Book: Stand on Zanzibar

[liv]

Author: John Brunner

Details: (c) 1969; Pub Arrow Books Ltd 1971; ISBN 0-09-004790-7

Verdict: Stand on Zanzibar is an original dystopia with an unusually broad focus.

Reasons for reading it: It's something of an SF classic. And I've liked a couple of other things by Brunner.

How it came into my hands: I got tempted by a second hand books stall in Cambridge market, and picked this up anyway even though I didn't really have space to bring books home. I'm glad I did because travelling is much less boring with reading material, even if I had to squash things a bit.

Brunner is famous for being an actual futurist; only Arthur C Clarke can compete in terms of coming up with solid technology ideas. (He was one of the earliest people to predict the internet, I think.) And Stand on Zanzibar, while it does have a plot, is mainly a vehicle for describing the world of... 2010. Yes, it's 40 years in the future from the time of writing, but it's a little jarring to keep being reminded that I'm actually living in The Future!

What I really like about SoZ is that's a portrait of the world, not of a forward projection of middle-class, urban America. It manages to capture the fun of reading a gazetteer or wikisurfing or similar, even though it's fictional. There's enough happening to characters you can care about to make it fun on the novel level as well, though the story and characterization are thinner than some. In some ways it's like very early cyberpunk, but it's also fairly pessimistic in its depiction of the future. It sort of amplifies the classic existential problem of the twentieth century, dealing with people living in unbelievable material affluence but lacking emotional connections or a sense of satisfaction from their lives. So it's a more plausible dystopia than 1984, because the misery isn't imposed top-down by an evil dictator, it just arises out of human nature and people being essentially apes who aren't very well adapted to modern civilization. There are more things wrong with the world than just unhappiness; the book deals with war and colonialism and the wealth gap, and has a glimmer of the ideas that later became environmental concern.

It's also trying to tackle racism and eugenics, though I'm not entirely convinced that it succeeds in this. OK, having major characters including both Americans of color and actual residents of the developing world is a very good start. Also, it's not just token diversity, people's lives are actually affected by both personal and global racism. The central conceit that the world has become too overcrowded in The Future and that this has caused a violent hatred against anyone who has too many kids or who has any kind of genetic condition seems a little far-fetched, but it's an interesting exploration of this idea and of course a satire on the ultimate consequences of any sort of eugenic attitudes. But I'm not convinced about the invention of a generic Pacific rim country and African country, where the western world uses real world history and geography. And the whole thing with the Shinka people being all magical and full of brotherly love feels a bit off to me.

The other thing that's very odd is that there seems to be absolutely no role for women in this future except as sex toys. There's a journalist and a police officer who get a few lines, and a few brief appearances of mothers. I do understand that it's supposed to be dystopian, so it's not claiming that it's a good thing that women have no economic or political or even really social roles. But it's striking that with the way the book does worldbuilding by presenting a very wide range of viewpoint characters, the only woman who has any screen time at all is the evil supervillain, who at 90 is too old to be anybody's sex toy. There are a few mentions that homosexuality and some forms of multiple / open / poly relationships are acceptable (though bisexuality is regarded as decadent thrill-seeking), but no actual evidence that this social change has any effects on society or gender roles.

The biology is bad, but that's forgivable if you're trying to write about genetics in the 70s. Also the whole thing with Chad Mulligan is really annoying; he just feels like a blatant Mary Sue / authorial mouthpiece. But those are minor quibbles; considering how descriptive and dense the book is, it's really incredibly engaging, and I enjoyed reading it a lot. It has lovely things like a supercomputer achieving sentience and lots of culture clash stuff, and is generally a very intelligent and interesting piece.

Comments

[rysmiel]

I need to read this again, though am very tempted to wait for January of next year. The things that stick with me about it, from some distance away, are how very effective the structure/stylistic choice is and how hard a thing that style is to do right, and how very shallow in a Swinging Sixties sort of way the gender ideation felt to be.

It may be worth noting that Brunner wrote what he thought of as four major novels addressing different major problems facing the world, of which Stand on Zanzibar is the overpopulation one, and the others have correspondingly different focus.

The sort-of predicting the Internet is in The Shockwave Rider, btw.

[lethargic_man]

It's eight and a half years since I read this, and to my surprise I don't have any correspondence in my inbox discussing it with rysmiel (maybe we discussed it in person); and I can't remember much either.

I remember coming away from it impressed with the concept of synthesists, and looking for examples of them in the real world.

[liv]

Yay, the synthesists are great. There are lots of really cool ideas in there. And I'm surprised I didn't get to it before now, it's the sort of thing I ought to have read years ago.

[rysmiel]

I spent years wanting to be a synthesist when I grew up, actually. jonsinger is probably the closest to one I have met in reality

[liv]

Yeah, reading it in 2010 seems like a great concept! The weird structure, with all the commercial breaks and jumping about between unconnected characters, took me a little while to get into, but helped move things along and was effective once I got used to it.

The gender stuff, and other bits that speak very strongly of the 60s context, I assumed were deliberate, in the same way that 1984 is really a book about 1948. I read it as saying, look, this sexual revolution with opt-in reproduction seems a lot of fun now, but it isn't actually a great lookout for women or really for men in the long term. But the absence of almost any female characters at all makes me think I'm possibly giving Brunner too much benefit of the doubt with that reading.

Are the other future problems novels worth reading? I think that a lot of what worried Brunner in SoZ is reflected in the real world, even if the eugenics thing was over the top. So that's pretty good futurism. Anything set in 2010 is going to be laughable, but this is less so than most!

I've read The shockwave rider, and think highly of it. My uncertainty wasn't about whether Brunner predicted the internet, but whether he was actually the first to do so.

[rysmiel]

That's an interesting take on what he might have been trying to do with the gender ideation; I must see whether that feels plausible when I reread.

The other future novels:I've not actually read The Jagged Orbit; The Sheep Look Up, which is the pollution one, is good but very depressing; and... looking at the entry for Brunner in Wikipedia I can't for the life of me recall which of the rather a lot of other titles he wrote was the fourth he counted as major. (papersky knew him so I am going from things she has reported him as saying himself; he would appear to have decided in the early seventies that he had said what serious stuff he had to say and that he was going to spend the rest of his career writing light entertainment.)

addendum

[rysmiel]

Chatting to papersky about this last night; it was The Shockwave Rider that was the fourth of those major works.

[liv]

That's an interesting tidbit about Brunner, thank you!

(papersky isn't Jo here. It's probably way too much effort to retrain yourself to type <user name="papersky" site="livejournal.com">, isn't it? But if you did, it would give you papersky which actually links to her journal.)

[llennhoff]

I think A logic named Joe (Murry Leinster, 1948)is generally considered to be the first prediction of the internet.

[ajollypyruvate]

Ai-ya! Bridge of Birds, before I forget again:
You had mentioned in your review (ever so long ago!) that the rather "tidy" conclusion seemed very Christian. It's actually very Chinese. The villain is punished, the lovers are united, either in this world or the next, and the dead are mollified. Justice Is Served is a key theme in a lot of Chinese folklore, myth, and literature and is why their legal system did work quite a lot of the time. (The Judge Dee stories by Dr. Robert van Gulik are another good source for English-adaptations of this theme.)

Mr. Hughart is familiar with Chinese literature, mythology, and history, and did a superb adaptation of several myths into one story. His next two books didn't resonate so well with me because they felt more laboured; more as if he was trying to hard to get too many elements he prized into the tale.

There, I feel better now for finally remembering. I can sleep well this night.

[liv]

That is absolutely fascinating, thank you for offering it even long after I reviewed original book. I think it makes sense that almost any culture would have a sense of justice, but it feels Christian to have things postponed until after death. (A lot of people have told me not to bother with the sequels, mind you.)

[ajollypyruvate]

The more I learn about Chinese history and folklore, the more impressed I am with how well written Bridge of Birds really is! I do like the sequels because the basic plots are interesting and intriguing but not nearly so well. If you can find them in a library, then check 'em out.

It's just that I felt he'd overwhelmed his nice story with too much detail from everything he'd ever leaned about Chinese myth, history, and folklore. For example, there is a sequence in The Story of The Stone with a lot of detail about association of the Chinese elements (there are five) and their colours, directions, seasons, animal/guardians, etc. It's interesting to me but it obscures the story instead of supporting it. If it were just the once, it wouldn't really detract too much but both sequels have multiple occurrences of this and the stories suffer because of it. For me, at any rate.

As I said, Mr. Hughart wrote from extensive knowledge and did a superb job of translating that to a great fantasy concept but seemed to feel he had to get as much of that learning into those stories as possible instead of letting it float down gracefully, as he seemed to do with Bridge of Birds.

[compilerbitch]

I'm fond of Against a Dark Background, Iain M. Banks. I'm a bit of a sucker for stories based on thousands of years of industrial history, with a few technological falls thrown in. I mention it partly because it mirrors something of the feel of Shockwave Rider, the idea of being a fugitive (mostly) due to no fault of oneself in a highly technology driven culture, where hiding is difficult at best.

[liv]

That's a really interesting comparison, thank you! I should probably read Against a dark background, as I loved The player of games and was impressed with Use of weapons too, even if the latter was a bit much for me in terms of violence as well as confusing structure.

[compilerbitch]

Moving off in the twilight ages of civilisation direction, I'm currently reading M. John Harrison's Viriconium. I'm not far into it yet, but it's looking promising. I like his writing generally, so I'm expecting it to be reasonably good (I loved Light). He does dark pretty well.

[hairyears]

Yes, I'm quite fond of Stand On Zanzibar; it's the future portrayed as the present through a distorting lens, and there's a lot about his vision of the urban pressure-cooker life in 2010 that has *almost* come true.

We're not quite there with water restrictions (give it time, and not very much time, for the conurbations of California and the Mid-West) but the space constraints and cost of urban living feel like something that is rapidly becoming true...

So, too, is his vision of an Orwellian-With-Incompetence unending war that never, ever wins a recognizable victory or secures any measurable gain... But keeps on killing those who lack the political influence to evade military service.

Sigh. It's a convincing dytopia.