Stand on Zanzibar
by John Brunner
Summary
The world of 2010 holds seven billion people, and Brunner's title comes from the calculation that they would just about fit, shoulder to shoulder, on the island of Zanzibar. Most countries operate eugenics laws restricting who may have children, based on whatever hereditary defect the legislature has settled on. Random public massacres by ordinary citizens are so routine they have a name, muckers, and a standard news format.
Two flatmates in New York carry the plot. Donald Hogan is a synthesist, paid to read everything and notice connections, and is secretly a reserve intelligence officer who will be activated and reprogrammed as a killer. Norman House is a Black executive at General Technics, a corporation large enough to take over the running of an entire African country, which is what it proceeds to negotiate.
Around them Brunner assembles the novel out of fragments: advertising copy, news bulletins, sociological lectures from a fictional theorist, overheard conversation, statistics. Whole chapters are collage, borrowed openly from the technique John Dos Passos used in the U.S.A. trilogy and updated with Marshall McLuhan.
It is demanding. The first hundred pages are largely context with no story, and the reader has to trust that the pieces resolve. They do.
The African state, Beninia, is the book's hopeful strand: a country with no crime and no ethnic violence, which the corporation intends to develop and whose peacefulness turns out to have a biological cause nobody expected.
Around six hundred pages, fragmented by design, and it works better read in long sittings than in short ones.
Its guesses have been quoted for fifty years: satellite television, corporate states larger than governments, routine mass shootings, genetic screening, and a President Obomi in office in the 2010s. Best for readers who want the most formally ambitious science fiction novel of the 1960s.
Historical Context & Significance
Stand on Zanzibar won the 1969 Hugo Award for Best Novel, the British Science Fiction Association Award and, in French translation, the Prix Tour Apollo.
John Brunner was English, prolific and prone to being paid badly, and this is the first of four thematically linked novels of collapse, followed by The Jagged Orbit on racial conflict and the arms trade, The Sheep Look Up on pollution and Shockwave Rider on data networks, which between them predicted a startling amount of the present, including the computer worm.
The Dos Passos technique had been used in literary fiction for decades but almost never in science fiction, and its arrival here is one of the clearest markers of the New Wave, the movement that pushed the field toward formal experiment in the 1960s.