Stand on Zanzibar was innovative within the science fiction genre for mixing narrative with entire chapters dedicated to providing background information and worldbuilding, to create a sprawling narrative that presents a complex and multi-faceted view of the story's future world. Such information-rich chapters were often constructed from many short paragraphs, sentences, or fragments thereof—pulled from in-world sources such as slogans, snatches of conversation, advertising text, songs, extracts from newspapers and books, and other cultural detritus. The narrative itself follows the lives of a large cast of characters, chosen to give a broad cross-section of the future world. Some of these interact directly with the central narratives, while others add depth to Brunner's world. Brunner appropriated this basic narrative technique from the USA Trilogy, by John Dos Passos. On the first page of the novel, Brunner provides a quote from Marshall McLuhan's The Gutenberg Galaxy that approximates such a technique, entitling it "the Innis mode" as an apparent label.
Title
The primary engine of the novel's story is overpopulation and its projected consequences. The title refers to an early twentieth-century claim that the world's population could fit onto the Isle of Wight—which has an area of —if they were all standing upright. Brunner remarked that the growing world population now required a larger island; the 3.5 billion people living in 1968 could stand together on the Isle of Man, while the 7 billion people who he projected would be alive in 2010 would need to stand on Zanzibar. Throughout the book, the image of the entire human race standing shoulder-to-shoulder on a small island is a metaphor for a crowded world.
Structure
As in Dos Passos's work, the chapters are headed by one of several rubrics:
"Continuity": Most of the linear narrative is contained in these chapters.
"Tracking with Closeups": These are similar to Dos Passos's "Camera" sections, and focus closely on ancillary characters before they become part of the main narrative, or simply serve to paint a picture of the state of the world.
"The Happening World": These chapters consist of collage-like collections of short, sometimes single-sentence, descriptive passages. The intent is to capture the vibrant, noisy, and often ephemeral situations arising in the novel's world. At least one chapter of the narrative, a party where most of the characters meet and where the plot makes a significant shift in direction, is presented in this way.
"Context": These chapters, as the name suggests, provide a setting for the novel. They consist of imaginary headlines, classified ads, and quotations from the works of the character Chad C. Mulligan, a pop sociologist who comments wryly on his surroundings and in one chapter, actual headlines from the 1960s.
Plot
The story is set in 2010, mostly in the United States. A number of plots and many vignettes are played out in this future world, based on Brunner's extrapolation of social, economic, and technological trends. The key main trends are based on the enormous population and its impact: social stresses, eugenic legislation, widening social divisions, future shock and extremism. Certain of Brunner's guesses are fairly close, others not, and some ideas clearly show their 1960s mindset. Many futuristic concepts, products and services, and slang are presented. A supercomputer named Shalmaneser is an essential plot element. The Hipcrime Vocab and other works by the fictional sociologist Chad C. Mulligan are frequent sources of quotations. Some examples of slang include "codder", "shiggy", "whereinole", "prowlie", "offyourass", "bivving" and "mucker". A new technology introduced is "eptification", a form of mental programming. Another is a kind of interactive television that shows the viewer as part of the program. Genetically modified microorganisms are used as terrorist weapons. The book centres on two New York men, Donald Hogan and Norman Niblock House, who share an apartment. House is a rising executive at General Technics, one of the all-powerful corporations. Using his "Afram" heritage to advance his position, he has risen to vice-president at age twenty-six. Hogan is introduced with a single paragraph rising out of nowhere: "Donald Hogan is a spy". Donald shares an apartment with House and is undercover as a student. Hogan's real work is as a "synthesist", although he is a commissioned officer and can be called up for active duty. The two main plots concern the fictional African state of Beninia making a deal with General Technics to take over the management of their country, in a bid to speed updevelopment from third world to first world status. A second major plot is a break-through in genetic engineering in the fictional South East Asian nation of Yatakang, to which Hogan is soon sent by the US Government to investigate. The two plots eventually cross, bringing potential implications for the entire world.
Books within the book
Quotations from books by Chad C. Mulligan, a former sociologist turned iconoclastic social commentator, appear throughout the novel to illustrate or contrast plot points. The books are:
The Hipcrime Vocab, a satirical collection of dictionary pseudo-definitions similar to Ambrose Bierce's The Devil's Dictionary. "Hipcrime" is one of Mulligan's neologisms; his definition in the book is: "You committed one when you opened this book. Keep it up. It's our only hope."
You're an Ignorant Idiot, a series of pieces poking holes in "common sense" and received wisdom.
Better ? than ?
You: Beast, a "popular science" book, condensing the science of mob psychology, population pressure, and biological imperative so that readers living in the increasingly populated world can better understand their own environment.
Critical reception
declared that Stand on Zanzibar "takes your breath away," saying that the novel "put itself together seemingly without effort paints a picture of the immediate future as it will, Brunner convinces you, certainly be." James Blish, however, received the novel negatively, saying "I disliked everybody in it and I was constantly impeded by the suspicion that Brunner was not writing for himself but for a Prize....A man of Brunner's gifts should have seen ab initio that U.S.A. was a stillbirth even in its originator's hands". Thirty years after its initial publication, Greg Bear praised Stand on Zanzibar as a science fiction novel that, unusually, has not become dated since its original appearance: "It's not quite the future we imagined it to be, but it still reads as fresh as it did back in 1968, and that's an amazing accomplishment!" In a retrospective review for The Guardian in 2010, Sam Jordison found the novel a "skilfully realised future dystopia", writing that it allowed Brunner "to express his most interesting ideas regarding corporate ethics, free will, the question of whether scientific progress is always good for humanity and the conflict between the individual and the state". Ursula K. Heise declared that "Stand on Zanzibar, to some extent, sets the tone for literary texts from the 1980s and 1990s that reengage the issue of population growth against the background of a multitude of interacting political, social, economic, ecological, and technological problems". Jonathan Nolan was partially inspired by Stand on Zanzibar in developing the content for the third season of the television showWestworld.
