Book Review + Podcast: Stand on Zanzibar by John Brunner

Stand on Zanzibar by John Brunner

Paperback, 650 pages

Published February 1983 by Del Rey Books (first published September 1968)

Hugo Award for Best Novel (1969)

Nebula Award Nominee for Best Novel (1968)

British Science Fiction Association Award for Best Novel (1969)

Prix Tour-Apollo Award for Best Novel (1973)

John Brunner was a leading voice of the 60's new wave of Science Fiction. I have wondered why other authors of the new wave like Leguin, Ellison and of course Philip K Dick are better remembered or respected. Ellison, it was his insane personality and with Dick, it was the films made after his death. John Brunner like PKD has a career that balances corny pulp novels in Brunner cases he did man books about space slavers and laser guns. For every one of those Brunner had as many works of pure genius as any of the giants. Novels like Shockwave Rider (proto- Cyberpunk), The Sheep Look Up (eco-horror), and Crucible of Time (A truly weird novel about alien civilization)to name a few.

Stand on Zanzibar is without a doubt his ultimate masterpiece and even though I have been a Brunner fan for decades I had saved read this book until now. Beyond what it means in this author's catalog this is one of the greatest science fiction novels of the 20th century. There are many elements that make this novel so good and important. The novel is intensely political, and there are so many levels which the story exists on it is a challenge to explain it all. The novel is about environmental issues, colonialism, social-political interactions and more.

The story is told in an experimental format that switches between traditional narrative and various weird sub-chapters. This is done with chapters that are just in world ads, Newspaper articles, speeches, poems and excerpts from fictional textbooks like Hipcrime Vocab by Chad C Mulligan. This style was apparently inspired by (or lifted from) a famous series of books called the USA Trilogy by John Dos Passos. This will turn off easily distracted readers but there is a narrative throughout the novel that follows two main characters. The main POV is a corporate spy and assassin named Donald Hogan and his roommate Norman who is a Muslim businessman. They are forced to live together in an over-populated domed New York part of the future 2010 controlled by a supercomputer. There are mass-shootings everywhere, unending war in this effectively scary dystopia that has lots of elements of the world we live in now.

Donald and Norman find themselves at the center of battle over two small fictional nations of this future. Mass marketed drugs and eugenics are the solution that many feel is the only answer to a better world. That narrative is OK, but it is all the elements of the snapshots combined with the story that makes this novel so amazing and worth the 650 pages.

It was 1968 when John Brunner sat down to write this and it is amazing how was able to predict about our future. Let's get something clear about Science Fiction, the ability to predict the future is not the job of the genre. Telling stories about possible futures is as much about exploring current affairs as anything. Ray Bradbury famously said he didn't write Farrenheit 451 to predict but prevent the future. That is what is amazing about SOZ. Certainly, this weird world is not like ours but goddamn it if many elements mirror our modern world 50 years later.

So New York is not covered in a dome, and the Vietnam war is not in its 50th year in 2010, but the point is not to get things exactly right. There are however mass shootings including schools (p.247). The ghost town that Detroit would become because automation happened much like Brunner predicted (p. 230). That is not all the way young people date, the way cigarettes are viewed, The European Union probably two dozen other things are pretty goddamn close here.

Probably my favorite part of the novel came on page 422 with the transcript of a speech by a lunar colonist entitled "Pros and Cons of Lunatic Society." Brunner here not only doubles on the Lunatic pun PKD made in Second Variety but here he lays out the mission statement of the novel when a person living on the moon basically explains why they are better off on the moon. Speaking of life on the moon "More Important than that, though, you know that you're in an environment where co-operation is essential for survival."

Stand on Zanzibar is Brunner's best and one of the most important novels of the 20th-century science fiction or otherwise. It is not for everyone as the style makes it a challenging read. Too bad because it deserves to be studied and understood.

“The book has one of the scariest mise-en-scènes in all of science fiction: a world that is a smothering, riotous tangle of human arms and limbs. Stand on Zanzibar is an information overload on topics that sensible people would never want to learn about. Even the characters fear what the book’s world is direly telling them: as the brightest among them rather pitifully remarks, “Whatever happens in present circumstances there’s going to be trouble.” Their world is a kaleidoscope of whatever. Its darkly troubled whateverness oozes from its walls with lysergic intensity.” ― John Brunner

After I read/reviewed this book I recorded a bonus episode with writer/publisher Duane Pesice. This is the episode where I decided to review all the Hugo winners of the sixties. Here is the audio review: