It’s a very severe world for women, Stand on Zanzibar—even the richest and most powerful of women can die instantly, simply from having her mind blown. If the women have a saving grace, it’s that they’re less inured to awful crime than the men.
Take “Jeff Young,” for instance. Jeff is a silent and friendless San Francisco anarchist who builds and sells lethal sabotage equipment. “His preference was for sabotage that did no more than stir people up, like ants whose nest has been kicked—in essence, a sort of joke.”
Entirely free of conscience yet very technically capable, Jeff is a kind of Kerouac figure for his world: Jeff’s a cool blue-collar guy, very of-the-moment, full of beatitude. The book doesn’t scold Jeff, or single him out for the caustic attacks doled out to the military, the media, and organized religion. Jeff is allowed to be the corkscrew pyromaniac that his world has made of him, and it’s precisely this kind of inside-out moral relativism that gives the book such dizzying, lasting power.
The novel would have these sinister virtues even if it lacked any prescience. But Stand on Zanzibar, in fact, is almost contemptuously prescient—because it’s written by a gifted visionary who has stopped amusing us, and is trying to level with us, and with himself. He sees the worst the future has to offer us: helplessly, dreadfully, and ecstatically.
We can divide Brunner’s major acts of prophecy into three classes: the parts that were simply mistaken, the parts that were more or less plausible, and the astonishing things.
The many parts that are “wrong” are often successfully disguised by the parts of all genre novels that are wrong. There are, for instance, no invented countries in our world called “Yatakang” or “Beninia.” Real spies never act like the fictional spy in this book.
Real corporate executives never act like the book’s executives. They are protagonists maneuvered into punch-’em-up tight spots, action-figure style. Stand on Zanzibar is all about the magnificent set designs and the eerie special effects. The unlikeliness of the drama passes by us like a fever dream.
The invented 2010 Brunner world has supersonic transports and pistols that shoot lightning bolts. It has a Moonbase and a giant Artificial Intelligence. The wealthiest women are prosthetic cyborgs. There are deep-sea mining camps. The population is haunted by cruel eugenics police. Brunner thought these ideas through with appalling detail, but they didn’t happen.
Then come the various predictions of the second class.
These things were profoundly shocking and implausible when Brunner wrote the novel, yet only too likely, much later. In a world of seven billion people (which indeed it has), the massive megacities of Delhi and Calcutta make New York look small (which indeed they do).
American black people have real careers with positions of authority. Global corporations are deeply involved in Third World tech development. Easy international travel has produced classes of deracinated migrants. There is tolerance of homosexuality and interracial romance. Tobacco is banned while society seethes with narcotics. Corporate espionage is best carried out through computers. Television news networks are global. And so on. And so on even more, because there are torrents of it.
Then the third class: the truly scary insights. Like this stunning eyewitness description of contemporary Detroit: “I was in Detroit last week and that’s the most eerie place I ever did set foot. Like a ghost town. All those abandoned factories for cars. And crawling with squatters, of course. Matter of fact I went to a block party in one of them. You should hear a zock group playing full blast under a steel roof five hundred feet long! Didn’t need lifting—just stand and let the noise wipe you out.”
To anticipate the industrial decline of Detroit was one thing, but to forecast Detroit Techno squatters performing rave parties in the factories? That’s as eerily accurate as Brunner’s offhand description of a hip New York street girclass="underline" purple hair and portable earphones.
People wear photo-resistant sunglasses. Computers have laser printers—“domestic computers” are described, when the real world’s personal Apple-1 was still eight years in the author’s future.
Some bits are just eerie: the book’s major political figure is an African named “President Obomi.” What are the odds there? How did he do that?
Brunner even briskly refutes some futurist cliches: “He had never expected to see, in his brave new century, naked children playing in mud with squealing piglets; here they were.” Yes, Mr. Brunner, sir; here indeed they are. Believe it or not.
This book was quite a success, as science fiction novels go. It was John Brunner’s best novel, and the grandest one in a notable year with many ambitious works. This book brought Brunner admiration and attention—before and afterward. It was his high-water mark as an artist.
For all its misanthropic bitterness—“we’re a disgusting species with horrible manners and not fit to survive”—Brunner can’t disguise the pleasure he is taking in composition. He knows he is in top form, and it shows. After years of obedience to the sci-fi genre’s market discipline, he’s thrilled to distort his manuscript in the same brusque, freaky way that science fiction distorts everything else that it touches.
The book bristles with weird typographical innovations, which Brunner hammered out on carbon-paper with his trusty Smith-Corona. (This beloved machine becomes a character in the novel, on its last page.) He even indulges his fondness for nutty limericks and doggerel poetry. Brunner quite enjoyed writing verse—in his alter-ego as a left-wing peace campaigner, he once wrote the marching anthem for the Committee for Nuclear Disarmament.
The novel also features some erudite dirty jokes, which Brunner clearly enjoyed sneaking past his blinkered publishers.
The book found particular success among later science fiction novelists. Ever keen to sniff out any trace of British counterculture, American and Canadian cyberpunks were all over this text. They could never mimic its unique form, but they appropriated almost all its constituent elements. The squalid and violent urban streetscapes, the extensive interest in sabotage methods and exotic weaponry, the sneering “yonderboy” youth gangs, the genetic engineering, the neural reprogramming …
That keen attention to the details of odd clothing and odder furniture, the semi-random globetrotting, the ear-grating futurist argot … those were among the many legacies of a thorny, challenging work that swiftly became a genre legend as the sci-fi novelist’s sci-fi novel.
Finally, though, the aspect that makes this book last is the author’s own bravery. It is Brunner’s quixotic determination that most impresses us, as he tackles an entire seething planet and every kitchen sink in it, with nothing more than a sci-fi writer’s jackdaw erudition.
Brunner is afraid of that world of his own invention. Because he is rational and quite well informed, so he has some good reasons for fear. He’s living in the lurid heat of the nuclear arms race—human extinction is a button-push away. The turbulent furies of 1967 and 1968 are howling on his television: the race riots, the arson, the draft resistance, the political assassinations. He’s too old and wise to join the street rebels, but not so old that he doesn’t feel the heat there.
He can’t conquer the world with his Smith-Corona—but John Brunner is, triumphantly, conquering his own reticence. He is defeating his inner censor. He has become authentic.
His characters speak for him, strangely and guardedly. The world’s wisest man is an alcoholic derelict, a blustering hipster buffoon. The world’s wisest machine has no soul, yet it speaks with the golden voice of a suicidal opera star.