Stand on Zanzibar in Sci-fi and Heroic Fantasy

Feb 24, 2012 Fungus Gnat rated it really liked it

Brunner’s story revolves primarily around two men, one white, one black (importantly), sharing a New York apartment. The first, Donald, is a “synthesist” who looks for patterns in open-source info for a spy agency. The second, Norman, is a recruiting exec for a large company. Their lives are intertwined through the first half of the book; then they drift apart, as Donald is drafted to conduct an undercover operation in a Pacific island nation and Norman takes charge of an industrial development Brunner’s story revolves primarily around two men, one white, one black (importantly), sharing a New York apartment. The first, Donald, is a “synthesist” who looks for patterns in open-source info for a spy agency. The second, Norman, is a recruiting exec for a large company. Their lives are intertwined through the first half of the book; then they drift apart, as Donald is drafted to conduct an undercover operation in a Pacific island nation and Norman takes charge of an industrial development scheme in Africa. Meanwhile, Brunner touches on the experiences of some two dozen other characters only loosely connected, if at all, with Donald, Norman, or one another.

The date of the action is the present—that is, our present: 2010. This look forward from a day some of us (ahem) well remember is fascinating, particularly since Brunner so thoroughly imagines his future. The driving social problem is overpopulation, and, as with most of the rest of his projections, Brunner gets it partly right and partly wrong. He’s got the number—7 billion (elsewhere in the novel, 10 billion)—but in actuality the world has managed to absorb the extra people more gracefully than Brunner imagined it would. In his world, the overriding policy in developed countries to deal with overpopulation is a Nazi-like insistence on one or two children per couple—and none if genetic profiling suggests a problem. Perhaps partly because of the tension in this society, it harbors a casual racism that seems kind of shocking in the real 21st century. But Brunner has uncanny foresight into other trends, e.g., bioengineering, the ascendance of China, majority rule in South Africa (though not by violent revolution, as he foresees), and the failure of the rest of Africa to get any real traction on the road to modern development. Like most prognosticators of that age, he didn’t foresee that the technology of transportation would essentially freeze at then-current levels.

This game—awarding or subtracting points for right or wrong predictions—is fun and obviously I play it myself, but it kind of misses the point, which is more like, Where should the world have looked like it was going in 1968? Like any other genre, science-fiction is informed by its present, and claims that historical science-fiction is “dated” seem to ignore that or to betray a lack of interest in the past. (The book’s slang—“codders” and “shiggies” and so on—has also come in for criticism, but, curious though some of it may be, I wasn’t really bothered by the possibility that Brunner imagined the future as having its own argot.)

Brunner’s story and his imagined world are conveyed in an unusual format (reportedly borrowed from Dos Passos): chapters of modest length alternating between his two protagonists, and, interspersed among them, short chapters devoted to his other characters or to various context-setting elements: news items, advertisements, poems, excerpts from sociological works, etc. The tone throughout is brassy, ironic, and, ultimately, somewhat bitter. Brunner is said to have been angry and pessimistic about the direction of the world, and the book includes a Heinleinesque “let me explain this for you” authorial stand-in, in this case an anti-hero psychologist by the name of Chad Mulligan, a (needless to say) colorful character who first appears only by way of quotes from his work but who is soon drafted into the dramatis personae. (This occurs, incidentally, at the same juncture as a big Manhattan party thrown by a trend-setting fashion designer and featuring a rather vicious little game—an event whose portrayal by Brunner builds interest and tension over the course of more than 30 pages, a tour de force in spite of an interpolated discourse by said Mulligan.)

So, how does this come off on the whole? I’d say well—surprisingly well, considering the book’s length and great ambition. I differ, though, from some other readers who found the greatest pay-off in the working out of the plot in the book’s second half. I liked the first half better—the set-up where Brunner’s vision, voice, and approach seem freshest and where the quality of his prose stands out more from that of other SF writers. To me, the major story lines were sufficiently interesting to hold my attention but lacked something by way of passion and intensity. It did not help that Donald in particular comes off as almost too sour to care about (though for much of the book’s length he has good reason to be so). Overall, though, I’d rate this among the better SF novels of the sixties, among which I would include Dune, Way Station, Babel-17, and Flowers for Algernon.
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