| Stand on Zanzibar | |
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Cover of first edition (hardcover) |
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| Author(s) | John Brunner |
| Cover artist | S. A. Summit, Inc. |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
| Genre(s) | Science fiction |
| Publisher | Doubleday |
| Publication date | 1968 |
| Media type | Print (hardcover and paperback) |
| Pages | 582 pp |
| ISBN | ISBN 0-09-919110-5 |
Stand on Zanzibar is a dystopian New Wave science fiction novel written by John Brunner and first published in 1968. The book won a Hugo Award for Best Novel at the 27th World Science Fiction Convention in 1969, as well as the 1969 BSFA Award and the 1973 Prix Tour-Apollo Award.
Contents |
A lengthy book, Stand on Zanzibar was innovative within its genre for mixing narrative with entire chapters dedicated to providing background information and worldbuilding, to create a sprawling narrative that presents a complex and multi-faceted view of the story's future world. Such information-rich chapters were often constructed from many short paragraphs, sentences, or fragments thereof – pulled from sources such as slogans, snatches of conversation, advertising text, songs, extracts from newspapers and books, and other cultural detritus. The result is reminiscent of the concept of information overload.
The narrative itself follows the lives of a large cast of characters, carefully chosen to give a broad cross-section of the future world. Some of these interact directly with the central narratives, while others add depth to Brunner's world. Brunner appropriated this basic narrative technique from the U.S.A. Trilogy of John Dos Passos.[1][2][3] On the first page of the novel, Brunner provides a quote from The Gutenberg Galaxy by Marshall McLuhan that approximates such a technique, entitling it "the Innis mode" as an apparent label.
The primary engine of the novel's story is overpopulation and its projected consequences,[2] and the title refers to an early twentieth-century claim that the world's population could fit onto the Isle of Wight (with an area of 381 square kilometres (147 sq mi)) if they were all standing upright. Brunner remarked that the growing world population now required a larger island — the 3.5 billion people living in 1968 could stand together on the Isle of Man (area 572 square kilometres (221 sq mi)), while the 7 billion people who he projected would be alive in 2010 would need to stand on Zanzibar (area 1,554 square kilometres (600 sq mi)).[4] Throughout the book, the image of the entire human race standing shoulder-to-shoulder on a small island is a metaphor for a crowded world where each person feels hemmed in by a prison made not of metal bars, but of other human beings. By the end of the book, some of that crowd is (metaphorically) knee deep in the Indian Ocean surrounding the island.
As in Dos Passos's work, the chapters are headed by one of several rubrics:
The story is set in 2010, mostly in the United States. A number of plots and many vignettes are played out in this future world, based on Brunner's extrapolation of social, economic, and technological trends. The key main trends are based on the enormous population and its impact: social stresses, eugenic legislation, widening social divisions, future shock, and extremism. Certain of Brunner's guesses are fairly close, others not, and some ideas clearly show their 1960s mind-set.
Many futuristic concepts, products and services, and slang are presented. The Hipcrime Vocab and other works by the fictional sociologist Chad C. Mulligan are frequent sources of quotations. Some examples of slang include "codder" (man), "shiggy" (woman), "whereinole" (where in hell?), "prowlie" (an armored police car), "offyourass" (possessing an attitude) and "mucker" (a person running amok). A new technology introduced is "eptification" (education for particular tasks), a form of mental programming.
The book centres on two New York men, Donald Hogan and Norman Niblock House.[2] House is a rising executive at General Technics, one of the all-powerful corporations. Using his "Afram" (African American) heritage to advance his position, he has risen to vice-president at age twenty-six.
Hogan is introduced with a single paragraph rising out of nowhere: "Donald Hogan is a spy". Donald shares an apartment with House and is undercover as a student. Hogan's real work is as a "synthesist", although he is a commissioned officer and can be called up for duty.
The two main plots concern the fictional African state of Beninia (a name reminiscent of the real-life Benin, though that nation in the Bight of Benin was known as the Republic of Dahomey when the book was written) making a deal with General Technics to take over the management of their country, in a bid to speed up development from third world to first world status. A second major plot is break-through in genetic engineering in the fictional Australasian nation of Yatakang (which seems to be a disguised Indonesia), which Hogan is soon sent by the U.S. government ("State") to investigate. The two plots eventually cross, bringing potential implications for the entire world.
Quotations from books by Chad C. Mulligan, a former sociologist turned iconoclastic social commentator,[3] appear throughout the novel to illustrate or contrast plot points. The books are:
Algis Budrys declared that Stand on Zanzibar "takes your breath away," saying that the novel "put[s] itself together seemingly without effort [and] paints a picture of the immediate future as it will, Brunner convinces you, certainly be."[5]
Greg Bear praised Stand On Zanzibar, thirty years after its initial publication, as a science fiction novel that, unusually, has not become dated since its original appearance: "It's not quite the future we imagined it to be, but it still reads as fresh as it did back in 1968, and that's an amazing accomplishment!"[6]
Stephen H. Goldman, "John Brunner's Dystopias: Heroic Man in Unheroic Society", Science Fiction Studies 16, 1978
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