Stand on Zanzibar - Softcover

Brunner, John

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0765326787 ISBN 13: 9780765326782

Publisher: Orb Books, 2011

Synopsis

Norman Niblock House is a rising executive at General Technics, one of a few all-powerful corporations. His work is leading General Technics to the forefront of global domination, both in the marketplace and politically---it's about to take over a country in Africa. Donald Hogan is his roommate, a seemingly sheepish bookworm. But Hogan is a spy, and he's about to discover a breakthrough in genetic engineering that will change the world...and kill him.

These two men's lives weave through one of science fiction's most praised novels. Written in a way that echoes John Dos Passos' U.S.A. Trilogy, Stand on Zanzibar is a cross-section of a world overpopulated by the billions. Where society is squeezed into hive-living madness by god-like mega computers, mass-marketed psychedelic drugs, and mundane uses of genetic engineering. Though written in 1968, it speaks of 2010, and is frighteningly prescient and intensely powerful.

About this title

Product Description:

Rare Book

Review:

Thirty-year old predictions have a habit of going stale, but not John Brunner's startling panoramic view of the year 2010. Even where he got the future we almost inhabit wrong, he understood where things were oing--"Conincidence You weren't paying attention to the other half of what was going on"--and his world of Artificial Intelligence, gene-engineering, psychedelics, government-sponsored murder and brainwashing is frighteningly enough like our own. Constantly panning from a few individuals and their stories to the chatter of the media and sudden chunks of crucial text, Stand on Zanzibar was a ground-breaking novel in which Brunner broke wide open the stylistic and narrative conventions of SF, and set the agenda for the next decades. Packed with memorable characters--the computer Shalmaneser, the incestuous racist Clodard family, Presidents and newscasters--and sudden flashes of insight from rebel sociologist Chad Mulligan. "Rumour Believe all you hear. Your world may not be a better one than the one the blocks live in but it'll be a sight more vivid." Stand on Zanzibar is a masterpiece of speculative sociological SF, which some have described as a nightmare vision and others as a possible world better than what we are likely to get. --Roz Kaveney

About this edition

• Publisher: Orb Books
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 0765326787
• ISBN 13: 9780765326782
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 547