John Brunner's "Stand on Zanzibar" (Steak Knives)

Reading vintage science fiction always entertains on at least two levels.  A tale well written has timeless appeal, of course, but playing 'count the things a futurist vision gets wrong/right' is also good times.  The latter is particularly true for Brunner's 1969 vision of a greatly overpopulated 2010 earth, as its just past the 'horizon of anachronism' for reading in 2011.  (Hey, look at me, I coined a phrase!)


To take a look at each piece in turn, I'll start with the tale well written...

Brunner opens with a Marshall McLuhan quote that would have had much more potency when the novel was published - McLuhan was a cutting-edge theorist at the time, rather than the 'classic' one he is today (making for a better fit with speculative fiction, all around).  The quote preps the reader for the fragmented, collage-like approach he takes to world creation, which, again 'at the time' would have read much more avant-garde than it does today.  With this approach in hand, he manages to paint an engaging and frenetic early 21st Century, largely in connecting chapters that serve as pause from the central plot arc.  These connectors are usually comprised of snippets (much like Burroughs-style 'cut ups') of media, advertising, overheard conversations etc., and do much of the leg work in setting context throughout.


Amidst all this world-building, Brunner's characters suffer from a woodenness that suggests they should have had more attention in the writing process.  This (among other things) reminded me of much of Vonnegut's work, and specific characters to boot (I see a Bokonon/Bokononism, Kilgour Trout and Eliot Rosewater in Zanzibar...).  While I have a lot of heart for Vonnegut, he was always *much* better with ideas than with characters.  It's a rare text and writer that nails both in this genre.  [This book *did* win the Hugo Award, so despite my criticism here, it's important to say it's a widely celebrated novel.]


Now for the 'visionary accuracy' piece...

To be fair, what futurist did 'get us right' back in 1969?  Brunner's 2010 sees the world having only a few supercomputers, the central one for this text being General Technics' 'Shalmaneser' - subject to speculation as to its ability to think independently.  While this seems like a tired and played out device today, we need to consider it from 1969 eyes.  Brunner certainly gets the population/over-crowding piece correct, though he envisions a western world thick with eugenic laws that limit breeding to those with clean genetics.  New York is covered by a Buckminster Fuller-style dome.  You can 'program' a person to be an efficient killer, similar to Neo's training in The Matrix.  As interesting as all this is what was missed or not anticipated, of course.

As I said up front, this is not distraction or something to titter over - it's part of the pleasure in the read.  Speculative fictions always teach us much about the tensions, anxieties, and wish-fulfilling dreams in historical snapshot, and need to be approached as social science texts (at least in part) to wring full value from them. 

For an interesting take on just one small dimension of the socio-cultural implications of spec and science fiction, read Disch's "The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of."  As a solid set of Steak Knives, I'd recommend you read Stand on Zanzibar too...

John Brunner (1934-1995)

As a side note - I've owned this book since the late 90's, purchased as a recommendation based on other things I'd been buying by the owner of a sci-fi book shop at Queen/Spadina specializing in rare and collectable editions (it no longer exists, sadly).  While it did take me over 10 years to get to it, it lead to the happy 'horizon of anachronism' timing, but also reminds me of how gratifying the purchase process used to be in pre-Amazon and Ebay ubiquity.  Maybe somebody should write spec-fic book about *that*...