Stand on Zanzibar

British writer John Brunner's novel, first published in 1969 (when 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 selfish

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.

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.