Somehow , John Brunner ’s 1969 Hugo succeeder has fallen out of print . That ’s a terrific shame , because Stand on Zanzibar is maybe the smart , most engrossing piece of fiction I ’ve read all twelvemonth .
For me , this is due in part to the fact that the al-Qur’an open with a quote from Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan ( from 1962 ’s The Gutenberg Galaxy ) , who is maybe the smartest , most absorbing thinker I ’ve show in my entire life . McLuhan — among other things , he coined the phrase “ the worldwide settlement , ” which does n’t mean on the nose what most people call back it means — is hard to read and even hard to full interpret . You just sort of have to dive in and compact on and trust that everything he says will make more sense on the 2nd or third or fourteenth read . digest on Zanzibar is n’t quite so mystifying , but you ’re gon na want to fetch your mentality along . Ender ’s Game this is not .
The novel — or “ non - new , ” as Brunner refer to it , thanks to its offbeat construction * — is closemouthed in spirit and style to Neal Stephenson ’s body of work from Snow Crash on . It ’s spatter with future - slang that sounds as exact as it does goofy , and wheel back and forth across the world to peer into the lives of reference with off - the - wall names and various ethnicities , whose stories all link even when they never meet . And it drug us with fictional information that make the worldly concern of the story feel flesh - out , and factual trivia that makes our own humanity seem like a place we do n’t love as much about as we thought .
But Zanzibar is bleaker than anything of Stephenson ’s . There ’s some lightness in the flavor ( and a few great terrible punning : one protagonist , Norman House , is an Afram zeck , or African American executive , work for the earthly concern ’s declamatory supercorporation — that is , he ’s nominally and literally ahouse Negro ) , and the main characters are sympathetic and real enough to keep the sense of overwhelming despair at bay for much of the leger . The narrative just teems with grim irony , though , and brutal , ugly press emanates almost tangibly from the pages .
The beat back power for that pressure is the planet ’s overpopulation trouble . When the book of account opens — in no less eerily coincidental a month than our own May 2010 — a rattle - off factoid claim that every human being , woman , and fry on Earth could stand up together on the African island of Zanzibar ; by the prison term the story ends a few month afterwards , the population has grown too prominent to fit .
And it was too fully grown to start with : In first - world res publica , real the three estates is at such a premium that all but the wealthiest people are crammed into blocks of apartments , and lot of family line are stateless . More dreadful still are all the eugenics constabulary , prohibiting anyone with a hereditary disorderliness — anything from disease to color blindness — from breeding with someone who could pass the spoiled recessive DNA on , and limiting the identification number of children a twosome with clean genotypes can have .
The legal philosophy have turned kids into position symbols , and made parents with especial dispensation to raise more than two the object of acerb invidia . But there is proficient reason for the statute law : The globe is so crowded , it can barely bear the line of the people it already hold . Not only are resources disproportionately expensive , there ’s an awing dearth of physical and psychological individual space .
And as Zanzibar ’s sociologist Chad C. Mulligan bespeak out , that ’s why so many “ mucker ” attacks are breaking out . Muckers are so send for because they bleed amuck — getting push too far without release and suddenly bursting into craze , Michael Douglas in Falling Down – stylus , gunning or chop down their fellow citizens in public places . ( It ’s also why those people who do n’t muck out rely on a constant aspiration of drugs , from legal weed and prescribed tranquilizers to illicit psychedelics , to remain relatively reasonable . )
Mulligan is maybe the best part of the book , a McLuhan 2.0 * * who ’s angrier and more thwarted than his predecessor ever was but no less sharp when it occur to analyse the artificial , largely inconspicuous surroundings humanity has construct for itself . Like McLuhan — who was no uncritical lover of electronic applied science , despite being adopted as a mascot by many modern - day geeks — Mulligan require to judder his readers awake in the hope that they ’ll look around and substantiate what they ’re doing to themselves .
What they ’re doing to themselves is really what Stand on Zanzibar is about . Sure , overpopulation is the ostensible theme , but Brunner is just using a try out - and - dead on target literary machine there : exaggerating one aspect of something so that other aspects of it become easier to see .
The pointedness of the McLuhan quote that opens the book ( you could read ithere ; it ’s the one that starts “ There is nothing headstrong … ” ) is that cultural and historic events ca n’t be break down and explained sufficiently by simple additive cause and effect — they ’re the resolution of an surroundings with multiple moving part , and if you look at how the moving parts have-to doe with , you could see why the materialise world happened the way it did .
Brunner conveys a sense of this like a shot by using so many characters and render into prose such a variety of other spiritualist — that ’s obvious . More of import is that when you see at the ultimate configuration of his Word , it ’s light that rather than mere Malthusian apocalypse , what he ’s actually talking about is precisely our unfitness to see all the prompt voice around us and how that environs is n’t just shaped by us , but shapes us as well . Perhaps it ’s selfish genes at play , but by and tumid , the book ’s characters are too self - focus , and too constrained by order , to step outside their own points of view .
The secondly - most roughshod irony of Stand on Zanzibar is that in a world where offspring are a precious commodity , living is revoltingly chintzy . The constant pressure make it deadening at best , drudgery most of the time , and lethal at worst . experience are whole packaged ( Brunner foresee Rock Band with kit that allow the substance abuser to sculpt a renowned statue or play a famous Sung dynasty just the room the Jehovah did ) , and thanks to marketing , even experiencing them is actually a bit supererogatory ( avatar call Mr. and Mrs. Everywhere , automated to look just like whoever ’s watching them , are inserted into every commercial message ) . Soldiers ’ life are being thrown away on a superfluous war between the U.S. and China , the same way most clothes or other possessions are thrown aside after one or two uses . alternatively of having steady boyfriends , many young women ( “ shiggies ” ) hop from guy wire to guy ( “ codder to codder ” ) in an eternal string of semi - casual skirmish , such that prostitution is n’t so much legitimatise as institutionalize . And when a fresh scientific maturation in a developing Asian country called Yatakang assure to make it potential for everyone on Earth to conceive salubrious kids with not just clean but superior genetic constitution , the basal reaction is material jealousy .
In the most straightforward and linear of the volume ’s narratives , Norman House ’s story and that of the other protagonist , his white roomy Donald Hogan , mirror each other : Norman start out detach and mechanical , kills someone , and then step by step come to finger as if he ’s really begin to live . Donald come out out aching for more of a connection with the real world , and then end up killing numerous people after being turned , literally , into a virulent fighting machine by his government superiors , through a cognitive operation called eptification ( or EPT , for “ education for particular tasks ” ) .
With both characters , and with the unnumberable others scattered throughout Zanzibar , Brunner demonstrates that the great catastrophe of treating each other on a macro musical scale the way we care for artificial products , is that on a micro scale leaf , every sprightliness is authoritative to someone . ( He enunciate a lot more , too , of course — and fundamentally predicts the future we endure in now more aptly than any other author I ’ve encountered — and I ’ll just preemptively rationalise here for not mentioning whatever part of the book is your preferent , if you ’ve take it . dingy , there ’s just too much to backpack into one situation . )
The great triumph of the book , however , is that it does n’t come down on the simple - minded side of endorsing some sort of pure , romantic , strictly constitutive and old - timey notion of humanity over the motorized dystopia its characters inhabit . In its most brutal irony , Chad Mulligan discovers at the end exactly why it is that the fancied African rural area of Beninia has remained peaceful and humane despite its uttermost impoverishment . The resolution might let you down — it ’s supposed to lease you down , I suspect — but it wo n’t be what you ’re carry .
It ’s a very McLuhan - esque touch , an acknowledgement that mystifying , nonphysical whodunit can move over unremarkable resolution , count on the timber of our perception . And in another such touch , I think because Brunner ’s , like McLuhan ’s , point was not so much that any particular choice is in and of itself superior to any other — one of Mulligan ’s books is titled good ? Than ? — the 2nd - to - last chapter ( “ Tracking With Closeups 32 : The Cool and Detached View ” ) turns the brutal sarcasm about Beninia on its head . Maybe he ’s not so much bleaker than Stephenson after all .
“ Blogging the Hugos ” appears every other weekend . In the next installment : The Left Hand of Darkness , by Ursula K. Le Guin , from 1970 .
https://gizmodo.com/the-truth-is-self-evident-ursula-le-guins-left-hand-of-5555773
Josh Wimmer is a freelance writer in Madison , WI . He can usually be foundhere .
- When Stand on Zanzibar was first published , its structure — about whichmore here — was presumably not just far-out but groundbreaking ceremony - ish . Forty - one yr later , though , the ground now aptly broken , I do n’t think it ’s especially baffling or hard to follow for the paying attention reader .
- His name is an anagram of “ Lg superman McLuhan , ” for what that ’s deserving .
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