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Stand on Zanzibar by John Brunner
1969 Hugo
Award Winner
Got it
from: Our Library
507 Pages
(HIPCRIME You
committed one when you opened this book.
Keep it up. It’s our only hope.
(The Hipcrime Vocab by Chad C. Mulligan)
Page
8
No
introduction. No preamble. You open your eyes and the world is teetering
on the brink of population induced collapse.
The response: mass hysteria, mass drug use, paranoia, eugenics. Cats and dogs are living together. Non-breeding sexuality has women living as
second-class citizens. Abstracted pop
culture and everything! creates superhuman, super-crazy “muckers”. There are too many people in the world and it
seems we are powerless to do anything about it.
I didn’t get the sense that things had eroded into Malthusian collapse
yet, but stang were they right on the
edge.
Barcode FAIL. |
A damn frightening thing
A goodly
portion of this book seems to be quite distinctly not SF. As it is hailed, it feels much more like a
sociological thriller, giving special attention to scientific or astro-achievements,
but to the supreme difficulty of making your way in not only the modern world,
but an overpopulated one. So much of the
book is devoted to worldbuilding and very little of that has anything to do
with science. Instead they were
(usually) short personal experiences or excerpts from some other text or pop
culture phenomena. Sure there are some
SF elements that are quite important, especially later in the book, but they
are nothing compared to those worldbuilding elements.
But at the
same time, it does have that SF outlook that I have come to recognize in the
Hugo winners of the 50’s and 60’s.
Namely, that within the realm of a wildly expanding field of science,
anything is possible and given human nature, given our history, that can be
exhilarating or it can be a damn frightening thing.
I wouldn’t
dispute that this is a work of science fiction.
Population dynamics, ecology, economics, psychology, etc., it’s all
there. Especially in the case of the
most modern of the sciences, SOZ
certainly relies on a scientific understanding of the world, but how Brunner experiences
that and makes sense of our place in the world seemed to me something else
entirely. I’m also reticent to say it is
the great sociological text that the back cover copy called it. To me it was something more of a mix of
sociology, phenomenology and politics.
Phenomenosociolitics. Coined it.
In all
seriousness, SOZ is more akin to novelized science if that were a thing. Science has been warning of collapse and
population bombs for many years and Brunner was no doubt aware and it shows. I don’t get the sense that Brunner was
dreaming of what could happen. He was
just painting the picture everyone had been talking about.
Reading
SOZ is disorienting to say the least. The extensive worldbuilding not only does the
job of places you within a context, but it also forces you to experience that
context of a world gone nearly mad. The
result is to pass along, so completely that feeling of alienation that many of
the characters struggle with. The result
is unique and I’m glad to have read it, but it also makes it quite difficult to
trudge through sometimes. It felt like
trying to watch a movie with a crowd of people shouting at you – which pretty
much reflects how the characters were living.
The cover
calls SOZ a “novel of the future”, but it is most unsettling because it is not
actually a novel of the future. It
exaggerates current (1960’s) trends and sometimes doesn’t even exaggerate them
but placed in the context of an overpopulated earth (a very real possibility)
they seem stupefying and horrific. How
many people have not complained about the social bankruptcy of the times? Cynicism is always vogue. Every generation seems to see the next
generation as hopelessly lost to the juggernaut that is “progress”. This is why, even though there are elements
that are quite dated, the fear, the cynicism, the apathy comes through loud and
clear and still cuts to the bone.
Recommendation
I’m pretty
ambivalent about this book as a literary work.
I thought the story suffered for the commitment to worldbuilding in that
sometimes entire chapters were devoted to just experience the scatterbrained,
over-stimulated, over-populated view of the world. And then some of those chapters might only be
a paragraph long and the characters or sub-plots are so minor that it’s hard to
really care about what’s happening. I do
give Brunner credit for the experience he created though. I felt his world sufficiently built. I didn’t feel like I had read about an
overpopulated earth and could imagine what Brunner imagined that place to be. I felt I had literally experienced the horror
for myself. I was right there with him
so much that I feel like I have this lingering sense of dread and pessimism
that I can’t fully blame on just being over-tired. Check out some of my posts from this week to
get a sense of how this book can read at times and just be aware of what you
are about to step in before it’s already all over your shoe.
HEP SCORE
Universe 3/5
Social/Political
Climate 5/5
Dialogue 3/5
Scientific
Wonders 3/5
Characters
2/5
Overall
16/25
The die being cast…
This
week’s book is Gateway by Frederik Pohl. Pohl’s name has been coming up ever since I
started reading SF a few years back. For
whatever reason, I’ve never gotten around to him though, so I am really excited
to cross another name off my list.
Next
week’s book is Dreamsnake by Vonda N.
McIntyre. My first female author!
I like what you said about the book creating an experience. That's pretty much how I felt about it as well. For me, the hardest trudge was in the first 100 or so pages, where I hadn't quite gotten into the mindset of the world yet, and I was left thinking "Is there even a plot? Why am I supposed to care about these people?" I ended up really enjoying the book, though, mostly because of how well Brunner created his world.
ReplyDeleteThat is pretty much how I experienced it too. Those first 100 pages were a little rough!
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