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Stand on Zanzibar: The Hugo Award-Winning Novel
Stand on Zanzibar: The Hugo Award-Winning Novel
Stand on Zanzibar: The Hugo Award-Winning Novel
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Stand on Zanzibar: The Hugo Award-Winning Novel

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The brilliant 1969 Hugo Award-winning novel from John Brunner, Stand on Zanzibar, now included with a foreword by Bruce Sterling

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 now, and is frighteningly prescient and intensely powerful.

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LanguageEnglish
Release dateAug 16, 2011
ISBN9781429978842
Stand on Zanzibar: The Hugo Award-Winning Novel
Author

Bruce Sterling

Bruce Sterling is an Austin-born science fiction writer and Net critic, internationally recognized as a cyberspace theorist who is also considered one of the forefathers of the cyberpunk movement in science fiction. He has won a John W. Campbell Award, two Hugo Awards, and an Arthur C. Clarke Award.

Read more from Bruce Sterling

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Rating: 3.9177019633540375 out of 5 stars
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  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I thought this was a re-read, but it turns out I'd just confused it with the Jagged Orbit. I was going to Zanzibar on holiday, so it seemed amusing to read this.I _think_ I liked it, but it's a very long book, and likes to be very clever, with the interweiving of stories and sentances that all highlight things, without making a coherant whole. It has a strong feeling of Boys Own adventure, business execs and superspies which doesn't always float my boat, (and don't get me started on the problems with the depiction of women in this novel). The main themes are the insanity caused by over crowding, and the plot that somewhere lost in a small African country is some Magic Science that will make us all Good People...
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I vividly remember reading this novel in1968--it was a revelation, full of innovation and outrageous predictions. Fifty some years later, what surprised me was how thin the plot is on the down side, and how accurate many of Brunner's predictions were, and I'm not talking about the technical ones. He foresaw tolerance of different sexual orientations and thinly veiled racism, for example, not to mention a Catholic Church in schism over one wing's focus on sexual issues over al other moral questions.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Should SF be seen as prescient? Only in hindsight, which makes any "predictions" worthless. Unless the author in question develops a track record of being right (in which case I'd be interested in seeing what they wrote about Bitcoin). Given the millions of SF authors, bashing out billions of pages, it is no surprise that simply due to dumb luck, some of their guesses will come true: in some form. However, since these stories have to relate to readers living in the present if the authors make up stuff that is too "out there", they will lose their readers. So any predictions are generally just linear extrapolations from the present. It is notable that almost nobody predicted the rise of the personal computer or the internet. And those who did (John Brunner's "The Shockwave Rider" from 1975 being probably the closest) did not see it becoming what it is today (the novel in which computer viruses called 'tapeworms' were 'invented'. Remember 'Stuxnet'?). Authors should not be judged on what they got right. Lottery winners are not acclaimed "prescient". Instead they should be read because their stories are well written.Novelists don't live in a bubble. They respond to things which are going on around them and process them into fiction. Atwood, in particular, rejects the idea that her work is science fiction and sees it as speculative explorations of how real world issues might play out to create dystopias. The Handmaid's Tale was inspired by the Iranian revolution and growing religiosity in US politics, and Oryx and Crake trilogy is an exploration of climate change and social breakdown. The possibility of a pandemic seems to have been on the radar of many people for a while now (with the obvious exception of our dear government, which truly does seem to live under a rock) so it isn't surprising that it has inspired writers - Louise Welsh and Minette Walters have both written excellent and hard hitting novels on post pandemic societies in recent years.What does “Stand on Zanzibar” bring to the table? Well, it's worrying to see that the 1967 prediction Brunner used was a population of 7 billion in 2010, essentially spot on (6.9 billion in fact; I know, I looked it up…). “Stand on Zanzibar” always deserves a nod for what it got right (coming to think of it, so does "The Sheep Look Up”, and “The Jagged Orbit”).I think it was Ursula Le Guin who said that there was no foresight in SF, only lies. Well, if the past and the present are anything to go by, the future is full of them.Book Review SF = Speculative Fiction
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    It took me about a third of the book to understand what was going on with how John Brunner intersperses his plot narrative with colour chapters to give a sense of what the world and culture are like. Once I figured that it out it became a very interesting read. What impressed me is that this was written in the 1960s yet reads as if it could have been written by a modern day writer of current times. Reading the chapters that tried to recreate what he likely imagined future tv to be like seemed so similar to what my experience is of surfing the net or reading through FB. He got a lot of his future history right. Good story too.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I loved it, particularly near the middle. I wish Chad C. Mulligan really did exist and write, because I'd love to read more than just excerpts from his books. (He's a bit like Spider Jerusalem, only more of a sociologist than a journalist.) Overall, an interesting take on human society--and what overpopulation does to it.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Science fiction that entralls as it makes you think about the population explosion [we already face]. Told in an experimental fashion combining several different styles, this remains a classic.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I think a lot of the scorecarding of how well Brunner predicted our current world misses the fact that this is a very detailed and internally consistent story. It also thoroughly looks at eugenics, AI, and the relationship between the developing / developed world in such a way as to be perpetually relevant. I both read and listened to this work and the audiobook is fantastic.

    1 person found this helpful

  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    It is the year 2010: there are over seven billion people on an ever-increasingly overcrowded Earth. It is a time when decisions are made wholesale by super-intelligent computers, there are bases on the moon and the Mid-Atlantic is being strip-mined, and when one's genotype determines whether one can have children. Mass-marketed psychedelic drugs are taken by everyone and New York is encased in a giant dome. Three years later, and many of Brunner's predictions for the twenty-first century have not come true yet there are over seven billion people alive today and resources are becoming even more scarce.

    Stand on Zanzibar is a frenetic and overwhelming novel that captures the hysteria of a dangerously over-crowded world in a unique and inventive style. The Continuity chapters follow two men whose lives are transformed and yet interlinked: Norman House works for the global mega-corporation General Technics and becomes in charge of a plan to transform an entire country from third- to first-world status, Donald Hogan is sent to an Asian country to investigate a genetic engineering break-through to transform the country's people. These chapters alone are an exciting story of politics, economics and shaping the future of the world.

    Yet there is so much more to Stand on Zanzibar. Brunner fully immerses the reader in this frantic world through a similar style to Dos Passos in the USA trilogy. In Tracking with Close-ups, Brunner introduces the reader to various ancillary characters that inhabit the world; in The Happening World, he captures the vibrant and often ephemeral situations that arise in this over-crowded world; and in Context, he develops and fleshes out this world with commentary from noted (fictional) individuals, headlines etc.

    Squarely in the New Wave of science fiction, Stand on Zanzibar is complex, eccentric, but above all, startlingly prescient. As Joe Haldeman (author of The Forever War) said, "sci-fi is not about predicting the future; it's about elucidating the present and the past." Brunner has captured the fears of the 1960s and 70s - the fears of scarcity and overpopulation, fears that still resonate today. And yet the book is not overly moralising. Rather, it immerses the reader in a vision of a world not unlike ours today, one that could easily come about.

    Overwhelming and visionary, exciting and absorbing, Brunner's vision of the world is still fresh, still as current as when he first wrote this in 1968.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    Un cl?sico de la ciencia ficci?n que no ha envejecido del todo bien. Est? lleno de clih?s y prejuicios de la ?poca en que se escribio. Es interesante y entretenido aunque el hilo argumental se basa en muchas coincidencias ya que en torno a 4 personajes repartidos por todo el mundo, se desarrolla todo el argumento de la peli. Quiz?s en su ?poca fue una maravilla pero hoy en d?a pienso que carece de inter?s.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    amazing book - difficult esp. at first, but definitely a must read for literate sf fans - does have a bit of a jarring climax

    1 person found this helpful

  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    Spoiler alert. Several things annoyed me about this dystopian overpopulation novel:1. Swearing. Why? Why, John Brunner? Why did you decide that in 2010 the English language would be unchanged in any respect, except for bad words, which would not have evolved but been forgotten and replaced by entirely new ones?! And why did you pick such stupid words, and having picked them, why must you use them so often? If I ever again read "sheeting hole" where I ought to read "bloody hell", or the dire "whatinole" for "what the hell" or "hole in corner" to describe a benighted location, I will know I am reading this novel again, and that I must therefore have lost my mind, and will therefore kill myself.2. Shiggy Culture. The idea, I suppose, is an extension of the 1960's free love ethos. People have sex with no emotional hangups, coming and going as they please. Fine - but in Brunner's world it's strictly one-way. Well-off men - sorry, "codders" or "zecks" - allow women - that is, "shiggies" - to live indefinitely in their apartments and eat their food, in exchange for sex. Well, great... if you're a man who wants a young woman in his apartment who he doesn't have to talk to. This theme permeates the book, and the only woman called a woman rather than a "shiggy" is the geriatric and past-it chairwoman of the mega-corp General Technics. Every other female in the book is either a passive child-bearer or a vapid "shiggy". There are many scenes of men sitting together, chomping cigar-like objects, discussing world-domination. Was this really how the future seemed in 1968?3. Inconsistencies. Hogan is "eptified", i.e. rapidly trained by futuristic means, into a deadly assassin. Great, and this sets up a nice psychological conflict in the guy which is handled OK. So why does this master of the lethal arts accidentally stab to death the man he's meant to be rescuing/kidnapping? It doesn't make any sense. Brunner could have made it a deliberate murder easily enough, but no... And while we're taking someone with a knowledge of Yatakangi and making them into a killing machine, would it not have been easier for the government to train one of their existing killing machines in Yatakangi and send him (or even, god forbid, her)?4. Chad C. Mulligan. A.k.a. the author. This novel spends a luxuriant 250-300 pages worldbuilding, some of which are given over to excerpts from the works of sociologist Chad C. Mulligan. Chad is a crashing explicatory bore who initially serves only to chant the author's sneering opinion of hoi polloi. But later Chad comes into the novel as a character, a sort of beardy, shambling visionary who eventually, and with minimal effort except hiring dozens of scientists, which no-one had apparently thought to do before, discovers the secret of the Shinka. Well done, Chad, i.e. John Brunner, you're a genius.5. Race. Other races are very much other in this novel. This would be understandable, perhaps, if it was written from a white/American/Caucasian point of view, but it's explicitly not. One of the main characters is a black Muslim American. We know this because on two occasions (in a 550-page novel) he declines a drink, and on about 550 occasions he prefaces his speech with the exclamation "Prophet's Beard!" This is poor writing. There are two minor French characters, brother and sister, who are drenched in ennui and sometimes even talk in French and end up screwing each other. The Asiatics (principally Sugaiguntung) are insrcutable and unpredictable. The Africans are full of wisdom, and (this almost qualifies as point 6.) the Shinka have a prophet who Brunner spends about 10 ghastly pages on in the form of pseudo-parables, like Aesop written by an eight-year old. The parables are lifted directly from the Bible and there is no point in reading them. What lingers is Brunner's deep anxiety about people of other races and skin colours.The only time the prose feels alive is in a few brief passages of manly adventure deep in the jungle. It seems to me that Brunner was an adventure writer with a zillion 1960's hangups which he tried to expiate in "Stand on Zanzibar" but failed, despite the reasonableness of the premise. "Stand on Zanzibar" reads like a tour of a frightened mind, but frightened for all the wrong reasons and not those ostensibly treated by the novel. Vision of the future? This book is the usual false prophet, forecasting doom very specifically, in a way that will only be invalidated 50 years from time of writing, or, generously, from time of review. Well I will stick my neck out and say this book will never be as relevant as when it was written, 1968, if it was relevant then.

    1 person found this helpful

  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    When I read this in 1972 I would have given this five stars. Now, in 2011, I'm a different person. this is a different time, and much of this book does not hold up for me. There is a lot that does - that's why I give it 3 stars. I find it to be a somewhat tedious read now though. It might be worth reading for a first time....hard for me to tell.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    This is not a book as most people would think of a book. Sure, it's got sheets of paper with words printed on them held together between covers. It looks alike a book, it feels like a book, hey, it even smells like a book. But it doesn't read like a book. Most "books" are about presenting a story. The characters are there to support the story. The places are there for story to happen in them. This book is not about a story or a character. This book is about a world. Every word in the book is there to show off the world. The characters are there to support the world. The plots are there to support the world. Yes, plots - as in more than one. I'm a sucker for worlds - If I can't believe in the world that's presented, I can't enjoy the story - so this book hit all the right spots for me. It does mean that this book is difficult to read. There's a heavy use of dialect. There's a large use of montage and background techniques normally used in movies. To see these elevated and used in the written word can be confusing and indeed that the first chapter is such a montage of facts and provides so much "context" in such a context-less way and with in the full dialect that it is easy to be put off by it. Don't be.The world itself is the 2010 as envisioned by Brunner in the late 60s. Other reviewers have commented on the similarities and differences between his predictions and the reality and whether that detracts from the book, especially given that we are fast approaching the 2010 timeframe of the book. The similarities tend to be the depiction of society and what the world is doing rather than the particular technological advances and I believe that the message or thesis that Brunner was trying to illustrate with this world was a sociological one rather than technological; the final scene is Chad Mulligan working out the reason for the Beninian society functioning the way it does in contrast to societies over the rest of the world. Talking of Chad C. Mulligan - where can I find his works? I know I have to read more Brunner and I would urge any of you to read this one at least.

    1 person found this helpful

  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This seems like a frighteningly realistic depiction of our future. One of the all time great dystopian fictions.

    1 person found this helpful

  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Simultaneously reading like a deadly earnest Illuminatus! Trilogy scrubbed of all the conspiracy nuttiness*, a fictionalized parable of Toffler's classic Future Shock, a finger-wagging sermon about the evils of overpopulation, and a whacked-out Jeff Noon media scramble, Stand on Zanzibar is one of the coolest bits of New Wave science fiction a reader could pick up.

    A lot of people who pick up a John Brunner novel -- or indeed any older science fiction novel -- in the 21st century get hung up on either the eerie prescience the author seems to have had about our contemporary world (the book was written in 1968 but set in 2010) or on what the author got wrong about it, but to do either is to miss the point here. Good fiction is good fiction, whether or not someone guessed there would be smart phones; ditto good social criticism. Stand on Zanzibar is both.

    The title comes from an observation made by a wag/sage of the novel's world that the world's current population of 7 billion (yes, one of things he got right; we hit that number pretty close to the same time he projected) if stood together in one place shoulder-to-shoulder, would take up the area of the island of Zanzibar (when the book was written, the world's population could fit on the Isle of Man, a much smaller bit of land). The world he depicts will remind fans a bit of that in Soylent Green**; its be-domed New York might also make one think of the be-domed city-as-spaceship New York in Cities in Flight. And as I suggested above, I kept thinking of Jeff Noon's fiction, particularly Channel Sk1n.

    The plot Brunner chooses from among the billions of possible stories on that/this overcrowded world concerns a mega-corporation that is getting ready to buy a country, the men chosen to spearhead the project (which takes a long view of a Third World nation's economic development into a new kind of global economic powerhouse as just another opportunity to increase shareholder value -- eerily, kind of the way our modern private prison industry works!), and some of their friends. Because the nation in question is in Africa, the company's single African-American (abbreviated "Afram") vice president, Norman Niblock House, gets the nod, along with the U.S.'s equally Afram ambassador to that little nation, Elihu Masters, who's been best friends with the country's president-for-life for some twenty years. Said president*** being a tired old man now, who has been pretty much single-handedly holding his little nation together since the British abandoned the whole colonialism thing and more or less forced him into the role of someone to whom they could hand off all their problems. But there is no good prospect for a successor, so why not bring in a corporation? The project is not viewed as the president selling out so much as a father with hundreds of thousands of helpless dependents trying to secure a future for them. Believe me, it sort of works.

    This is largely because there is so much else going on in this novel, which is apparently modeled on John Dos Passos' U.S.A. trilogy ****, at least structurally, for the narrative, plot forwarding chapters are interspersed with all sorts of non-narrative interludes of pure, hypermediated texture, including extended excerpts from the works of one Chad Mulligan, sociologist, who is this novel's Austin Train figure (see The Sheep Look Up), a wise man who has gone ignored but may now be called somewhat resurgent, but only because drinking himself to death in disgust is taking too long and is actually kind of boring.

    But wait, there's more!

    Because Norman has a white roommate, Don, a guy with a freak gift for pattern recognition who has spent the last ten years in deep cover as a member of the U.S. Army's "Dilettante Corps" in which his job is basically being a sort of Cayce Pollard for the government. In the course of the story, Don gets called up and has to go overseas to help out with an international problem involving a fictional Pacific Rim nation with whom the U.S. is in a seemingly endless and bitter Vietnamesque war. Said country having made an announcement regarding a Great Leap Forward in eugenics and genetic engineering that holds incredible possibility and also, of course, incredible threat to the rest of the world.

    For the reaction of the First World to the planet's overwhelming population problem is to plunge into eugenics with all enthusiasm. Laws governing who may have children and how many children they may have get stricter and stricter all the time -- and in the United States, differ from state to state, so, for example, Nevada is close to a free-for-all whereas Louisiana is flirting with the idea of not allowing anyone to breed who can prove three generations of residency in that state in addition to the standard prohibitions on anyone with genetic defects of any kind reproducing. As the novel opens, the latest trait under fire is color-blindness. But what everyone is really afraid of is that someday producing too much melanin is going to be a prohibiting factor.

    Which is to say that racism -- and sexism, which I'll get to later -- are prevalent elements throughout the text. As the U.S. is at war with an Asian power, plenty of anti-Asian sentiment and offensive slang gets slung about (which, about the slang, get ready for that. The slang in Stand on Zanzibar could be the subject of a whole big and fascinating paper, to be pored over like that in A Clockwork Orange, but unlike Burgess' novel, all of Brunner's slang is derived from English), and blacks don't get any better treatment. It's all presented very matter-of-factly, even casually, which can be shocking but which is part and parcel of the societies we're examining. Kinship and tribalism and associated inter-group violence, sociologists tell us, tend to come very much to the fore in cases of crowding.

    As is, apparently, a very casual, even cavalier, attitude towards women, the young and attractive variety of which are referred to in this world as "shiggies" and are passed around like party favors, traded like Magic the Gathering cards, apparently happy with this state of affairs and the nomadic, uncertain life they lead on the "shiggy circuit." Older women are only ever noticed if they happen by some freak of affairs to have somehow achieved serious corporate power, with a depressing few exceptions, and even the one younger-than-the-alpha female executive type who crosses our path is at first dismissed as on the scene just because her boss got tired of sleeping with her. To the slight credit of the man making this internalized observation about her, he does eventually include that she might be there on her own actual merits as well, perhaps. Partly. Ugh.

    The only other reason a woman might matter, of course, is as breeding stock. But only if she's genetically OK. But hey, at least the potential father has to pass genetic muster as well. So I guess there's parity somewhere. Ugh.

    But hey, all of literature has taught me how it sure do suck to be female, so I can hardly single out this book for special castigation. Especially in a year in which I have taken on Robert Silverberg. I do not cry out for a fan-edit of Stand on Zanzibar from which my gender has been removed, but, you know, yuck.

    That aside, this is a pretty fantastic read, a worthy companion to Brunner's other blisteringly awful masterpiece, The Sheep Look Up. But where we could sort of, kind of, desperately cling to the idea that The Sheep Look Up was a self-denying prophecy, Stand on Zanzibar still feels like it could happen, is happening.

    But we already knew that, didn't we?

    *Which, I hasten to assure you, is still a very entertaining, if somewhat depressing, thing.

    **Itself based on a novel by Harry Harrison, Make Room! Make Room! that came out two years before Stand on Zanzibar.

    ***Whose name is Zadkiel Obomi, and I'll refer you to the rest of the internet for points of view on that amazing coincidence/prediction. Yawn.

    ****Which I haven't read but now really want to.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    A searingly bitter yet somehow wry dystopia. While it's obviously a product of the late 60s, at the same time much of it seems eerily prescient (shallow media, consumerism, corporatisation, etc). It's taken me several months to read it, but that has actually proved for the best - it's given me time to properly digest it, and I'm very impressed by how Brunner's seemingly fragmented approach, with hundreds of tiny, scattered chapters, could end up being woven into a cohesive whole. Kudos are also due for having non-white characters and non-white settings, and for thoughtful explorations of post-colonial legacies. One of the very best in the SF Masterworks series.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    A great book. Not something that would be published in todays market I think. It uses a-linear story telling and introduces a large number of characters which weigh it down at times. Still, this book was critical of capitalism and the military-industrial complex. Way ahead of its time!
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Sure it's frequently called a classic science fiction novel, but it's also one of that variety that can date horribly fast: the near future novel. Is it still worth reading 40 years later? On the whole, yes.The novel surprises for what it isn't. For a novel with the reputation of being about overpopulation, it doesn't have the squalid and packed future of Harry Harrison's classic (if extrapolatively dishonest) Make Room! Make Room!. There isn't a lot of mention of scarce commodities. Technology continues to develop. Wars continue to be fought. New entertainment media still is invented. The effects of overpopulation mainly seem to be an extensive adoption of worldwide government eugenics programs to ensure only the healthy procreate and the appearance of "muckers", people driven into mass killing sprees by the pressures of overcrowded living. And, from the author who went on to write the famous polluted dystopia of The Sheep Look Up, there is little talk about the effects of overpopulation on pollution.The plots involving the main characters are pretty straightforward. Hogan, a seeming layabout who spends all day reading, is activated as a spy. The American government wants him to discredit or stop the announced program of the Yakatang government to edit human genes. It fears the population pressures resulting from the millions, denied the right to reproduce, suddenly allowed to via gene editing. House, an angry, young black executive (and, in this future, living space is expensive enough where even corporate executives have to share apartments) gets put in charge of his company's collaboration with the American government to bootstrap the poor African country of Beninia into prosperity, protect it from its neighbors, and use it to process ore from deep sea mines. Along the way, he has to find out why the impoverished Beninia is so lacking in the social pathologies of wealthier countries. Oddly, their stories lag a bit at times when, in the second half of the book, they arrive, respectively, in Yakatang and Beninia.Like Brunner's literary model, John Dos Passos' U.S.A.Trilogy, the joy and interest of the book is when the focus is off the main characters. Their lives are covered in the Continuity chapters. Brunner alternates those chapters with others labeled Context (usually news reports), The Happening World (a scattershot of vignettes and quotes from books, ads, and tv as well as just brief statements of fact about the world and various characters), and Tracking with Closeups (following several minor characters and their lives). To my mind, this Dos Passos technique is perhaps the most dramatic, interesting, and effective expository method a science fiction writer can use to show off his world building.And there is an impressive amount of world building. I suspect that Brunner's serious look at the possibilities of genetic engineering (allowing for changes in terminology, they seem pretty accurate predictions) and pheromones was among the first in science fiction. The man who is credited with inventing the computer worm in the The Shockwave Rider gives us the beginnings of artificial intelligence and sort of an internet service (asking questions via phone of an automated service).Some of that world building, though, is bound to be dated and especially so given its origin in the 1960s. Like so many other authors of the time, he thought the future would hold many new and bizarre art forms. Instead, the computer game is really the only new art form of the last 40 years. His picture of Communist China was too kind, his opinion of the tractability of African problems too kind. He thinks too much of Marshal McLuhan.Critic John Clute has contended every novel has three dates: when it was written, when it was set, and the year it's really about. Brunner's style makes this novel enjoyable even though it's now more a time machine back to the late sixties than any credible view of the future. But it is a glorious example of a technique still not used enough by writers.And Brunner was smart enough to know what his novel's ultimate fate would be. There's a scene at a party where the fashions from the late sixties until the novel's year of 2010 are closely described. I like to think Brunner was brazenly rubbing it in that he wasn't trying to be a true prophet, that he was going out of his way to risk looking silly someday - and was going to proceed anyway.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Let’s face it. It is impossible to go back and objectively review a classic that impacted you as a youth so profoundly that you reread many times. But that is what I took on with Stand On Zanzibar. I returned to it because I recently read some books that remind me of it, and seemed to pale in comparison. Would it still stand up when read after all these years? Would it still have the impact? Did it age well or smack too much of its 60’s heritage?Who am I to say? All I can say is that it still hit me between the eyes. I read scene after scene that had emblazoned themselves in my memory. I had forgotten the real thread of the story, but had it come back to me like an old friend. This is a story of a world that is tearing itself apart. There are limits on everything, but most importantly, the population is being controlled through eugenics - if you have even the smallest chance of having an “imperfect” child, you will not be allowed to have one. Two roommates, Norman House and Donald Hogan, really have nothing in common except existence in the same apartment. Norman learns that his mere presence in the wrong location can cause a riot. Donald learns that he is a tool of the government. Just as they are about to really connect, their lives take off in different directions. Norman goes off to discover why a small country in Africa is a hotbed for pacifism. Donald goes off to discover if someone has really discovered how to make perfect children. Norman goes off to find a solution for the world. Donald goes off to learn of greed, avarice, and destruction. Interspersed (well, not really interspersed – that makes it seem inconsequential, let’s instead call it “playing as important a role as the story” because it takes up over half the book) are stories of individuals coping with this kind of world. And the chaos of this new world that is doing its best to destroy itselfIt stood the test of time. It deserved (deserves) every award it won. It is Brunner at his strongest, science fiction at its best, and literature at its finest.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This seems like a frighteningly realistic depiction of our future. One of the all time great dystopian fictions.

Book preview

Stand on Zanzibar - Bruce Sterling

the happening world (1)

READ THE DIRECTIONS

For toDAY third of MAY twenty-TEN ManhatTEN reports mild spring-type weather under the Fuller Dome. Ditto on the General Technics Plaza.

But Shalmaneser is a Micryogenic® computer bathed in liquid helium and it’s cold in his vault.

(DITTO   Use it! The mental process involved is exactly analogous to the bandwidth-saving technique employed for your phone. If you’ve seen the scene you’ve seen the scene and there’s too much new information for you to waste time looking it over more than once. Use ditto. Use it!

The Hipcrime Vocab by Chad C. Mulligan)

Less of a machine, more of a human being, but partaking of the nature of both, Georgette Tallon Buckfast is largely supported by prosthetics in her ninety-first year.

When the strain becomes TOO MUCH it’s because Hitrip of California bred it to have less stalk per ounce, more clean-queen leaf. Ask The Man who’s Married to Mary Jane!

Eric Ellerman is a plant geneticist with three daughters who’s scared because his wife has developed a permanent pot-belly.

… and Puerto Rico today became the latest state to ratify the controversial dichromatism provision of United States eugenic legislation. This leaves only two havens for those who wish to bear disadvantaged children: Nevada and Louisiana. The defeat of the baby-farming lobby removes a long-time stigma from the fair brow of the Junior-but-One State—a congenital stigma, one may say, since the J-but-O State’s accession to hoodness coincided almost to the day with the first eugenic legislation concerned with haemophilia, phenylketonuria and congenital imbecility…

Poppy Shelton has believed in miracles for years, but now there’s one happening right inside her body and the real world is leaning on her dreams.

THE DIFFICULT WE DO AT ONCE. THE IMPOSSIBLE TAKES A LITTLE LONGER.

—Base version of General Technics motto

Norman Niblock House is junior VP in charge of personnel and recruitment at General Technics.

One fraction of a second, please—participant breakin coming up. Remember that only SCANALYZER’s participant breakin service is processed by General Technics’ Shalmaneser, the more correct response in the shorter quantum of time…

Guinevere Steel’s real name is Dwiggins, but do you blame her?

Do your slax sufficiently convey your natural power—at a glance?

If you’re wearing MasQ-Lines, the answer’s yes. Tired of half measures, we at MasQ-Line Corp. have put the codpiece back where it belongs, to say to the shiggies not kidder but codder.

Sheena and Frank Potter are all packed ready to leave for Puerto Rico because a green and a red light are just lights to him.

"Two participant breakins! Number one: sorree, friend, but no—we are not wrong to say Puerto Rico’s decision leaves a mere two havens for the dissident. Isola does enjoy statehood, but the whole area of the Pacific its islands occupy is under martial law and you don’t get a pass for other than martial reasons. Thanks for asking us, though, it’s the way of the world, you’re my environment and I am yours, which is why we operate SCANALYZER as a two-way process…"

Arthur Golightly doesn’t mind not being able to remember where he put things. Looking for them, he always finds other things he’d forgotten he had.

THE DIFFICULT WE DID YESTERDAY. THE IMPOSSIBLE WE’RE DOING RIGHT NOW.

—Current version of General Technics motto

Donald Hogan is a spy.

"Number the other: dichromatism is what’s commonly called colourblindness, and it is sure as sidereal time a congenital disability. Thank you, participant, thank you."

Stal (short for Stallion) Lucas is a yonderboy, weighed, measured, and freeflying all the way.

(IMPOSSIBLE   Means: 1 I wouldn’t like it and when it happens I won’t approve; 2 I can’t be bothered; 3 God can’t be bothered. Meaning 3 may perhaps be valid but the others are 101% whaledreck.

The Hipcrime Vocab by Chad C. Mulligan)

Philip Peterson is twenty years old.

Are you undermined by an old-style autoshout unit, one that needs constant reprogramming by hand if it’s not to call you for items that were descheduled last week?

GT’s revolutionary new autoshout reprograms itself!

Sasha Peterson is Philip’s mother.

Turning to a related subject, rioting crowds today stormed a Right Catholic church in Malmö, Sweden, while early mass was in progress. Casualty lists suggest a death toll of over forty including the priest and many children. From his palace in Madrid Pope Eglantine accused rival Pope Thomas of deliberately fomenting this and other recent uprisings, a charge vigorously denied by Vatican authorities.

Victor and Mary Whatmough were born in the same country and have been married twenty years—she for the second time, he for the third.

What you want to do when you see her in her Forlon&Morler Maxess costumelet

Is what she wants you to do when you see her in her Forlon&Morler Maxess costumelet

If she didn’t, she wouldn’t have put it on

Maximal access is no exaggeration when you spell it MAXESS

Style illustrated is Courtesan

But you should see Tart

What there is of it

Elihu Masters is currently United States Ambassador to the one-time British colony of Beninia.

Speaking of accusations, Dixierep Senator Lowell Kyte this anti-matter charged that dicties were now responsible for nine-tenths of the felonies committed per anum—sorree!—per annum in his home state of Texas and that Fed efforts to quell the problem were a failure. Privately, officials of the Nark Force have been heard to express concern at the way GT’s new product Triptine is catching the dicties’ fancy.

Gerry Lindt is a draftee.

When we say general at GT we mean GENERAL. We offer the career of a lifetime to anyone interested in astronautics, biology, chemistry, dynamics, eugenics, ferromagnetism, geology, hydraulics, industrial administration, jet propulsion, kinetics, law, metallurgy, nucleonics, optics, patent rights, quarkology, robotics, synthesis, telecommunications, ultrasonics, vacuum technology, work, X-rays, ylem, zoology …

No, we didn’t miss out your speciality. We just didn’t have room for it in this ad.

Professor Doctor Sugaiguntung is head of the Tectogenetics Department at Dedication University in the Guided Socialist Democracy of Yatakang.

The incidence of muckers continues to maintain its high: one in Outer Brooklyn yesterday accounted for 21 victims before the fuzzy-wuzzies fused him, and another is still at large in Evanston, Ill., with a total of eleven and three injured. Across the sea in London a woman mucker took out four as well as her own three-month baby before a mind-present standerby clobbered her. Reports also from Rangoon, Lima and Auckland notch up the day’s toll to 69.

Grace Rowley is seventy-seven and going a bit weak in the head.

Here today and gone tomorrow isn’t good enough for us in this modern age.

Here today and gone today is the pidgin we pluck.

The Right Honourable Zadkiel F. Obomi is the president of Beninia.

Westaway a piece or two, a stiff note was received in Washington this anti-matter from the Yatakangi government, claiming naval units working out of Isola had trespassed into Yatakang’s territorial waters. Officials will be polite, but it’s an open secret Yatakang’s hundred-island territory gives refuge all the time to Chinese aquabandits who sneak out from so-called neutral ports and ambush U.S patrols in mid-ocean…

Olive Almerio is the most successful baby-farmer in Puerto Rico.

You know the codders who keep one, two, three shiggies on the string. You know the shiggies who every weekend blast off with a different codder. Envy them?

Needn’t.

Like any other human activity this one can be learned. We teach it, in courses tailored to your preferences.

Mrs. Grundy Memorial Foundation (may she spin in her grave).

Chad C. Mulligan was a sociologist. He gave it up.

Last week’s State Forest fires on the West Coast that laid low hundreds of square miles of valuable timber destined for plastics, paper and organic chemicals were today officially attributed to sabotage by Forestry Commissioner Wayne C. Charles. As yet it is uncertain to whom the guilt belongs: treacherous so-called partisans among our own, or infiltrating reds.

Jogajong is a revolutionary.

The word is EPTIFY.

Don’t look in the dictionary.

It’s too new for the dictionary.

But you’d better learn what it implies.

EPTIFY.

We do it to you.

Pierre and Jeannine Clodard are both the children of pieds-noirs, unsurprisingly as they are brother and sister.

Tornado warnings are out in the following states…

Jeff Young is the man to go to anywhere west of the Rockies for the rather specialised goods he handles: time-fuzes, explosives, thermite, strong acids and sabotage bacteria.

Turning to the gossipy side: once again the rumour goes the rounds that the small independent African territory of Beninia is in economic chaos. President Kouté of Dahomalia in a speech at Bamako warned the RUNGs that if they attempted to exploit the situation all necessary steps to counter…

Henry Butcher is an enthusiastic proselytiser for the panacea he believes in.

(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.

The Hipcrime Vocab by Chad C. Mulligan)

It is definite that the man known as Begi is not alive. On the other hand, in at least one sense he isn’t dead either.

Also it’s noised that Burton Dent is bivving it again, in that he was seen scorting former fuel supply Edgar Jewel into the particulate stages of this anti-matter. Meantime, Pacific time, it looks like Fenella Koch his spouse of three years may be turning spousiness into spiciness with cream-dream Zoë Laigh. Like the slogan says—why not equals why ker-not!

Mr. & Mrs. Everywhere are construct identities, the new century’s equivalent of the Joneses, except that with them you don’t have to keep up. You buy a personalised TV with homimage attachment which ensures that Mr. & Mrs. Everywhere look, and talk, and move like you.

(HIPCRIME   You committed one when you opened this book. Keep it up. It’s our only hope.

The Hipcrime Vocab by Chad C. Mulligan)

Bennie Noakes sits in front of a set tuned to SCANALYZER orbiting on Triptine and saying over and over, Christ what an imagination I’ve got!

And to close on, the Dept of Small Consolations. Some troubledome just figured out that if you allow for every codder and shiggy and appleofmyeye a space one foot by two you could stand us all on the six hundred forty square mile surface of the island of Zanzibar. ToDAY third MAY twenty-TEN come aGAIN!

tracking with closeups (1)

MR. PRESIDENT

The Right Honourable Zadkiel F. Obomi could feel the weight of the night pressing on his grey-wire scalp like the oppressive bulky silence of a sensory deprivation tank. He sat in his large official chair, hand-carved into a design that recreated without copying the sixteenth-century style of the master craftsmen some of whom had been his ancestors … presumably. There had been a long interval when no one had time to care about such things.

Both his hands lay on the edge of the desk before him, as lax as vegetables. The left one showed its pinkish palm to the ceiling, with the creased lines that once, when he was a very small boy, had led a woman of half-French and half-Shango breeding to predict he would be a great hero. The other was turned to show its mahogany back, its tree-knot knuckles, as though poised to rap out a nervous fingertip rhythm.

It did not stir.

The deep intellectual forehead and the arch of his nose were probably Berber. But below the bridge on either side the nostrils flared out and the broad flat lips matched the plump cheeks and round chin and heavy pigmentation. That was all Shinka. He had often said jokingly in the days when his life had room for jokes that his face was a map of his country: invader down to the eyes, native from there on south.

But the eyes themselves, that made the dividing line, were simply human.

The left one was amost hidden under its drooping lid; it had been useless since the assassination bid of 1986, and a long scar still puckered the skin of his cheek and temple. The right one was bright, sharp, darting—at present unfocused, for he was not looking at the other occupant of the room.

The dead night suffocated him: Zadkiel F. Obomi, seventy-four years old, first and thus far only president of the former British colony of Beninia.

Not seeing, he was feeling. At his back, the huge empty nothing of the Sahara—the best part of a thousand miles away, yet so monstrous and so dominant it loomed in his brain like a thunderhead. Before him, beyond the walls, beyond the busy city, beyond the port, the early-night breeze of the Bight, smelling of ocean salt and spices from the ships standing to at the harbour bar. And to either side, forming the shackles that anchored his wrists on the desk against his half-formed desire to move them and turn the next page of the sheaf of documents awaiting his attention, the deadweight of the prosperous lands on whom fortune had smiled.

The population of the planet Earth was numbered in many billions.

Beninia, thanks to the slashed-on-a-map boundaries of the colonial government, had only nine hundred thousand of them.

The wealth of the planet Earth was inconceivable.

Beninia, for the same reason, had a little less than enough to save its people from starving.

The size of the planet Earth was … large enough, so far.

Beninia was pitted and pendulumed, and the walls were closing in.

He heard in memory the soft wheedling arguments.

With a French accent: Geography is on our side; the lie of the land indicates that Beninia should logically join the Dahomalians; the river valleys, the hill passes, the …

With an English accent: History is on our side; we share the same common language; in Beninia Shinka speaks to Holaini, Inoko to Kpala, in the same tongue as Yoruba speaks to Ashanti; join the Republican Union of Nigeria with Ghana and be another RUNG …

Abruptly rage claimed him. He slapped the pile of papers with his open palm and leapt to his feet. The other man in the room jumped up also, face betraying alarm. But he had no time to speak before Mr. President strode out of the door.


In one of the palace’s four high towers, on the inland side where one could look towards the lush green of the Mondo Hills and feel the bleak desolation of the Sahara far beyond, there was a room to which only Mr. President had the key. A guard at the intersection of two corridors saluted him with a quick wave of his ceremonial spear; he nodded and went on by.

As always, he closed and locked the door behind him before he turned on the light. He stood a few seconds in total darkness; then his hand fell to the switch and he blinked his one good eye at the sudden glare.

To his left, resting on a low table adjacent to a flat padded hassock, a copy of the Koran bound in green leather and tooled by hand with golden Arabic script listing the nine-and-ninety honourable names of the Almighty.

To his right, a prie-dieu in traditional Beninian carved ebony, facing a wall on which hung a crucifix. The victim nailed to the wood was as dark as the wood itself.

And facing the door, black masks, crossed spears, two drums, and a brazier of a type only the initiates of the Leopard Claw Brand might see without its disguise of leopard’s fur.

Mr. President took a deep breath. He walked to the low table, picked up the Koran, and methodically shredded each of its pages into confetti. Last, he ripped the leather binding down the spine.

He turned on his heel, removed the crucifix from its peg, and snapped it across. The crucified one fell to the floor and he ground the doll-shape underfoot.

He dragged from the wall each in turn of the masks. He tore away the coloured straw hair from them, poked out the jewelled eyes, broke loose the ivory teeth. He stabbed through the sounding heads of both the drums with one of the spears.

The task complete, he turned off the light, left and locked the room, and at the first disposall chute he came to throw away the one and only key.

context (2)

EDITORIAL SLOT

Stock cue VISUAL: cliptage, wholescreen, atmospheric-type, orchestrated, first favouring copter views and MCU’s New Jersey Turnpike Jam 1977 (¾ million cars o/w 16,000-odd had to be crushed in situ) intercut w crush-hour shots Fifth Ave., Oxford St., Red Sq.; later favouring cretins, morons, phocomeli.

Live cue SOUND: "Today we congratulate Puerto Rico on the defeat it’s inflicted on the baby-farming lobby. People who have celebrated their twenty-first find it hard to believe that a mere thirty years ago highways and cities were choked to strangulation point with masses of allegedly moving metal that got in each other’s way so much we finally saw sense. Why worry about two tons of complicated steel gadgetry you won’t need when you get where you’re going—that won’t even get you there in reasonable time? Worse yet—which measurably shortens your life through cancer or bronchitis thanks to the stench it emits!

"Like living creatures, automobiles expired when their environment became saturated with their own excreta. We ourselves are living creatures. We don’t want the same to happen to us. That’s why we have eugenic legislation. Praise the J-but-O State for joining the majority of us who have seen the danger coming and resolved to put up with the minor inconveniences it entails when we decide to control the human elements of the big scene we inhabit.

This has been a Greater New York Times editorial slot.

continuity (1)

THE GUILT-EDGED SECURITY

Everything about Norman Niblock House was measured: as measured as a foot-rule, as measured as time. Item the degree to which he allowed himself to lighten his skin and straighten the kinks in his hair and beard, so that he could exploit the guilt-reaction of his colleagues while still managing to get next to the shiggies who did most for his cod. Item the soupçon of eccentricity he manifested in his behaviour, as much as could ordinarily be tolerated in a junior VP of a big corporation and that much over the limit which said he was not a man to trifle with. Item the amount and nature of the work he arranged to have channelled to his office, selected so the visits of other zecks found him engaged in vastly important transactions.


He had been recruited to the company under the provisions of the Equal Opportunity Act which bound corporations like General Technics to employ the same ratio of whites to Aframs as was found in the country at large, plus or minus five per cent. Unlike some of his intake, he’d been welcome with a sigh of relief by the then vice-president in charge of personnel and recruitment, who had almost given up hope of finding enough Aframs willing to accept the standards of their host society. (A doctorate? What’s a doctorate? A piece of paleass’s toilet-paper.)

Norman N. House, D.Sc., was a prize. Knowing that, he’d made the race to win him long and hard.

Perceptive for the third time in his life (the first time: picking his parents; the second: sideswiping the only other contender for the post he now held down), the VP noticed that his new subordinate had a talent for impressing his personality on people he had never met before and was unlikely to meet again. They said later that he had House style. It meant that while he could bear to forget others he hated the idea that they should forget him.

The VP, envying this talent, took to cultivating Norman House in the hope that some of it might rub off on him. The hope was unfounded. Either a man is born with the gift or he learns it by conscious application over twenty years. Norman was then twenty-six and had been applying himself for the requisite two decades.

But the VP was tossed a few glib, helpful snippets.

What I think of him? Well, his papers are good (spoken judiciously, willing to make allowances) but to my mind the man who has to wear MasQ-Lines is basically unsure of his own competence. They pad the frontal area, you know.

The VP, who had six pairs, never wore them again.

What do I think of her? Well, she profiles okay on the testing sheet, but to my mind any girl who wears a Forlon&Morler Maxess top over a pair of impervious slax is the type who won’t go through with what she starts.

The VP, who had invited her to dinner and expected to be paid in the current contemporary coin, excused himself on grounds of imaginary illness and went grumpily home to his wife for the night.

What I think of the annual report? Well, the graphing is up on last year’s, but the noise level generated by this operation suggests it could be fifteen to eighteen per cent higher than it is. I’m wondering if it’ll last.

The VP, who had been dithering, decided to retire at fifty with the Grade One bonus stock issue instead of hanging on to collect the Grade Three entitlement, double the size, due at sixty. He sold the stock as soon as he acquired it and chewed his nails while he watched its value creep up month by month. Eventually he shot himself.

It was his suspicion that the rise of GT stock might be due to his own replacement by Norman which killed him.


Norman walked briskly towards the general elevator. He declined to use the one that led directly from street-level to the wall behind his desk: It’s ludicrous for someone who deals with people not to mingle with the people he’s dealing with, isn’t it?

At least one of the senior VP’s had lately stopped using his private elevator too.

But in any case, he was going up.

Waiting, there was one of the company shiggies. She smiled at him, not because they were acquainted—he preferred to let it be felt that someone who relied on the firm to get him shiggies was less of a man than Norman House—but because the time and effort he invested in trifles like not using a private elevator paid off in the common belief that of all the twenty VP’s in the company the most approachable and sociable was Mr. House. Stockboys toting crates in GT’s West Virginia electronics plant shared the opinion, never having set eyes on him.

The smile he automatically returned was forced. He was edgy. An invitation to take lunch on the presidential floor with the senior zecks might be accounted for in two main ways: there might be promotion in the offing, although the grapevine he assiduously cultivated had brought him no hint of it; or, far more likely, they might be planning yet another review of the staffing system. He had endured two such since inheriting his present job, but they were a nuisance, and sometimes he could not hang on to people he had schemed for months to slot into influential posts.

The hole! I can cope with these paleasses. I did it before.

The descending light of the elevator showed and a soft chime rang out. Norman returned his attention to the here and now. A clock over the door, keyed like all those in the GT tower to the famous critonium master clock, indicated 12–44 poppa-momma. If he let the shiggy take the car down, he’d be a measured minute late for lunch with the Highly Important Personages.

That should be about right.

When the car arrived, he waved the girl past him. I’m going up, he told her.

Promotion in the offing or not, he meant it.


The predicted few moments behind schedule, he emerged on the presidential floor. Synthetic grass hushed under his feet as he walked towards the group gathered alongside the swimming-pool. Four of the shapeliest of the company shiggies were disporting themselves nude in the water. He thought of the recurrent joke question—Why doesn’t GT pioneer company codders?—and had trouble masking his amusement as he was greeted by Old GT herself.

Merely by looking at Georgette Tallon Buckfast one could not have guessed she was both an extraordinary person and an extraordinary artifact. One had to be told that she was ninety. She looked at worst sixty: plump, well-favoured, crowned with enough of her own brown hair to belie the old charge that she was more male than female. True, close study of her bosom might reveal the inequality which betrayed her use of a cardiac pacemaker, but nowadays many people wore such accessories by the time they were seventy or even younger. Only intensive prying had led Norman to knowledge of the lung-tissue transplant, the plastic venous valves, the kidney graft, the pinned bones, the vocal cords replaced because of cancer.

According to reliable estimates she was somewhat richer than the British royal family. Wealth like that could buy health, even if only by instalments.

With her were Hamilcar Waterford, the company treasurer, much younger than Old GT but looking older; Rex Foster-Stern, senior VP in charge of projects and planning, a man of Norman’s own height and build who affected Dundreary whiskers and what the Children of X sneeringly termed a non-partisan tan; and an Afram whose features had a tantalisingly familiar cast, though he was not someone Norman had seen around the GT tower before—fiftyish, stocky, bald, Kenyatta beard, looking tired.

Norman considered a new explanation for his having been invited to this luncheon. Last time he had encountered a middle-aged stranger at such a function it had been a retired admiral GT was thinking of adding to the board for the sake of his service contacts. He had gone to a hovercraft manufacturer instead, so nothing had come of it. But if this was another of the same, Norman was going to be as insolent as he could manage without jeopardising his career. No kinky-knobbed Uncle Tom was going to be slotted into a high board chair above Norman House.

Then Old GT said, Elihu, let me introduce Norman House, who’s our VP i/c personnel and recruitment, and the world shifted to a different axis.

Elihu. Elihu Rodan Masters, career diplomat, U. S. Ambassador to Beninia. But whatinole could GT want with a snake’s-tongue scrap of land like that, stuck wedgewise into Africa with neither skills nor natural resources to be exploited?

There was no time for speculation, though. He put out his hand, cutting short GT’s introduction with the gesture. No real need to introduce anyone to Mr. Masters, ma’am, he said briskly. Someone with his kind of personal distinction is environment-forming for all of us, and I feel I know him well though I never had the chance to shake with him before.

In Old GT’s face—for a woman who had built herself both a giant corporation and a huge personal fortune, she was surprisingly bad at controlling her expression—Norman could see annoyance at being interrupted struggling with satisfaction at the prettiness of the compliment.

Drink? she said finally, the latter winning out.

No thanks, ma’am, Norman answered. It’s against the word of the Prophet, you know.

Beninia, hm? Something to do with opening an African market for MAMP? Over half a billion bucks tied up in that, and no place to sell the produce of the richest mineral strike since Siberia—it can’t go on. But Beninia can’t even afford to feed its own population from what I hear …

Plainly embarrassed at having forgotten or not known that one of her own VP’s was a Muslim, Old GT took refuge in testiness. The House style was proof against that. Pleased with the turn the talk was taking, extremely aware of Master’s eyes on him, Norman thoroughly enjoyed the ten minutes of conversation which preluded their adjournment to table. In fact he took it so much for granted that the buzz of the phone a minute or two after one o’clock was to herald the serving of the meal that he continued with the story he’d been telling—a mild anti-Afram joke suitable for mixed company, well salted with the derogatory term brown-nose—until GT shouted at him the second time.

"House! House! There’s trouble with a gang of visitors being shown over Shalmaneser! On your orbit, isn’t it?"

Preserving his exterior calm by reflex, Norman rose from his polychair.

If this is something they’ve laid on to screw me, I’ll give them dreck for dinner. I’ll—

Forgive me, Mr. Masters, he said in a slightly bored tone. I’ll only be a minute or two, I’m sure.

And headed for the elevator, seething.

tracking with closeups (2)

YONDERBOY

Talk about launch windows all it means some pudding-hole zeck knotted his strings Shalmaneser-pizzleteaser whyinole waste the time come all this way to New York better weather even without a dome fit to freeze your cod off in here better shiggies wearing less and better pot to cap the lot eight today already here it is not yet one poppa-momma and hardly a heist in a haywagon


Inside the vault housing Shalmaneser: cool. Waiting for the launch window, which is a decorative way of saying when the GT guide is good and ready to start, this fact has already decided several of the crowd one hundred nine strong (some of whom are tourists some of whom are genuine potential recruits lured by the handouts and TV plugs of the GT Corp. some of whom have seen themselves here so often in the personae of Mr. & Mrs. Everywhere that they couldn’t tell you why they bothered to make the visit in reality and some of whom are GT’s own plantees primed to speak up at the right moments and give the impression of Things Happening) that they aren’t going to be interested in what they’re shown. Cold! In May! Under the Manhattan Fuller Dome! And clad in Nydofoam sneakers, MasQ-Lines, Forlon&Morler skirtlets and dresslets; strung about with Japind Holocams with Biltin g’teed Norisk LazeeLaser monochrome lamps, instreplay SeeyanEar recorders; pocket-heavy with Japind Jettiguns, SeKure Stunnems, Karatands to be slipped on as easily as your grandmother drew on her glove.

Uneasy, watching their accidental companions on this guided tour.

Well-fed.

Shifty-eyed, slipping tranks into their chomp-chomp jaws.

Damned good-looking.

Thinking that any one of these crowding-near neighbours could be a mucker.

The New Poor of the happening world.


Stal Lucas didn’t like the way the guide looked over the party when he finally deigned to show. Someone looking over that many people wouldn’t notice Stal Lucas, individual: age twenty, height six, wearing SirFer S-Pad-Drills, Mogul slax and a freeflying Blood Onyx shirjack with real gold fastener tags.

He’d see, rather, a vaguely milling bunch of misfits, vagabonds and pseudos, out of which some subgroups could be separated. Like Stal and his sparewheels from California, in New York on a two-night-one-day Jettex Cursion for the lift and not getting any. The world shrunk so tight you couldn’t pull it on over your shoes and still this distancing effect between the coasts …

On the entire one hundred and nine, there were four shiggies to fine-focus: one orbiting, probably by now ignorant not only of what building she was in but of what astral plane she was inhabiting; two with codders they hung to the arms of undetachablike; one like she just blew in from RUNG with African hair and bilberry skin which it wouldn’t do for Stal to be seen counting down with.

The rest were so drecky it was hard to believe, going right down to one in a shapeless brown bag of a garment toting a big heavy sacking purse, hair cropped to a crewcut, nervous face shiny except where it was chapped or spotted—a Divine Daughter, probably. Nothing short of religion could persuade a normal girl to make herself look so awful.

Whereinole the shiggies? Stal said half under his breath. In company jobs, of course. Of all the megalopoli New York ate most and paid best. Same problem Ellayway, though there the hirer was government, drecking the draftees to the Pacific Conflict Zone, but who’s richer than a government?

So kill time. So put up with this sheeting notion of being dragged around a cold vault. So wait until tomorrow anti-matter when the plane will take Stal and sparewheels back to love on her and oh Bay.

Where they keep Teresa, say? muttered Zink Hodes, sparewheel nearest to Stal. He alluded to Shalmaneser’s legendary girl-friend, source of endless dirty jokes. Stal didn’t deign to reply. Zink had gone storehopping last night and was wearing a Nytype outfit. Stal was unpleased.

A couple up ahead with not one or two but count ’em three prodgies trailing along: embarrassed at the attention they attracted from envious neighbours in the crowd, explaining in loud voices that the three weren’t all theirs but they were taking a cousin’s appleofmyeye out for the day as well as their own two, mollifying the people around them but not so readily that they weren’t the last to shush when the guide finally called the visitors towards him.

Good afternoon and welcome to the General Technics tower. I don’t have to tell anyone about GT—

So why you don’t get the mouth sewn shut? whispered Zink.

—because it’s environment-forming for everyone in this hemisphere and even beyond, from Moonbase Zero to the Mid-Atlantic Mining Project on the deep ocean floor. But there’s one element of our manifold operations which always fascinates you, Mr. and Mrs. Everywhere, and that’s what you’re going to be shown.

He should fascinate good and tight, such as weld it, Zink said.

Stal cracked fingers at the two other sparewheels a pace distant and gestured they should shut Zink in from both sides.

Leave you behind, Stal said. Nylover. Or get on that plane we put you out at thirty thousand, no ass-padding for you land.

But I—

Fascinate, Stal said, and Zink complied, eyes round with dismay.

Notice the granite slab you’re passing under with the lettering engraved by GT’s high-precision explosive forming process. They said nobody could work natural stone explosively so we went ahead and did it, thus bearing out the company motto at the head of the list.

A dropout near Stal moved lips in an audible whisper as he struggled to interpret the obliquely viewed writing.

Underneath are listed prime examples of human shortsightedness, like you’ll see it’s impossible for men to breathe at over thirty miles an hour, and a bumblebee cannot possibly fly, and interplanetary spaces are God’s quarantine regulations. Try telling the folk at Moonbase Zero about that!

A few sycophantic laughs. Several places ahead of Stal the Divine Daughter crossed herself at the Name.

Why is it so sheeting cold in here? yelled someone up the front near the guide.

If you were wearing GT’s new Polyclime fabrics, like me, you wouldn’t feel it, the guide responded promptly.

Drecky plantees, yet. How much of this crowd are GT staff members hired by government order and kept hanging about on makeweight jobs for want of anything better to do?

But that cues me in to another prime instance of how wrong can you be? Seventy or eighty years back they were saying to build a computer to match a human brain would take a skyscraper to house it and Niagara Falls to cool it. Well, that’s not up on the slab there because they were only half wrong about the cooling bit—in fact Niagara Falls wouldn’t do, it’s not cold enough. We use liquid helium by the ton load. But they were sheeting wrong about the skyscraper. Spread around this balcony and I’ll show you why.

Passive, the hundred and nine filed around a horseshoe gallery overlooking the chill sliced-egg volume of the vault. Below on the main floor identical-looking men and women came and went, occasionally glancing upwards with an air of incuriosity. Resentful, another score or so of the hundred and nine decided they weren’t going to be interested no matter

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