Stand on Zanzibar
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Stand on Zanzibar is a dystopic science fiction novel written by John Brunner and first published in 1968. The book won a Hugo for best SF novel at the 27th World Science Fiction Convention in 1969.
The title
The novel's main driver is overpopulation and its projected consequences. Its title refers to an early twentieth century claim that the world's population could fit onto the Isle of Wight (area 381 km²) 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 km²), while the 7 billion people whom he projected would be alive in 2010 would need to stand on Zanzibar (area 1554 km²). 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) getting its feet wet in the Indian Ocean surrounding the island.
The story
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, extremism. Certain of Brunner's guesses are fairly close, others not, and some ideas clearly show their 1960s mind-set.
A lengthy book, it was innovative within its genre for its combination of longer narrative chapters with short segments giving vignettes of the future, sometimes expressed simply as statistical or other tabular data. Brunner appropriated the basic narrative technique from the John Dos Passos U.S.A. trilogy.
The book starts (at "CONTEXT (0) The Innis mode") with a half-page quote from The Gutenberg Galaxy by Marshall McLuhan and expands, possibly in the Innis mode, with a number of stylistic devices - most obviously the sprawling narrative with choppy, episodic advancement of the characters. Chapters consist of many short paragraphs, often single sentences - offering a snap-shot introduction and advancing of the many plots and sub-plots and quick views of Brunner's world in the form of slogans, snatches of conversation, advertising text, songs, extracts from newspapers and books (notably The Hipcrime Vocab and other works by the fictional sociologist Chad C. Mulligan), and other cultural detritus. Other features are the introduction of 'future' products and words such as "codder" (man), "shiggy" (woman), "whereinole" (where in hell?), "prowlie" (an armored police car) and "mucker" (a person gone amok). Most are simple replacements for existing terms except for "eptification" (education for particular tasks).
The book centres on two New York men, Donald Hogan and Norman Niblock House. 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 covered as a student. Hogan's real work is as an analyst, although he is a commissioned officer and can be called-up for work.
The two main plots concern the mythical African state of Beninia (a name reminiscent of the real-life Benin) making a deal with General Technics in order to take over the management of their country in an attempt to create a utopian state. A second major plot is a genetics break-through in the mythical Australasian nation of Yatakang (which seems to be a thinly disguised Indonesia). The two plots are related, although this is not immediately apparent.
External links
- Tal Cohen (http://www.forum2.org/tal/books/soz.html) Excellent review
- D. Douglas Fratz (http://www.scifi.com/sfw/issue106/classic.html) Excellent story summaryde:Morgenwelt