Teaser

The year is 2010. Earth suffers under the weight of a population of billions. There is no hope of a better future, only the suffering of the present. A malaise against which no man can stand . . .

Review

John Brunner made his name writing the pulpiest of pulp science fiction. Even as late as 1965 he was penning stories such as The Altar on Asconel. Then, in 1968, everything changed. Stand on Zanzibar catapulted Brunner to the upper echelons of science fiction, rendering him the first British author to win a Hugo Award, while also netting him a BSFA award on this side of the Atlantic. Later reprinted as a Gollancz Masterwork, Stand on Zanzibar remains Brunner’s most famous work, and arguably his most influential.

I don’t doubt any of this book’s pedigree. It absolutely deserved to win the Hugo and BSFA Awards. However, it’s also a book that I simply did not enjoy.

The difference between Brunner’s earlier works and this one is one of style. Stand on Zanzibar is a novel of the New Wave – that point in the history of science fiction when a group of authors and editors decided to reinvent the wheel, so to speak. The New Wave was characterised by a shift towards more literary writing styles, with experimentation and variation the name of the game. tonally, the New Wave set itself in opposition to the authors of the Golden Age, often openly denigrating them. Editors such as Michael Moorcock and Harlan Ellison took the reigns from old hands like John Campbell and steered the genre in a new direction. The New Wave largely petered out by the nineteen-eighties, but it fundamentally changed the genre. Not, in my opinion, necessarily for the better.

Stand on Zanzibar exemplifies the experimentality at the heart of the New Wave. There is a story here, but it’s drowned by a sea of white noise. The book is filled with adverts, scripts, news broadcasts and quotations from fictional manuscripts. There are diversions and deviations that could perhaps serve to detail the world, but ultimately just detract from the narrative. Don’t worry, there is a table of contents for the hundred chapters, but it is unfortunately not presented in a linear fashion, instead collecting chapters by theme. It’s shockingly messy, and that’s before we get to the prose. At times, the language is barely even English. I’m not averse to a little fictional swearing here and there, but Brunner overdoes the ‘sheeting hole’ schtick several chapters in. There is so much reinvention of things that simply did not need to be reinvented. It wasn’t broke, but Brunner decided to fix it anyway.

The interesting part of the novel is not in the text itself, but to be found in hindsight. The book is over half a century old at this point, and much of what Brunner wrote has come to pass. The blooming population, which can no longer be contained by even an island the size of Zanzibar. The rise of mass media, and the dubious nature of the information it can bring. The changing geopolitical makeup of the world. Not all of these predictions came true, of course, and not all on Brunner’s schedule, but enough of the modern world is recognisable in these pages to give even an unconvinced reader moment to pause.

Strip away the foresight and the unneeded innovation of the New Wave, however, and you have a book that is textbook dystopia. Everything is bad. Everyone is awful. Nothing has meaning. Personally, that’s not what I look for in science fiction. Or, it must be said, in anything.

Book Stats

• A Standalone Novel
• A Gollancz SF Masterwork
• First Published in 1968
• 650 Pages