Your Country. Mine.
Every other country in the world has the same cause.
And what is does is: it takes people, who don't give a pint of whale dreck for it,
And sends them off to kill women and children
Yes, it's the cause of every country on Earth
And you know what I call that cause?
I call it naked, stinking, greed.
A party. Beatnik. Bohemian. The height of style
Conversation flows through: " I was in Detroit last week. Eerie. Ghosttown. Abandoned factories everywhere.
Then, it was like a wave hit me. Base pounding through a steel roof five hundred ft. long"
"It's more than a hobby. It's a basic necessity for modern man. It fulfills a fundamental psychological urge.
Unless you know that if you have to, you can kill someone who gets in your way, preferably with your bare hands.....
"Ohh, are those the new Too-much joints? May I have one? I've heard very good things about this strain."
[Laughs] "Louisiana isn't gonna last much longer, you know? There's a bill for the next session of the state legislature
which will ban child-bearing by anyone who can't prove three generations of residence. And what's worse- they're only....."
This book, Stand On Zanzibar, is one of the reasons we started this series.
Because it's the dystopia that looks, just a little too much, like the modern day.
It got so much right, it's kind of terrifying.
Beyond just the decline of Detroit, and the legalization of Marijuana in many places across the states,
in 1965, Brunner, the author of Stand On Zanzibar, foresaw a ton of other stuff.
He saw super computers crunching data directing much of our lives.
He predicted a much wider spread acceptance of homosexuality and bi-sexual relationships.
He saw that young people would be less likely to marry quickly. Instead, having plenty of options for short-term romance.
He predicted China would eclipse Russia as the United States' main rival.
And guessed at the rise of the European Union.
He saw that old colonial divides would hold Africa back
while, at the same time, predicting more opportunities for minorities in America in the future,
And that that would be met with a backlash of racism and hate.
Stand On Zanzibar has America fighting Brush-fire wars, and describes terrorists as a common fear in the United States. Something almost unthinkable when it was written.
And it even predicted electric cars and 24hr news on satellite feed
, but, perhaps most jarring when reading this book is it's most stark and terrifying prediction also came true:
It predicted the normalizing of mass killings.
This is because it's a book about pressure, population pressure.
In fact, the title of the book comes from this turn-of-the-century idea that if all of humanity stood shoulder to shoulder,
the population of the Earth could fit on the Island of Wight.
But Brunner predicted, with almost spooky accuracy, that by 2010, there would 7 billion people on Earth.
So, in that case, we'd need a bigger island: Zanzibar.
A sense of crowding pervades the book. Even wealthy young people have to have roommates.
The cities that aren't abandoned are teeming, overflowing with people.
The streets are often packed, and the tension in them can, in an instant, turn into a riot.
Zanzibar is about the fact that we were never built to deal with such a tightly packed world,
that something inside us needs space and time that the modern world just doesn't give us.
And this lack causes us to all react in self-destructive ways.
For some people in the book, it's actually running amok, deciding to walk into a public place and simply starting to kill as many strangers as they can.
But even for other people, for the supposedly well-adjusted characters in the book,
you can see all of the subconscious ways that this population pressure causes them to self-destruct.
There's plenty of other plots going on, but that's the theme running through the book:
how do we cope with the world we were never evolutionarily designed for?
It's prophetic, chaotic, and at times, profound.
But it's also one of the most intriguingly written books you'll stumble on because it's divided into 4 different types of chapters:
Context
Continuity
Tracking with CloseUps
and The Happening World
Context is just filled with headlines or articles that give context to the world.
Continuity is where the plot happens.
Tracking with CloseUps tends to be microstories that give us a view into the world that the main plot can't.
And The Happening World can be anything from the scripted images
to an almost hallucinogenic barrage of images from daily life in Stand On Zanzibar.
And then, there's the Hipcrime Vocab.
A book within the book
which reads like the devil's dictionary for the 21st century.
In fact, you know what, let me give you a few excerpts.
Both of which are held by human beings to be true and often by the same people:
1.) I can't, so you mustn't.
& 2.) I can, but you mustn't.
I wouldn't like it when it happens, and I won't approve.
I can't be bothered.
God can't be bothered.
Meaning Three may perhaps be valid, but the others are a hundred and one percent whale dreck.
A form of self-preservation exhibited by people with auto-destructive imaginations
in order to ensure that when it comes time to the crunch, it'll be someone else's bones which go crack
and not their own.
From those entries you can probably get a sense of Stand On Zanzibar.
Sardonic.
Sarcastic.
Hip and yet, hopeful.
In fact, even from the hipcrime definition of history, where it says, "Papa Hagley say that all we learn from history
is that we learn nothing from history.
I know people that can't even learn from what happened this morning. Hagle must have been talking the long view."
We get the sense that Brunner is using this bitter, sarcastic commentator,
being bitter and sarcastic about a future that hasn't happened yet,
to tell us to make sure that it never does.
There's a message in this book:
that we can fight back against the crushing nature of this world
if we're willing to take the blinders off and look past what's right in front of us everyday.
For all its cynicism,
it's a book that can't hide its hope.
A hope that we'll create a better world
than the one in Stand On Zanzibar.