Stand on Zanzibar Author: Visit Amazon's John Brunner Page | Language: English | ISBN:
0765326787 | Format: EPUB
Stand on Zanzibar Description
Review
"A wake-up call to a world slumbering in the opium dream of consumerisum; in the hazy certainty that we humans were in charge of nature. Science fiction is not about predicting the future, it's about elucidating the present and the past. Brunner's 1968 nightmare is crystallizing around us, in ways he could not have foreseen then. If the right people had read this book, and acted in accordance with its precepts and spirit, our world would not be in such precarious shape today. Maybe it's time for a new generation to read it."--Joe Haldeman
"A quite marvelous projection in which John Brunner landscapes a future that seems the natural foster child of the present."
--Kirkus Reviews
From the Inside Flap
A Hugo-award-winning novel of over-population, poitical struggles, and warped ethics. "A quite marvelous projection in which John Brunner landscapes a future that seems the natural foster child of the present...Everything compounds into a fractured tomorrow--from the population explosion to Marshall McLuhan to the Territorial Imperative to the underground press..."--Kirkus Reviews
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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- Paperback: 576 pages
- Publisher: Orb Books; First Edition edition (August 16, 2011)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0765326787
- ISBN-13: 978-0765326782
- Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.2 x 1.1 inches
- Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
British writer John Brunner's novel, first published in 1968 (it won both the Hugo and British Science Fiction awards, and four years later, the French Prix Apollo), is certainly one of the most literary, complex, challenging, even difficult works of science fiction written during the twentieth century. Yet, in spite of the hurdles it may present some readers, the book manages also to be fast-paced and hysterically funny.
One of the triumphs of Brunner's book is that it can be read on any number of levels, which is probably why it seems to resonate with readers of extraordinarily divergent tastes. Having read it twice (once as a bookwormish Valley brat and now twenty-odd years later as a still-bookwormish publishing professional), I am not surprised that this book might be entirely different beasts to different readers; the enthralling, bewildering thriller I remembered from my adolescence has somehow transformed itself into a darkly sardonic political and social commentary--and I like both versions just fine.
The novel is not, at first, an easy read. Its "unique" jump-cut/collage structure, its pseudo-hip prose style, its fabricated lingo--all are modeled rather precisely on John Dos Passos's classic American classic trilogy, "U.S.A." Like Dos Passos, Brunner interlaces chapters in several strands. The bulk of the storyline appears in the "Continuity" chapters, which detail the misadventures of secret agent Donald Hogan and corporate executive Norman House, and the "Tracking with Closeups" chapters, which describe two dozen characters who are peripheral to the action. The other two strands--"Context" and "The Happening World"--provide background material (film descriptions, encyclopedia entries, song lyrics, document excerpts, advertising jingles, news stories, etc.
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