ego.istic.org

It is 1968. Society, as represented by capitalist America, is beset by problems. Soviet Russia is about to be supplanted in its rôle as The Enemy by Red China. The war against Communism is being fought on three fronts: military, propaganda, and scientific. Ultra-commercialism is starting to take hold, the first megacorporations are appearing, and some people are starting to notice that maybe capitalism has a downside. Europe is hung all over with the stench of post-colonial decay. The population explosion has meant that people are starting to get all hung up over birth control; also, that vast tracts of land are being turned into high-density housing. America is starting to see the price it is paying for overseas military intervention: specifically, the draft. Africa, like Europe, is feeling the pain of the colonial legacy. Personal privacy has taken one on the chin from McCarthyism, and from the cramped conditions of the cities. Even so, people are feeling newly confident to bring their personal affairs into the public arena, with strange new forms of marital arrangement being condoned. Women's skirts are getting ever shorter. Some men think the skirts look better on them than on the women, and who can blame them, for men's dress is getting even sillier. Even after emancipation and despite "affirmative action" laws, the black population of America is discriminated against wholesale. The long-prevalent drug culture has enjoyed a new lease of life from the invention of LSD. Television news is wiping out newspapers and replacing them with hyperactive sound-bite channels. And then, every so often, some random loses it completely and goes postal in a crowded area.

So, will mankind find it's way out of the darkness? Do we have a happy future, where man can live in peace with his fellows? In 'Stand on Zanzibar', John Brunner has some bad news for you. It is 2010, and it is all going horribly wrong.

You may think that this is a lot of issues to cover in one book, and you may be right. Brunner offers an action-packed 650 pages, leaping between topics, between narrative threads, and between prose styles like a demented James Joyce. This is sf as a mirror for society at its most sweeping, in form as well as in content. Brunner's 2010 is a world in which the problems of the sixties are extrapolated forwards. Given how much of society falls under his lens, he had to hit the mark somewhere, but even allowing for the old principle, familiar to astrologers, that you only take note of correct predictions and ignore the incorrect ones, it is quite eerie how closely some of his extrapolations match present-day reality. The very opening is a transcript of a TV news programme whose slick presentation, interleaved adverts, and rapid jumps between news items would be a convincing parody if written today.

The book isn't just a collection of predictions. Brunner has a lot to say, mostly about sociology and psychology, two areas of study that were gathering public awareness at that time. Like Orwell before him, and Shea and Wilson after, Brunner performs ventriloquism on a fictional author to make the commentary he doesn't want to. His comments on society range from Bierceian faux-definitions to entire chapters where he accuses his readers of belonging to the stupidest species to walk the Earth. Even the events of the plot are dovetailed into the exploration of man's all-too-humanity to man.

Brunner's chief preoccupation, like many other sf writers', is with creating a rational explanation for human suffering. Why do we feel the need to inflict suffering on others? How can we let it go on when we know it is happening? Why do we argue and fight wars and break each other's hearts? Many of us are content to just accept that as "the human condition", but the idea of a specific, observable cause is very tempting. If we knew the cause of human suffering, we could work towards a cure: a cure for everything. Religious leaders and philosophers have been quarrelling over how to go about this for millennia, and even Freud's analysis of superego and id has joined the game. It seems fitting that sf too should cover this world-spanning topic, and perhaps offer some new hypotheses.

Although his particular conclusion is something of a let-down, the journey is what matters. Much of what Brunner says, he says in passing, and that is what makes him such a convincing author. After hearing a news announcer mention off-hand near the beginning that "you are my environment and I am yours," it is clear that you are in for some interesting thoughts on interpersonal communication. When he notes that the supercomputer Shalmaneser's technicians get edgy when it talks to humans directly, because it "meant funnelling everything through subsidiary installations which worked at less than a thousandth of the speed," it is plausible that this is a man who will go on to invent the term worm for a malicious computer program that spreads via the Internet. (It also reminds the reader that the time-sharing operating system is still a novel concept in 1968.)

Brunner's insight is matched by a notable stylistic creativity. He prefaces his work with a block quotation from McLuhan's 'The Gutenberg Galaxy', in which McLuhan promotes the presentation of ideas as a "mosaic" of data points rather than as a coherent narrative. Brunner bases the large-scale form of the book on this idea: there are four almost independent sequences of chapters interleaved into one book but not one story. Some chapters are TV transcripts, some are straight narrative, some follow one particular character's train of thought, some are excerpts from fictional books, scientific papers, instructions to saboteurs, some are folk rhyme, and so on. I would be tempted to call it post-modern were it not so reminiscent of 'Moby Dick'.

When I started reading the book, I was quite disconcerted. Brunner introduces a host of characters and concepts all at once, and it feels quite overwhelming. But he manages to keep the minor characters minor and distinctive, and the concepts he introduces form the basis of several recurring motifs, which he returns to throughout the book. About four-fifths of the way through, he drops all his running jokes in order to concentrate on the plot, and he wraps the whole thing up abruptly in the last twenty-odd pages.

In the small, too, Brunner eschews standard descriptive English, inserting his own neologisms throughout. His punning use of language is playful throughout, and he convincingly apes the styles of many of the professional torturers of English: I can seriously imagine an advert telling you to put your waste in a "disposall", or a dress being advertised with the slogan, "Maximal access is no exaggeration when you spell it 'Maxess'." Though he burns a few pages early on to teach the reader this vocabulary of the future by example, it makes for dense prose and heavy going. Even his straight writing is quite hard to read: his comma placement is often distracting and he occasionally gets carried away with clauses. Overall, a more ruthless editor would have spotted infelicities like repeating the expression "pitted and pendulumed," but it's such a pretty reference it's worth repeating.

It is 2007. Almost forty years after 'Stand on Zanzibar' shocked the Hugo judges into declaring it the Best Novel ('2001' won Best Dramatic Presentation the same year), more than ten years after Brunner's death, society is still beset by problems. Some of them are new problems, but some of them are just the same problems made worse. One of this book's running jokes is a character sitting at home in front of TV news. He is stoned, and he knows it. Every few chapters he makes an appearance and marvels at the implausibility of the real world he is seeing, "Christ, what an imagination I've got." Wherever Brunner's spirit or soul is now, if it can see the mortal world and the events thereon, it may well be saying the same thing.