Stand on Zanzibar

foreword

THE HAPPENING WORLD

BRUCE STERLING

When one writes about an antique science fiction novel, it’s common practice to promptly trot out a list of “what he got right” versus “what he got wrong.” As if prediction were the point of the enterprise—and sure enough, Stand on Zanzibar truly revels in prediction. Few novels have ever had so much of that, layered on so thick.

However, the truly appealing things about this novel are not its predictions. They are certain things John Brunner achieved, which no one has done before or since.

Before he essayed this remarkable book, while in his early thirties, Brunner was a productive and disciplined professional science fiction writer. Brunner had pseudonyms galore, and could hammer out a paperback novel in a matter of weeks. A lifelong Briton, Brunner had also managed the considerable feat of cracking the American sci-fi market.

In his personal life, John Brunner was a rather irascible gentleman with strong political convictions and a genuine loathing for mystics, rascals, and phonies. But these inner demons weren’t often ventilated in his daily work.

However, in the mid-1960s, this canny veteran’s attention was caught by a New Wave arriving in science fiction. A period of great social turbulence had arrived. The genre’s tight conventions were splitting. This radical movement was clearly led by Britain.

Brunner was older and wiser than the hippie sci-fi kids clustered around London’s New Worlds magazine, the tie-dyed global focus of the New Wave. Through no fault of his own, Brunner had arrived at a roaring, out-of-control hashish party at somewhat the wrong time. Brunner was no longer young enough to be authentically spontaneous, naïve, flipped-out, and psychedelic. He had too much seasoned erudition and street smarts. He chose to jam all that into a paisley New Wave package—a package that split at the seams.

It’s impossible to repeat an adventure like that in cold blood. This is why nobody has ever equaled Stand on Zanzibar. It’s a book that should have been exceedingly modish. It missed that target, and it shot a hole in the clock. It became a timeless classic of temporal disorientation.

The book is a unique formal achievement, something like a science fiction cousin of Georges Perec’s haunting Oulipo masterpiece Life: A User’s Manual (La Vie mode d’emploi). It is Brunner’s complex, showy mode of writing-through-constraints that gives one the powerful sensation of being saturated in his invented world—of dissolving in it, of being assaulted by it.

Stand on Zanzibar is often compared to the work of John Dos Passos, due to its variant narrative modes, its multiple point-of-view characters, and its collages of newspaper clippings. But Dos Passos was writing a pragmatic and naturalistic American book. Brunner, who was a European like Perec, is antinaturalistic—he’s aiming for future-shock, for a moral freak-out, for the hallucinatory. It’s a book that is kindly toward Americans and sincerely admires them, yet it comes from the damp and haunted mansion of Orwell and Huxley.

The plot has the basic working armature of a sci-fi adventure. It concerns a young New York man rising through high-tech corporate intrigues, and his mild and scholarly roommate, who is a disguised spy. This scheme assures some publisher-pleasing segments of page-turning “action.” These action sequences are in fact the dullest parts of the book. They’re the easiest to read, but the least engaging.

The truly exciting, the wildly exceptional parts of the book, are the parts which are radically antinovelistic. Those exhaustive lists of apparent trivia, for instance, which presage the arch and surreal approaches of Georges Perec a decade later.

For instance, there’s a megacorporate help-wanted ad, which requests the aid of staff “in the following specialties”: Architecture, Transportation, Civil engineering, City planning, Law, Cybernetics, Plant erection, Water purification, Textiles, Ore refining, Plastics synthesis, Mining and mineralogy, Education, Communications, Mechanical engineering, Medicine (esp. tropical), Economics, Power, light and heat, Human ecology, Public health & sanitation, Agriculture, Production planning, Electronics, Printing & publishing.

Confronted by this burst of scary erudition, the reader feels a subliminal terror that some data-burst from any of these topics may gush onto the page. Because these gushes of exposition do flood in, repeatedly, with powerfully surreal effect. They’re almost always horribly convincing: they suspend readerly disbelief much more effectively than the plot or the characters do. They’re never the smooth verbal artifacts one expects from a proper novel. They’re aggressive debris from a disturbed world.

The book has one of the scariest mise-en-scènes in all of science fiction: a world that is a smothering, riotous tangle of human arms and limbs. Stand on Zanzibar is an information overload on topics that sensible people would never want to learn about. Even the characters fear what the book’s world is direly telling them: as the brightest among them rather pitifully remarks, “Whatever happens in present circumstances there’s going to be trouble.” Their world is a kaleidoscope of whatever. Its darkly troubled whateverness oozes from its walls with lysergic intensity.

The characters are remarkably unpleasant people. They are the native products of a taut and difficult world, and many of them come to bad ends. They are always under stress and are often violent, yet the book’s true emotional storminess is almost all in the exposition.

It’s that exposition, the violent and aggressive act of world-building, that bears the book’s true freight of rage, dread, and cynical bitterness.

The unseen author is making imaginative leaps of a kind he has never attempted before, leaps of a kind he was never allowed to perform. He is daring not just his readers, but even his much-threatened characters, to keep up with the terrific pace of his own invention. None of us do very well.

Our own future-shock forces us to identify with the shocking habits of the characters. All of them bear murder in their hearts. The stronger ones are given to cruel fits of violent riot. The weaker ones have surrendered to narcotic catatonia. The wisest ones are exceedingly wistful and sad; they suffer the homesick emptiness of “extemporates,” of outdated people burdened with the forlorn values of a lost world. They can never fit in. Conformity is no longer even an option.

It’s the women who especially suffer: especially the British women, who might have offered the text some sense of kindliness, warmth, and stability. One is Grace Rowley, a refined twentieth-century survivor (and the reader’s own contemporary). Jane is brusquely thrown from her cherished home by crass officials, who mistake it for an abandoned house. They instantly loot all of Jane’s cherished cultural antiques. A younger and more vital British woman, one of the few sweet-tempered innocents in the book, plummets to her doom in a delirium when she’s harassed by health inspectors.

Entire classes of women live as literal tramps, trading random sex for a roof and a warm place to sleep. The men in this book infallibly see these wretched demimondaines as attractive. Everything in their world tells them to do that. They all buy into that idea.

The erotic center in the book, the aptly named Bronwen Ghose, is a multiracial widow whose husband was murdered in senseless communal violence. The stateless, stricken Bronwen is slowly dying of leukemia. She is also much harassed by fierce immigration officials.

Bronwen should have been the book’s major love interest, for she personifies the world of Stand on Zanzibar as no one else can. She is the only woman in the book who can look her man in the face and tell him that he is rude, that he treats women badly. But Bronwen is luckless even in this brave confrontation, for her boyfriend is a brainwashed assassin. He cannot spare her a second thought.

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 girl: 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.

Every figure who approaches the dark, central truth of this book—that we are doomed, we are hopeless, because we don’t deserve survival—shies away from that revelation. They know about it, yet they dare to hope against it. They always leave the author some plausible deniability for his own creeping despair, but the darkest truth of all is that John Brunner, the wild inventor of this racked dystopia, is a kind-hearted man. He’s a sentimental idealist who loves humanity and wants everybody to thrive. He has to choke that admission out of himself, but he truly loves all of them, with a big, rambling, Dickensian kind of humane pity and affection. He loves the monsters because all human beings are monsters.

This is a great science fiction novel that only a great science fiction writer could create. It’s not a “great novel,” but no merely “great novelist” could ever mimic a fantastic creation of this kind. It’s the unique product of a daring and prolonged smash-and-grab raid of the imagination, a planet-sized jackdaw-nest made of straw, barbed-wire, and emeralds. It’s a true monument to genre sensibility, and although John Brunner died in 1995—at a science fiction convention, as one might guess—time cannot much harm this book of his. It was very strange when he wrote it, and time only makes it feel stranger.

Walter Benjamin once described the Angel of History as an entity blown backward into futurity by an endless storm. As a good Hegelian, Walter Benjamin thought that a proper history should concern itself with the Angel. That’s what this old-fashioned, very futuristic, alarmingly timeless book is entirely not-about. It’s not of our own time and space, and it has no Angel. It’s not about the History, and it’s not about the Future. It’s about the happening world—about how worlds happen to people. It’s about the endless storm.