorts of non-narrative interludes of pure, hypermediated texture, including extended excerpts from the works of one Chad Mulligan, sociologist, who is this novel's Austin Train figure (see The Sheep Look Up), a wise man who has gone ignored but may now be called somewhat resurgent, but only because drinking himself to death in disgust is taking too long and is actually kind of boring.
But wait, there's more!
Because Norman has a white roommate, Don, a guy with a freak gift for pattern recognition who has spent the last ten years in deep cover as a member of the U.S. Army's "Dilettante Corps" in which his job is basically being a sort of Cayce Pollard for the government. In the course of the story, Don gets called up and has to go overseas to help out with an international problem involving a fictional Pacific Rim nation with whom the U.S. is in a seemingly endless and bitter Vietnamesque war. Said country having made an announcement regarding a Great Leap Forward in eugenics and genetic engineering that holds incredible possibility and also, of course, incredible threat to the rest of the world.
For the reaction of the First World to the planet's overwhelming population problem is to plunge into eugenics with all enthusiasm. Laws governing who may have children and how many children they may have get stricter and stricter all the time -- and in the United States, differ from state to state, so, for example, Nevada is close to a free-for-all whereas Louisiana is flirting with the idea of not allowing anyone to breed who can prove three generations of residency in that state in addition to the standard prohibitions on anyone with genetic defects of any kind reproducing. As the novel opens, the latest trait under fire is color-blindness. But what everyone is really afraid of is that someday producing too much melanin is going to be a prohibiting factor.
Which is to say that racism -- and sexism, which I'll get to later -- are prevalent elements throughout the text. As the U.S. is at war with an Asian power, plenty of anti-Asian sentiment and offensive slang gets slung about (which, about the slang, get ready for that. The slang in Stand on Zanzibar could be the subject of a whole big and fascinating paper, to be pored over like that in A Clockwork Orange, but unlike Burgess' novel, all of Brunner's slang is derived from English), and blacks don't get any better treatment. It's all presented very matter-of-factly, even casually, which can be shocking but which is part and parcel of the societies we're examining. Kinship and tribalism and associated inter-group violence, sociologists tell us, tend to come very much to the fore in cases of crowding.
As is, apparently, a very casual, even cavalier, attitude towards women, the young and attractive variety of which are referred to in this world as "shiggies" and are passed around like party favors, traded like Magic the Gathering cards, apparently happy with this state of affairs and the nomadic, uncertain life they lead on the "shiggy circuit." Older women are only ever noticed if they happen by some freak of affairs to have somehow achieved serious corporate power, with a depressing few exceptions, and even the one younger-than-the-alpha female executive type who crosses our path is at first dismissed as on the scene just because her boss got tired of sleeping with her. To the slight credit of the man making this internalized observation about her, he does eventually include that she might be there on her own actual merits as well, perhaps. Partly. Ugh.
The only other reason a woman might matter, of course, is as breeding stock. But only if she's genetically OK. But hey, at least the potential father has to pass genetic muster as well. So I guess there's parity somewhere. Ugh.
But hey, all of literature has taught me how it sure do suck to be female, so I can hardly single out this book for special castigation. Especially in a year in which I have taken on Robert Silverberg. I do not cry out for a fan-edit of Stand on Zanzibar from which my gender has been removed, but, you know, yuck.
That aside, this is a pretty fantastic read, a worthy companion to Brunner's other blisteringly awful masterpiece, The Sheep Look Up. But where we could sort of, kind of, desperately cling to the idea that The Sheep Look Up was a self-denying prophecy, Stand on Zanzibar still feels like it could happen, is happening.
But we already knew that, didn't we?
*Which, I hasten to assure you, is still a very entertaining, if somewhat depressing, thing.
**Itself based on a novel by Harry Harrison, Make Room! Make Room! that came out two years before Stand on Zanzibar.
***Whose name is Zadkiel Obomi, and I'll refer you to the rest of the internet for points of view on that amazing coincidence/prediction. Yawn.
****Which I haven't read but now really want to. show less
A lot of people who pick up a John Brunner novel -- or indeed any older science fiction novel -- in the 21st century get hung up on either the eerie prescience the author seems to have had about our contemporary world (the book was written in 1968 but set in 2010) or on what the author got wrong about it, but to do either is to miss the point here. Good fiction is good show more fiction, whether or not someone guessed there would be smart phones; ditto good social criticism. Stand on Zanzibar is both.
The title comes from an observation made by a wag/sage of the novel's world that the world's current population of 7 billion (yes, one of things he got right; we hit that number pretty close to the same time he projected) if stood together in one place shoulder-to-shoulder, would take up the area of the island of Zanzibar (when the book was written, the world's population could fit on the Isle of Man, a much smaller bit of land). The world he depicts will remind fans a bit of that in Soylent Green**; its be-domed New York might also make one think of the be-domed city-as-spaceship New York in Cities in Flight. And as I suggested above, I kept thinking of Jeff Noon's fiction, particularly Channel Sk1n.
The plot Brunner chooses from among the billions of possible stories on that/this overcrowded world concerns a mega-corporation that is getting ready to buy a country, the men chosen to spearhead the project (which takes a long view of a Third World nation's economic development into a new kind of global economic powerhouse as just another opportunity to increase shareholder value -- eerily, kind of the way our modern private prison industry works!), and some of their friends. Because the nation in question is in Africa, the company's single African-American (abbreviated "Afram") vice president, Norman Niblock House, gets the nod, along with the U.S.'s equally Afram ambassador to that little nation, Elihu Masters, who's been best friends with the country's president-for-life for some twenty years. Said president*** being a tired old man now, who has been pretty much single-handedly holding his little nation together since the British abandoned the whole colonialism thing and more or less forced him into the role of someone to whom they could hand off all their problems. But there is no good prospect for a successor, so why not bring in a corporation? The project is not viewed as the president selling out so much as a father with hundreds of thousands of helpless dependents trying to secure a future for them. Believe me, it sort of works.
This is largely because there is so much else going on in this novel, which is apparently modeled on John Dos Passos' U.S.A. trilogy ****, at least structurally, for the narrative, plot forwarding chapters are interspersed with all sorts of non-narrative interludes of pure, hypermediated texture, including extended excerpts from the works of one Chad Mulligan, sociologist, who is this novel's Austin Train figure (see The Sheep Look Up), a wise man who has gone ignored but may now be called somewhat resurgent, but only because drinking himself to death in disgust is taking too long and is actually kind of boring.
But wait, there's more!
Because Norman has a white roommate, Don, a guy with a freak gift for pattern recognition who has spent the last ten years in deep cover as a member of the U.S. Army's "Dilettante Corps" in which his job is basically being a sort of Cayce Pollard for the government. In the course of the story, Don gets called up and has to go overseas to help out with an international problem involving a fictional Pacific Rim nation with whom the U.S. is in a seemingly endless and bitter Vietnamesque war. Said country having made an announcement regarding a Great Leap Forward in eugenics and genetic engineering that holds incredible possibility and also, of course, incredible threat to the rest of the world.
For the reaction of the First World to the planet's overwhelming population problem is to plunge into eugenics with all enthusiasm. Laws governing who may have children and how many children they may have get stricter and stricter all the time -- and in the United States, differ from state to state, so, for example, Nevada is close to a free-for-all whereas Louisiana is flirting with the idea of not allowing anyone to breed who can prove three generations of residency in that state in addition to the standard prohibitions on anyone with genetic defects of any kind reproducing. As the novel opens, the latest trait under fire is color-blindness. But what everyone is really afraid of is that someday producing too much melanin is going to be a prohibiting factor.
Which is to say that racism -- and sexism, which I'll get to later -- are prevalent elements throughout the text. As the U.S. is at war with an Asian power, plenty of anti-Asian sentiment and offensive slang gets slung about (which, about the slang, get ready for that. The slang in Stand on Zanzibar could be the subject of a whole big and fascinating paper, to be pored over like that in A Clockwork Orange, but unlike Burgess' novel, all of Brunner's slang is derived from English), and blacks don't get any better treatment. It's all presented very matter-of-factly, even casually, which can be shocking but which is part and parcel of the societies we're examining. Kinship and tribalism and associated inter-group violence, sociologists tell us, tend to come very much to the fore in cases of crowding.
As is, apparently, a very casual, even cavalier, attitude towards women, the young and attractive variety of which are referred to in this world as "shiggies" and are passed around like party favors, traded like Magic the Gathering cards, apparently happy with this state of affairs and the nomadic, uncertain life they lead on the "shiggy circuit." Older women are only ever noticed if they happen by some freak of affairs to have somehow achieved serious corporate power, with a depressing few exceptions, and even the one younger-than-the-alpha female executive type who crosses our path is at first dismissed as on the scene just because her boss got tired of sleeping with her. To the slight credit of the man making this internalized observation about her, he does eventually include that she might be there on her own actual merits as well, perhaps. Partly. Ugh.
The only other reason a woman might matter, of course, is as breeding stock. But only if she's genetically OK. But hey, at least the potential father has to pass genetic muster as well. So I guess there's parity somewhere. Ugh.
But hey, all of literature has taught me how it sure do suck to be female, so I can hardly single out this book for special castigation. Especially in a year in which I have taken on Robert Silverberg. I do not cry out for a fan-edit of Stand on Zanzibar from which my gender has been removed, but, you know, yuck.
That aside, this is a pretty fantastic read, a worthy companion to Brunner's other blisteringly awful masterpiece, The Sheep Look Up. But where we could sort of, kind of, desperately cling to the idea that The Sheep Look Up was a self-denying prophecy, Stand on Zanzibar still feels like it could happen, is happening.
But we already knew that, didn't we?
*Which, I hasten to assure you, is still a very entertaining, if somewhat depressing, thing.
**Itself based on a novel by Harry Harrison, Make Room! Make Room! that came out two years before Stand on Zanzibar.
***Whose name is Zadkiel Obomi, and I'll refer you to the rest of the internet for points of view on that amazing coincidence/prediction. Yawn.
****Which I haven't read but now really want to. show less
I almost gave up on this book in the beginning. However, once I got the rhythm of the book I was able to stick with it and I am glad that I did.
NOTE: When reading this book, it is important to remember that it was published in 1968 and begins on 5/3/2010.
This is a dense story with a lot of ideas packed into the story. Central to the plot is Shalmaneser, a computer that collects all the information and seems to foretell AI technology. Interspersed are all kinds of political, social, and historical thoughts. There are references to:
--mass shootings,
--gender/sexuality, including thruples and LGBTQ+
--eugenics, including intrauterine screening, forced sterilization, forced abortions
--video conferencing
--individualized mass media
Throughout show more all of this, the thoughts of Chad C. Mulligan are referenced. Chad is by-far my favorite character in the book. His takes on society are really still very relevant today. For instance: "You know Chad’s definition of the New Poor? People who are too far behind with time-payments on next year’s model to make the down-payment on the one for the year after?" His takes are blatantly cynical but with a tinge of hope that eventually it will all sort itself out and the world will be a better if less populated place.
The commentary on mass media is still insightful: "We’re aware of the scale of the planet, so we don’t accept that our own circumscribed horizons constitute reality. Much more real is what’s relayed to us by the TV." How much more true is this today than in 1968. Everyone seems to spend so much time viewing mass (social) media that it has come to define the world far more than just walking outside and looking around. The world has simultaneously become larger and smaller. Further, because of so many conflicting views, it seems most people have trouble defining reality because all of it is skewed one way or another.
Brunner addresses the justice system: "The biggest single building project in this country right now is costing a hundred million buckadingdongs. What do you think it is? You’re wrong. It’s a jail." This is something that has become increasingly true over the past almost 60 years.
I could probably go on for days about this book but will close this review with the one quote that really made me stop and think: "Did nobody ever point out to you that the only liberty implied by free will is the opportunity to be wrong?' This really is the definition of freedom because if everyone is conforming and agreeing there is no freedom. This runs contrary to the current idea that everyone is entitled to their own opinion (truth) and it must be accepted. This is important because people learn more from failures than they do from successes. show less
NOTE: When reading this book, it is important to remember that it was published in 1968 and begins on 5/3/2010.
This is a dense story with a lot of ideas packed into the story. Central to the plot is Shalmaneser, a computer that collects all the information and seems to foretell AI technology. Interspersed are all kinds of political, social, and historical thoughts. There are references to:
--mass shootings,
--gender/sexuality, including thruples and LGBTQ+
--eugenics, including intrauterine screening, forced sterilization, forced abortions
--video conferencing
--individualized mass media
Throughout show more all of this, the thoughts of Chad C. Mulligan are referenced. Chad is by-far my favorite character in the book. His takes on society are really still very relevant today. For instance: "You know Chad’s definition of the New Poor? People who are too far behind with time-payments on next year’s model to make the down-payment on the one for the year after?" His takes are blatantly cynical but with a tinge of hope that eventually it will all sort itself out and the world will be a better if less populated place.
The commentary on mass media is still insightful: "We’re aware of the scale of the planet, so we don’t accept that our own circumscribed horizons constitute reality. Much more real is what’s relayed to us by the TV." How much more true is this today than in 1968. Everyone seems to spend so much time viewing mass (social) media that it has come to define the world far more than just walking outside and looking around. The world has simultaneously become larger and smaller. Further, because of so many conflicting views, it seems most people have trouble defining reality because all of it is skewed one way or another.
Brunner addresses the justice system: "The biggest single building project in this country right now is costing a hundred million buckadingdongs. What do you think it is? You’re wrong. It’s a jail." This is something that has become increasingly true over the past almost 60 years.
I could probably go on for days about this book but will close this review with the one quote that really made me stop and think: "Did nobody ever point out to you that the only liberty implied by free will is the opportunity to be wrong?' This really is the definition of freedom because if everyone is conforming and agreeing there is no freedom. This runs contrary to the current idea that everyone is entitled to their own opinion (truth) and it must be accepted. This is important because people learn more from failures than they do from successes. show less
Sure it's frequently called a classic science fiction novel, but it's also one of that variety that can date horribly fast: the near future novel. Is it still worth reading 40 years later? On the whole, yes.
The novel surprises for what it isn't. For a novel with the reputation of being about overpopulation, it doesn't have the squalid and packed future of Harry Harrison's classic (if extrapolatively dishonest) Make Room! Make Room!. There isn't a lot of mention of scarce commodities. Technology continues to develop. Wars continue to be fought. New entertainment media still is invented. The effects of overpopulation mainly seem to be an extensive adoption of worldwide government eugenics programs to ensure only the healthy procreate and show more the appearance of "muckers", people driven into mass killing sprees by the pressures of overcrowded living. And, from the author who went on to write the famous polluted dystopia of The Sheep Look Up, there is little talk about the effects of overpopulation on pollution.
The plots involving the main characters are pretty straightforward. Hogan, a seeming layabout who spends all day reading, is activated as a spy. The American government wants him to discredit or stop the announced program of the Yakatang government to edit human genes. It fears the population pressures resulting from the millions, denied the right to reproduce, suddenly allowed to via gene editing. House, an angry, young black executive (and, in this future, living space is expensive enough where even corporate executives have to share apartments) gets put in charge of his company's collaboration with the American government to bootstrap the poor African country of Beninia into prosperity, protect it from its neighbors, and use it to process ore from deep sea mines. Along the way, he has to find out why the impoverished Beninia is so lacking in the social pathologies of wealthier countries. Oddly, their stories lag a bit at times when, in the second half of the book, they arrive, respectively, in Yakatang and Beninia.
Like Brunner's literary model, John Dos Passos' U.S.A.Trilogy, the joy and interest of the book is when the focus is off the main characters. Their lives are covered in the Continuity chapters. Brunner alternates those chapters with others labeled Context (usually news reports), The Happening World (a scattershot of vignettes and quotes from books, ads, and tv as well as just brief statements of fact about the world and various characters), and Tracking with Closeups (following several minor characters and their lives). To my mind, this Dos Passos technique is perhaps the most dramatic, interesting, and effective expository method a science fiction writer can use to show off his world building.
And there is an impressive amount of world building. I suspect that Brunner's serious look at the possibilities of genetic engineering (allowing for changes in terminology, they seem pretty accurate predictions) and pheromones was among the first in science fiction. The man who is credited with inventing the computer worm in the The Shockwave Rider gives us the beginnings of artificial intelligence and sort of an internet service (asking questions via phone of an automated service).
Some of that world building, though, is bound to be dated and especially so given its origin in the 1960s. Like so many other authors of the time, he thought the future would hold many new and bizarre art forms. Instead, the computer game is really the only new art form of the last 40 years. His picture of Communist China was too kind, his opinion of the tractability of African problems too kind. He thinks too much of Marshal McLuhan.
Critic John Clute has contended every novel has three dates: when it was written, when it was set, and the year it's really about. Brunner's style makes this novel enjoyable even though it's now more a time machine back to the late sixties than any credible view of the future. But it is a glorious example of a technique still not used enough by writers.
And Brunner was smart enough to know what his novel's ultimate fate would be. There's a scene at a party where the fashions from the late sixties until the novel's year of 2010 are closely described. I like to think Brunner was brazenly rubbing it in that he wasn't trying to be a true prophet, that he was going out of his way to risk looking silly someday - and was going to proceed anyway. show less
The novel surprises for what it isn't. For a novel with the reputation of being about overpopulation, it doesn't have the squalid and packed future of Harry Harrison's classic (if extrapolatively dishonest) Make Room! Make Room!. There isn't a lot of mention of scarce commodities. Technology continues to develop. Wars continue to be fought. New entertainment media still is invented. The effects of overpopulation mainly seem to be an extensive adoption of worldwide government eugenics programs to ensure only the healthy procreate and show more the appearance of "muckers", people driven into mass killing sprees by the pressures of overcrowded living. And, from the author who went on to write the famous polluted dystopia of The Sheep Look Up, there is little talk about the effects of overpopulation on pollution.
The plots involving the main characters are pretty straightforward. Hogan, a seeming layabout who spends all day reading, is activated as a spy. The American government wants him to discredit or stop the announced program of the Yakatang government to edit human genes. It fears the population pressures resulting from the millions, denied the right to reproduce, suddenly allowed to via gene editing. House, an angry, young black executive (and, in this future, living space is expensive enough where even corporate executives have to share apartments) gets put in charge of his company's collaboration with the American government to bootstrap the poor African country of Beninia into prosperity, protect it from its neighbors, and use it to process ore from deep sea mines. Along the way, he has to find out why the impoverished Beninia is so lacking in the social pathologies of wealthier countries. Oddly, their stories lag a bit at times when, in the second half of the book, they arrive, respectively, in Yakatang and Beninia.
Like Brunner's literary model, John Dos Passos' U.S.A.Trilogy, the joy and interest of the book is when the focus is off the main characters. Their lives are covered in the Continuity chapters. Brunner alternates those chapters with others labeled Context (usually news reports), The Happening World (a scattershot of vignettes and quotes from books, ads, and tv as well as just brief statements of fact about the world and various characters), and Tracking with Closeups (following several minor characters and their lives). To my mind, this Dos Passos technique is perhaps the most dramatic, interesting, and effective expository method a science fiction writer can use to show off his world building.
And there is an impressive amount of world building. I suspect that Brunner's serious look at the possibilities of genetic engineering (allowing for changes in terminology, they seem pretty accurate predictions) and pheromones was among the first in science fiction. The man who is credited with inventing the computer worm in the The Shockwave Rider gives us the beginnings of artificial intelligence and sort of an internet service (asking questions via phone of an automated service).
Some of that world building, though, is bound to be dated and especially so given its origin in the 1960s. Like so many other authors of the time, he thought the future would hold many new and bizarre art forms. Instead, the computer game is really the only new art form of the last 40 years. His picture of Communist China was too kind, his opinion of the tractability of African problems too kind. He thinks too much of Marshal McLuhan.
Critic John Clute has contended every novel has three dates: when it was written, when it was set, and the year it's really about. Brunner's style makes this novel enjoyable even though it's now more a time machine back to the late sixties than any credible view of the future. But it is a glorious example of a technique still not used enough by writers.
And Brunner was smart enough to know what his novel's ultimate fate would be. There's a scene at a party where the fashions from the late sixties until the novel's year of 2010 are closely described. I like to think Brunner was brazenly rubbing it in that he wasn't trying to be a true prophet, that he was going out of his way to risk looking silly someday - and was going to proceed anyway. show less
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Author Information
288+ Works 24,193 Members
Legendary science fiction author John Brunner was the winner of the Hugo award and two-time winner of the British Science Fiction Award. He was perhaps the first science fiction author to predict the Internet and coined the term "worm" to descibe computer viruses. Mr. Brunner died in 1995
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Common Knowledge
- Canonical title*
- Morgenwelt
- Original title
- Stand on Zanzibar
- Original publication date
- 1968
- People/Characters
- Norman House; Donald Hogan; Chad Mulligan; Shalmaneser
- Important places
- New York, New York, USA; Yatakang; Beninia, Africa
- Epigraph
- context (0) THE INNES MODE
"There is nothing wilful or arbitrary about the Innis mode of expression. Were... (show all) it to be translated into perspective prose, it would not only require huge space, but the insight into modes of interplay among forms of organisation would also be lost. Innis sacrificed point of view and prestige to his sense of the urgent need for insight. A point of view can be a dangerous luxury when substituted for insight and understanding. As Innes got more insight he abandoned any mere point of view in his presentation of knowledge. When he interrelates the development of the steam press with the 'consolidation of the vernaculars' and the rise of nationalism and revolution he is not reporting anybody's point of view, least of all his own. He is setting up a mosaic configuration or galaxy for insight... Innes makes no effort to 'spell out' the interrelations between the components in his galaxy. He offers no consumer packages in his later work, but only do-it-yourself kits..." - Marshall McLuhan: The Gutenberg Galaxy - Dedication
- For Marjorie of course
- First words
- Stock cue SOUND: 'Presenting SCANALYZER, EngrelaySatelserv's unique thrice-per-day study of the big big scene, the INdepth INdependent INmediate INterface between you and your world!'
- Last words
- (Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)A long time later, when people had come from all the rooms to see what the shouting was about - Elihu, Gideon, scores of anonymous faces - he allowed Norman to take his hand and lead him quietly away.
(Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)This non-novel was brought to you by John Brunner using Spicers Plus Fabric Bond and Commercial Bank papers interleaved with Serillo carbons in a Smith Corona 250 electric typewriter fitted with Kolok black-record ribbon. • • context (28) - A Message from our Sponsors - Blurbers
- Spinrad, Norman; Haldeman, Joe; Kirkus, Virginia; Merril, Judith
- Original language
- English
*Some information comes from Common Knowledge in other languages. Click "Edit" for more information.
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