Authors: John Brunner

Stand on Zanzibar (2 page)

BOOK: Stand on Zanzibar

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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.

Stand on Zanzibar (2 page)

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