Customer Reviews

Stand on Zanzibar

5 star:		(28)
4 star:		(10)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

British writer John Brunner's novel, first published in 1968 (it won both the Hugo and British Science Fiction awards, and four years later, the French Prix Apollo), is certainly one of the most literary, complex, challenging, even difficult works of science fiction written during the twentieth century. Yet, in spite of the hurdles it may present some readers, the book manages also to be fast-paced and hysterically funny.

One of the triumphs of Brunner's book is that it can be read on any number of levels, which is probably why it seems to resonate with readers of extraordinarily divergent tastes. Having read it twice (once as a bookwormish Valley brat and now twenty-odd years later as a still-bookwormish publishing professional), I am not surprised that this book might be entirely different beasts to different readers; the enthralling, bewildering thriller I remembered from my adolescence has somehow transformed itself into a darkly sardonic political and social commentary--and I like both versions just fine.

The novel is not, at first, an easy read. Its "unique" jump-cut/collage structure, its pseudo-hip prose style, its fabricated lingo--all are modeled rather precisely on John Dos Passos's classic American classic trilogy, "U.S.A." Like Dos Passos, Brunner interlaces chapters in several strands. The bulk of the storyline appears in the "Continuity" chapters, which detail the misadventures of secret agent Donald Hogan and corporate executive Norman House, and the "Tracking with Closeups" chapters, which describe two dozen characters who are peripheral to the action. The other two strands--"Context" and "The Happening World"--provide background material (film descriptions, encyclopedia entries, song lyrics, document excerpts, advertising jingles, news stories, etc.) that catalog a world drowning in both information overload and an excess of people who would no longer be able to stand "on the island of Zanzibar without some of them being over ankles in the sea." Much of the novel revolves around how various nations and individuals deal with the perceived need to limit births both in number and in quality. (A helpful hint to the baffled reader: "Read the Directions," the first chapter in "The Happening World" sequence, serves as both a dramatis personae and a jargon decoder.)

After the first 75 pages or so, once you're accustomed to the pace, the book is smooth sailing; it's as much a novel to be admired as enjoyed. And it's one of the most wickedly, playfully funny books ever written--in any genre. The plot is far too complicated to attempt to summarize here; suffice it to say that Donald is trying to thwart a potentially dangerous and politically volatile eugenics program and Norman is struggling to increase his company's profits while simultaneously enriching an underdeveloped yet perplexingly peaceful African nation.

The two plots seem disconnected, yet at heart is the juxtaposition of naked greed and dignified idealism, of selfishness and altruism, of capitalism and communalism, of totalitarianism and anarchy. (At times, the overt political and sociological messages recall Le Guin's "The Dispossessed.") Or, as the character Chad Mulligan puts it in one of his sociological treatises, "applying the yardstick of extremism leads one to conclude that the human species is unlikely to last very long." Yet Brunner avoids the trap of losing himself in the hopelessness of his nightmarish world; instead, the resilience of human ingenuity and the vision for a better world still stand a chance, even on Zanzibar.

While some aspects of this novel are dated and a bit annoying, John Brunner delivered an eerily prescient and haunting epic on the human condition back in 1968. This is mostly thought of as a story about overpopulation, but that is actually just a background setting that weighs down upon the bizarre near-future society Brunner has created. Social pressures of population have led to twisted morals and ethics. Discrimination and xenophobia have been mechanized with eugenics legislation, people have become over-reliant on the cold logic of supercomputers rather than human reasoning, corporations are buying and controlling entire nations, and crime, terrorism, and social sabotage have become endemic. Back in 1968 these may have seemed like creative aspects of Brunner's imagination, but they are becoming disturbingly familiar over the intervening decades. Brunner's writing style here can be a real trip too, with a montage of styles incorporating quick cuts between the viewpoints of different characters, along with constructed snippets resembling newspaper reports, government documents, advertisements, and even folktales from Brunner's imaginary world. This style of writing is becoming rather dated, and the book gets off to a slow start as you try to digest the writing methods. Also, the ending is a bit anti-climactic with the long and extensive build-up fizzling out into an off-screen denouement. But in the end this novel has the power to implant rather disturbing thoughts in the back of your mind about the near-future course of humanity. [~doomsdayer520~]

I can't remember what prompted me to re-read this lovely book but I ordered it from Amazon recently and was not disappointed.

Science fiction which attempts to forecast the near-future often fails as the prophesies are either too obvious or fail to come to life. In this case John Brunner demonstrated - in 1967 - an extraordinary facility the understand and describe issues which the rest of us did not catch up on till 20 or 30 years later.

The writing technique used is quite unique and requires considerable concentration and participation by the reader, who is rewarded as the book progresses with the answers to the puzzles which emerge.

Finally a word on Brunner's marvellous capacity for believable characterisation. The characters in this fast-moving story are alive and highly motivated.

I don't agree with reviews which pigeonhole and classify this unique book with lesser genres. It is far above that.

I learned only recently that John Brunner had died a few years back. This is a great loss to the world but his books prevail.

I first picked up this book when I was ten years old. I've had to buy three new copies since then, because of all the wear and tear. I've been watching a great deal of the world that Brunner wrote about in this and the other two books in this cycle (The Sheep Look Up and the Shockwave Rider) grow around us. I'm not sure that the late Mr. Brunner wanted that to happen-these are cautionary tales in the extreme, and I imagine he didn't enjoy watching it happen any more than the rest of us did. Shalmaneser has almost as much personality as HARLIE, without much text space devoted to it, simply by the accumulated weight of all the sub-references, which pile up like Dennis Miller asides until they reach a whole. The entire book is written in minichapters, with their own headings, and each heading has a story to tell. I would have liked to have been eptified to write like this. The cut-up technique may cause difficulty for readers with long attention spans or a conservative reading bent, but if you keep reading, the detail will build up in your head until you get the point(s) that Brunner is trying to make. This novel and it's companions predated the cyberpunk genre by some long years (it's literary precedent would be "A Clockwork Orange", which had some of the same points to make), but it's the stuff that Gibson, Sterling, et al seem to have used as a reference, like a previous reviewer correctly observed.

Stand on Zanzibar is a classic sci-fi novel from the late 60s that is, to paraphrase another review, simultenously dated and ahead of its time. Brunner created a future world where overpopulation and overstimulation would drive some people to become murderous "muckers." He may have missed the mark on his predictions about drug use and abortion, but... his central thesis - that people's biggest fear in the 21st century would be simply standing in the wrong place at the wrong time when an otherwise normal-looking person snapped and went psychotic - is such a BULLSEYE in the wake of events like Columbine and 9-11, it's scary!

It's not a downbeat as it sounds, mostly because of the creative narrative technique. Brunner's fast-paced writing style predated hypertext and MTV-style jumpcuts. I particularly enjoy the way he uses short paragraphs that each describe what multiple individuals are doing in a single moment across the globe -- a sort of a world's-eye-view technique that was supremely influential on narration of comic book writers like Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman. Brunner's joy of linguistic and narrative technique are apparent on every page, and the results are clever and often bitingly funny despite the downbeat theme.

There was a brief period from the late sixties to the early seventies that saw a veritable explosion of new ideas and new methods of painting those ideas on the reader's consciousness within the SF field. This book is one of the finer examples of both of those items, winning (quite appropriately) the Hugo award for 1969 (though I thought that Samuel Delany's Nova was just as deserving that year).

Stylistically, this book is a mosaic, a patchwork of cross-cutting images, scenes, advertisements, headlines, interviews, scientific paper excerpts, startlingly different from almost everything else published up till then. It takes a little bit to get used to this style, to let the world picture build into something coherent in your mind. But once you do, it lends a verisimilitude and a sense of frenetic pace that is perfectly suited to this dystopian vision of a world staggering under severe over-population pressure, driven by mega-corporations and military influence, forced genetic regulation, socialism and severe pressure to conform. From the Mr. and Mrs. Everyman that has become a daily part of everyone's daily video viewing to the 'muckers' so prophetically envisioned (just see today's headlines), this is an expose of just what happens when there really are too many people crowded onto too small a planet.

Some portions of this are a little dated, mainly in those areas where Brunner used straight-line extrapolations of trends that were present at the time of writing, such as the liquid-nitrogen cooled mega-computer (rather than any vision of today's internet) or the portrayed 'integration' of blacks in the society. But these items do not seriously detract from the power and depth of the themes that tackled here. Characterization is a little thin. Other than Norman and Donald Hogan, most of the characters are pretty flimsy, or they are an obvious preaching board for Brunner's thematic comments (Chad Mulligan). But as this is an idea book, not a book of character or strong action, this is a minor fault.

This book was probably the archetype for today's cyberpunk sub-genre, written with power and conceptual brilliance, one of Brunner's best, standing alongside his The Whole Man, The Sheep Look Up, and The Jagged Orbit as prime examples of just what science fiction is all about. A dark vision of which all too much is still very relevant in today's world.

Although this book is classified as Science Fiction, it is better defined as a study of the general thought processes used in the late 1960's instead of the futuresque novel in which it is advertised. For example, the casual drug use so prevalent in the 60's allows the book's version of the future to be filled with an entire population addicted to Bay Golds (legalized pot), hashish, tranks (tranquilizers), and of course alcohol. The Free Love movement generates mass overpopulation, extreme legislation preventing excessive childbirth and mandatory sterilization for those with defective genes. The general distrust of government (particularly military) operations in the 60's generates a military group capable of turning a pacifist into a killing machine in just a few days. It's great reading and the speculations are limitless. The book is divided into two major plots. The first is a story of American espionage in the Far East. The second is the description of a corporate take-over of a small African nation. The only real connection between the two plots is the characters we have grown familiar with throughout the book. Included are multiple sub-stories demonstrating the thought process and the animalization of a society crammed together due to overpopulation. The influence of television is (in my opinion) the closest Brunner came to correctly describing the 21st century world of today except folks in his world have the added luxury of watching everybody's favorite character, Mr & Mrs. Everywhere, during commercials. Businesses are incapable of making a move without consulting Shalmaneser (a massive computer capable of generating all the right answers as long as it understands the information inputted into `him'...I mean `it'). PC's weren't even a science fiction concept in '69, I guess. In fact, the only character capable of thinking for himself is the book's only `genius' to the point of being considered a freak of nature. Of course he's only hooked on alcohol. The book is an interesting, thought provoking read if the reader is willing to deal with a slow pace for the first 300 pages or so. The author implements multiple styles in the book also, and that proved to be kind of difficult to hang with. I have to give him credit though; he managed to emulate the clipped, edited, almost but not quite random style used constantly by MTV...and the book was written 13 years before the station ever aired. Now that is predicting the future.

First, I have to ask... how come so few people have reviewed this site? Second...this is a damn fine book. Brunner uses an enormous variety of literary techniques to convey a world incredibly imaginative and at the same time very close to us in the information age. The book begins with the sript for a cacophanous computer-television show called SCANALYZER. Brunner's description of this information-overdosed world interplays very nicely with the plot. The book opens with a black VP of a Microsoft-like corporation called General Technics; but for the first 75 pages, Norman is the symbol for a generation of blacks who still use words like "paleass," which (as far as I know) never really happened in the way Brunner portrays it. But, the book, for being written thrity years ago, has surprisingly few anachronisms beyond extinct whales, an intelligent computer called Shalmaneser who still needs liquid helium to keep cool, mass-marketed psychedelics -- but many predictions seem distressingly close to reality: a China locked in economic war with the US; a NY so filled with people you can in an instant inflame a horrible riot; the merging of information and enter- tainment, visual and synthesized rock and roll, a world where you have mandatory sterilization if you carry a gene for color-blindness, phenylkenoturia, haemophilia, imbecility; etc. But I digress. After meeting Norman and the 91-year-old founder of GT, we see a devastating portrait of a couple having to flee the country to bear a color-blind child. Then we meet Donald Hogan, a bookworm government employee whose job is synthesis: if you are exceptionally gifted at pattern perception, the government hires you to be a spy without leaving the country, by assertaining another nation's activies by studying on them. After much world-building, the plot takes off. An overpopulated island country of Yatakang (a parallel of Indonesia) announces that they are begining a eugenics program that will create a race of supermen by maximizing your own DNA...even if you do have an "illegal gene". The world goes into an uproar, and Brunner's portrait of the reactions of an entire nation is superb. Also, General Technics begins to buy out a mysteriously calm little African country called Beninia (take a guess) to exploit a rich mineral strike in the Atlantic. But the country is a little TOO callm, and Norman and his group investigate something that may, when combined with Yatakang's research, save man from himself

Seen and read it all? New to Science Fiction? READ THIS BOOK! Written on a Smith Corona typewriter in the late '60s, Stand on Zanzibar attempts to describe the world in 2010. World views are generally a tall order for any writer, but Brunner is up to the task. In some ways, his story line is far more relevant and entertaining than many recent SF novels, and again, this speaks to the intellect and literary talent of the late John Brunner. Stand on Zanzibar won the 1968 Hugo Award, and 33 years later, it's still on my top ten list of SF novels.

The "Innis Mode" style used in the book can be disorienting at first (I was pre MTV), but after a few chapters you'll be drawn into this beautiful and complex dance as the subplots and characters interact. There are laugh out loud vignets, poetry, songs, and scenes that will make your heart ache. From dirt floor huts in Africa, to the edge of space, Brunner's characters will guide, push, and drag you through experiences that reflect on what it takes to be a human being in a society driven by technology and greed.

I hope that someday a gifted director will make a movie version of SoZ. If the screenplay captures even half of what's in this novel, it would be a success.

I decided to re-visit this wonderful novel some fifteen to twenty years after my first reading. Forget the reviews which claim Stand on Zanzibar is dated. While it is true that many of the events in this story of the year 2010 aren't going to happen, that doesn't make it any less enjoyable. The book's value lies not in the accuracy of any so-called predictions, but in the rich and complex description of a world that is in many ways much like our own, but also somewhat different. Thinking of it as occuring in a parallel universe might be a good perspective.

The novel is at times challenging, riveting, hysterical and heart-breaking, but always rewarding. I strongly recommend that you read Stand on Zanzibar. It is one of the classics of science fiction.