Stand on Zanzibar: The Hugo Award-Winning Novel Paperback – August 16, 2011

This book has good ideas, but it's all over the place. It is a story with multiple view points, but only focused on a couple of characters. Most of the characters introduced only got one chapter and were only mentioned again just to end their story. These characters to me could've had interesting stories, but we're under utilized, and I felt the author did a better job with this similar style in "Sheep look up"; but it was incredible how much world building he did for this book. Also there was a ton of jargon you had to decipher to get a understanding of what is being said (I guess this cryptic language comes with every sci-fi novel), and the stream of consciousness sections of this story were maddening.I would recommend this book to people who like stories with multiple perspectives, and don't mind a nihilistic plotlines. The novel has a very interesting dystopian vision of the future.

I read this book when it was new 30-40 years ago. At that time it hinted at some weird future that was interesting and exotic but ...just impossible. NOW it reads like a checklist . This guy is a visionary! What a book!! Buy iit! You'll be blown away

This Book is best read in the same staccato , spin the roulette wheel, Forgot my ADHD meds fashion in that it was written. Please just make sure you have your AM radio on to a talk-news station for the white noise, your tv set with the sound off Watching the history channel and some documentary and finally your favorite drink and maybe an e cig. Yeah that should rip your senses apart enough to set the scene for its choppy blasts of info and background that are full of incredibly insightful looks into todays dystopian leaning trendiness. Must read for students of Real history as well as Political sciences. Reading a few full reveiws online will help you meld yourself into this world although it is worth the work.Of note is the missing of thepolitcal correctness issue which could NEVER have been predicted in '68

I read this book for the first time many moons ago, and I bought a Kindle version to see how well it stood up to time. For the most part it did. I grew a little impatient with the length, but for the most part Brunner was fairly prescient about the way society was heading. We still aren't there yet, thank God, but he's pretty dead-on about where we are headed.The book was more exciting when I was an impressionable 21-year old college student, but it still held my interest.

A bit slow in the beginning but this was enjoyable and ended up having quite a message. The science fiction part was quite interesting also as he predicted cell phones, gene editing and many other modern technologies. The westworld tv show took quite a bit from this book

What can you say about one of the most important books ever written in the science fiction genre.I felt like I had gotten on a runaway train with William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, Isaac Azimov, Jack Kerouac, Kurt Vonnegut, and the Merry Pranksters fighting to be the conductors.It was one of the most prescient books I have ever read. While Brunner didn't get everything right, (this was written in 1967, I believe), and some things aren't even remotely true, what he DID get right was chillingly right.There is nothing like this book. It has to be read to be believed. And, I urge everyone who has ever had an interest in this field to read it. It really is that important.

The writing style was a shock to most SF readers when the book was published. That is unless they had previously readJon Dos Pasos’s “Manhattan Transfer” first, in which case Brunner’s “avant-garde” stylistics were simply a rip-off. But if you didn’t know better it was impressive.To me there are no sympathetic characters. Interesting characters, perhaps but no one I would want to identify with. Basically the idea is that the world is going to hell in a hand basket and there is nothing you can do about it. By half way through you don’t expect anyone to have a happy or even comfortable ending. I guess that pretty much mirrored how a lot of us who read back in the day felt about the real world which made the book seem profound.The book also illustrates the hazards of writing SF set in the near future. That “future” has mostly come and gone by the early 21st century so reading it now make suspension of disbelief a considerable chore.

If the word prescient means anything to you fellow reader this is the book. Published in 1968 it was part of my teenage sci fi reading binge. The author magically [predicts almost all the major technological devices that are so ubiquitous in our daily lives. Computer processing cell phone tech video chat and the list goes on. This is a fine read. Quite fun with the style utilized by the author. Not exactly linear at all times. I guess even the style is akin to the way we get stories on television. This book will appeal to fans of the genre as well as readers that enjoy literature. Yes literature. This is an important book that grows in stature and greatness as the years continue. Buy this read this enjoy this and then live right.

This book was written in the year I turned four and first read by me when I was in my twenties. I am now fifty-five and it is a book I would always want to own. Its core message, which is about overpopulation, is even more relevant now than it was when it was written. As an aspiring writer myself, this book reminds me that it is perfectly possible to make serious points in ways that get people laughing out loud. Recommended for anyone who cares about our planet or the power of words to change minds (or preferably both) but also has a sense of fun.

A stunning novel where one gets flashes and bits of story, then they start to come together and it becomes irresistable!! Imagine a rope, frayed at the end, almost to the individual threads. THAT is where you begin (without knowledge of the unified rope in the future). These threads start gradually to come together to form individual stories which merge in diverse ways to become THE story (the whole rope)!! A vision of the future that is not ENTIRELY ACCURATE but, in some areas it is chillingly close!!The title come from the theory that, if people stood side to side and virtually one in front of the other, the population of the world would (at one time) have fitted on the Isle of Wight. In this future, the population has expanded and it would need an island the size of Zanzibar to fit them all in!

Dazzling. A number of modernist authors pioneered montages of writing to bring newspaper cuttings/ film scenes/snatched conversation and so forth into he novel. The obvious example in John Dos Passos. Stand on Zanzibar takes that technique builds on it and pushes it a little furthjer to tell a political/social tale of the near future. It shows how that technique, first used in the 1920s and 30s really did anticipate the way modern people would experience the world and perhaps how it is the only way to portray the multi-faceted and data-overloaded modern/future world.

I first read this novel some 40 years ago and was struck by both its literary style and the way the author focussed on what were then embryonic environmental and political concerns. As the years went by, his analysis has -alas - proved to be all too accurate on all fronts. If one has any concerns about where GM agriculture might be leading us, read this book. If anything, I am much more worried about the future of mankind and the planet on rereading the novel than I was when first I purchased it.

I'm re-reading Stand on Zanzibar because I'd suddenly remembered is was set in this year, 2010. It's something I've always been fascinated by, comparing the predictions of SF with the present as it arrives, the most famous example for many being Arthur C Clarke's 2001 nine years ago. Anyway, now we're seeing 2010 from the viewpoint of 1968, so of course the technology is all wrong, but John Brunner transcends that. Give it a go, it's called a classic for good reason.