John Brunner's “Stand on Zanzibar” spookily predicted today

If you haven't read The Shockwave Rider, do yourself a favor and read it ASAP.

One fascinating aspect of it, aside from the whole "computer hacker hero before there were any" bit, is that it was largely based on a non-fiction work - Alvin Toffler's Future Shock. Brunner was apparently so interested in what Toffler had to say, he chose to portray his ideas in novel form.

And Future Shock is another book which I can't recommend highly enough. Toffler might not have been right about everything, but I think he really hit on something with the basic concept of "future shock" as a state where you constantly feel out of sorts and disjointed due to how rapidly the world is changing. And given that he wrote that book in the late 60's, early 70's, imagine how much more profound that effect is now (just due to technological advances if nothing else).

I'm not sure either Toffler or Brunner had, or claimed to have, any answers for how to deal with the "future shock" phenomenon, but I think it behooves all of us to think about the idea and ways to deal with it.

Plus, The Shockwave Rider is just plain entertaining. And depending on who you ask, it's either the first cyberpunk novel, or an example of "proto-cyberpunk", and probably influenced any number of subsequent works that are widely beloved in this community.

Well written, fun, and bizarrely prescient compared to a lot of SF written decades later. Even William Gibson (of all people) has Soviet astronauts in space and hard SF themes in short stories written in the 80s, but Stand on Zanzibar predicts the rise of SE Asian powers all the way back in 68, and is far more biology/sociology themed.

It has some great epigrams sprinkled through:

"Papa Hegel he say that all we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history. I know people who can't even learn from what happened this morning. Hegel must have been taking the long view."

"SHALMANESER That real cool piece of hardware up at the GT tower. They say he's apt to evolve to true consciousness one day. Also they say he's as intelligent as a thousand of us put together, which isn't really saying much, because when you put a thousand of us together look how stupidly we behave."

Note that a lot of the rest of Brunner's output is very different - I found the Traveller in Black stuff pretty much unreadable.

Another don't-miss Brunner 1975 novel: The Shockwave Rider ...

"notable for its hero's use of computer hacking skills to escape pursuit in a dystopian future, and for the coining of the word "worm" to describe a program that propagates itself through a computer network.... In the novel, data privacy is reserved for corporate entities and individuals who may then conceal wrongdoing; by contrast, normal citizens do not enjoy significant privacy."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shockwave_Rider

The Sheep Look Up is fantastic. It's a very dark novel, but at the same time it has a great sense of irony. In particular, it keeps setting up characters and then throwing them to the wolves faster than you can say "Game of Thrones". For example, the plot is ostensibly about a legendary environmental activist who is about to come out of hiding — he's sought for inciting his followers to violence — at a pivotal time as the world is being thrown into a series of political wars/crises caused, indirectly, by environmental disasters (think Syria) and squabbling for resources, but the moment the hero emerges for his triumphant appeal to the American people, everything blows up in his face.

The article doesn't mention The Jagged Orbit, which Brunner considered to form a trilogy together with Stand on Zanzibar and The Sheep Look Up. Anyone read it?

a lot of the golden age sci fi authors were good guessers.

they were prolific (and their misses fell out of favor), scientifically literate (the foundation sciences have not progressed much since the 60s, biology/genetics being the major exception) and based their stories on old myths and legends (a standard trope in fiction), which allowed a type of reflective writing on the human condition with forward prediction power. many were also tied into anti-soviet/anti-american spy networks and traveled frequently working as information gatherers and agents for their respective governments.

sumna technologiae (stanislaw lem) is a good primer for people working in AI today, as lem attempts to understand cybernetics through the golden age lens. arkady and strugatsky's hard to be a god is about the problems of trying to order society and artificially advance it.

the soviet skepticism towards scientific/technological utopias comes through much stronger, given those authors lived through a failed one. the movement continued into the real sciences, fomenko's new chronology being the gold standard of what happens when you erode faith in your society, truth and the stability of reality. the western system is going through a similar social collapse the soviet one went through, reading the soviet literature of the time will help you understand the coming future of the english speaking peoples, no death or violence, just a disoriented sadness, a type of alien haze which clouds your senses and has you slowly floating down into cold darkness.

Let's hope that his Total Eclipse [1] does not predict tomorrow as well. It's one of the bleakest yet believable books I've read in a long time. First paragraph of the description from the link:

In 2020, an international space team, exploring Sigma Draconis, 19 light years from earth, discovers the remains of a highly advanced society that has left behind its most spectacular artifact; the largest telescope imaginable, carved & polished from a natural moon crater. Successive space crews determine that the native culture evolved & disappeared mysteriously after a mere 3000 years of existence. It's now 2028. Another mission reaches the planet with just one goal--to discover why the civilization disappeared--& with just one hope--that this knowledge will prevent the same thing from happening on earth.

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/41087.Total_Eclipse

My username came from going through a huge John Brunner phase when I was a teenager.

I always make sure to have at least two copies of Stand on Zanzibar on hand at any point in time so I can always gift one to a friend on a whim (I hunt used bookstores and pick up another copy if I’m below 3)

>>> As Smith describes it, he imagined a Victorian time-traveller pitching up in the 1960s, and then pondered how he’d go about explaining to them everything from the telephone to the sexual revolution

A while back oh write about taking a naive teenager and a seen-it-all elder and 'diff'ing their thoughts - everything left would be deep cultural assumptions

This is a nice complimentary idea

From the article (about a book written 50-odd years ago):-

"... and there’s a teeming social network that allows media organisations to put out hits of news and receive real-time fan feedback."

And at the bottom of the page:-

"If you would like to comment on this story or anything else you have seen on BBC Culture, head over to our Facebook page or message us on Twitter."

Always nice to see people rediscover John Brunner, he's one of my favorite authors. There's a quote i once heard that goes approximately like this : "Philip K Dicks novels turn into movies, John Brunners novels turn into reality".

Stand on Zanzibar was a real trip the first time i read it, though in later years my favorite Brunner novel has been Squares of the City. Its not as scifi-ey as Zanzibar, but it is interesting for being built on a famous chess game and for exploring the nature of propaganda and its influence on the body politic.

And honestly, deciding to write a book where the characters conform to the moves of an almost 100 year old chess game and pulling it off is just amazing.

I read Brunner voraciously when younger. I find "shockwave rider" aged badly, it's like SciFi juvenilia. Along with his source book, Alvin Toffler's "future shock" it sat in the remainder pile of most secondhand bookshops.

Some of his other work is .. bizarre. A book about sentient plants on a planet beset by Massive meteorite threat stimulating speedy evolution.

I can't but think Brunner was depressed. His books make grim reading sometimes. Perhaps less depressed than David Lindsay but overall he thinks humans are weak, and unlikely to find politically stable paths out of trouble.

In my childhood I went through a period where I only read sci-fi, borrowed in batches of 7 books a week from the city library. Sci-fi wasn't in a separate section, but the library had color codes for different genres, marked by a dot on the spine of the books. Sci-fi's dot was yellow, and it wasn't yet lumped into the weird 'Sci-Fi and Fantasy' arranged marriage of later.

I started scanning for yellow dots and reading through the shelves in alphabetical order, backtracking my way sometimes to pick up on books that were borrowed by others, or just added new in previous passes.

For that reason Brunner came rather early with pearls like 'Stand on Zanzibar' and of course 'The Shockwave Rider' most certainly fueling the habit. Even back then at a very young age I felt the dystopian writers for the most part were more thinking in terms of complete system dynamics while the utopian writers had a more narrow view and thus it comes as no surprise that the former turned out to be less blind-sighted than the latter in hindsight.

Brunner was amazingly prescient, but sadly almost forgotten now.

See also The Stone that Never Came Down - the most 70s novel ever.

Ironic timing in that I'm about half way through this. Started a few months back and got side tracked but just picked it up again last night.

As at least one other said, the presentation/style is not like anything you have seen before and it takes getting used to (I'm not quite there yet). The first half of the book (roughly where I am) is kinda slow as well, but starting to pick up the pace now.

It is one of the most prescient books I've read, and a bit of a fave, as my user name probably shows (a character in the book). It is notoriously hard to start reading though because of its style - it breaks up the story with montages of news articles, stories and excerpts from books. Though once you get in the groove its hard to put down.

While Brunner's forecasts may have been prescient, that might be due to the freedom he enjoyed as a science fiction writer.

Forecasters making earnest and serious attempts to predict technological and social change over a couple decades often get it badly wrong.

One of my favorite books is "Megamistakes: Forecasting and the Myth of Rapid Technological Change" by Stephen P. Schnaars, which provides many examples of poor predictions. In some cases, technological change is simply delayed, as in video calling, which can now be done with smartphones 50 years after PicturePhone. In other cases, such as supersonic airliners or gas turbine powered cars, the predictions may never become true.

I wonder whether you can't write this story about almost any SF author. If you write a dozen books and stories each with a plethora of new ideas, you are sure to get some things right. Pick out all the things they got right, add a few mistakes for 'balance' and tadaaa, another visionary SF author.

Has anyone done statistical analysis on the accuracy of 'predictions' by SF authors? Are some really more visionary than others?

I always thought of that book when I watched Bigelow's movie "Detroit". It's not scifi, it's history.

Is this confirmation bias?

huh... the article says that in response to overpopulation that the world "governments have responded globally with draconian eugenics laws, harnessing genetics to determine who can and cannot be allowed to have children."

Well, we do have the same overpopulation that brunner predicted, but instead our governments encourage overpopulation because it props up our Western ponzi economies, which are based on debt and consumer demand....our govt's should be responding to the overpopulation crisis, but they do not because they are under the control of the big corporations that want to keep propping up the ponzi economy...so, brunner called it wrong on this angle...he failed to foresee our out of control Western pseudo-democracies