Fiction Addiction - rereading "Stand on Zanzibar" by John Brunner

Fiction Addiction - rereading "Stand on Zanzibar" by John Brunner

Warning: All Spoilers, Not a Review
If you are thinking of reading "Stand on Zanzibar" (SoZ),  it is worth trying at least a couple of hundred pages, especially if you are a developing writer.  It was a Hugo-winning blockbuster SF book when it came out in 1968: unique in style, massive in size and scope, and full of ideas and memorable characters. It is still in print as part of the SF Masterworks series. Born in 1934, Brunner would have been in his early thirties, a hard-working and skilled professional writer, someone who cared deeply about injustices and social problems. I couldn't put the book down when I first read it and I have re-read it at least a couple of times since then.

Fifty-four years have passed since it was written, and ten years have passed since 2010, the year in which the book was set.  There are biographies of Brunner and retrospective reviews of the book on line, some of which have useful insights. For example,  I had no idea that Brunner was borrowing techniques from John Dos Passos and adapting them to create a world as carefully realized as Middle Earth or Dune. But not every great book ages well. I recently re-read Stand on Zanzibar for the last time so I could make a few important notes and move on in my recovery from addiction to fiction.

Understanding the context:
The 1960s were not well understood even by those of us who were there. The first half of the 1960s was a lot like the 1950s culturally: an uneven postwar economic boom in industrialized countries, with the uneven  decline of nationalist colonialism everywhere else. In Canada, things started to change slowly with the 1960 election of the Jean Lesage government in Quebec, the start of the Quiet Revolution. The landmark year was 1967, when psychedelic drugs went mainstream with the Summer of Love in San Francisco, the release of Sergeant Pepper,  and millions of young Canadians on the move to see Expo 67. In science fiction there was a parallel cultural shift going on: "Dangerous Visions" collection of stories was published, and Roger Zelazny's "Lord of Light" won a Hugo. Frank Herbert's  "Dune" had appeared only two years before in 1965.

 SoZ opens with an introduction to the Innis Mode, quote from 1960s cultural celebrity Marshall McLuhan. Canadian academic Harold Innis is not widely remembered but he had a reputation for exceptional insights into how societies worked. Brunner was also looking at the "big picture" on the same scale as Innis. He voices his insights in the character of Chad Mulligan, an obnoxious and arrogant sociologist quoted throughout the book. Brunner followed up SoZ with The Jagged Orbit, The Sheep Look Up, and Shockwave Ride, three more books that attempt to give 1970s readers some perspective on the social, ecological, and information technology changes unfolding around them.

Things Brunner saw clearly:
The fundamental concept of the book was correct: there would be about 7 billion people on the planet in 2010. Housing would be crowded and expensive, some people would be sleeping on the streets, some people would be hungry and malnourished.

Items that were in the news in the 1960s would continue as trends:  global superpowers, corporate superpowers, manipulative media, a fashion industry built on human insecurity, sexual exploitation of women, massive use of recreational drugs, random violence by the mentally ill, dissatisfied fringe political elements,  street gang crime, satellite communications, and electronics everywhere.

And he was correct that the promises of biotechnology would prove difficult to live up to, that the military/political complex would continue brainwashing massive numbers of people, and that religion would continue to ruin people's lives on a more personal scale.

Things he understood less well:
At that time, he didn't seem to know how stored-program computers worked, even though he could have just asked someone what Fortran and LISP were all about. His fictional intelligent supercomputer Shalmaneser, a central character in the book,  is custom hard-wired, not programmed. And like most of us in the 1960s, he doesn't seem to have seen that integrated circuits would lead to microprocessors and personal computing devices like smart phones.

What he got seriously wrong:
Brunner's other books confirm that he was a strong advocate of racial equality who also held socially progressive views on other topics, so SoZ features the decline of racism and the acceptance of homosexuality. But while he is fascinated by the problems of social organization, he paints no picture of ordinary people working together to change the world.  That's why he absolutely missed the new variations of religion that were about to blossom, and failed to see the rise of feminism and identity politics that were actually taking shape around him.  SoZ with its "Divine Daughters" and "shiggie circuit" now reads as far more sexist than Brunner probably intended.

And there are other details that look out of place from our perspective: Brunner's Americans take less frequent showers because water is so expensive. Like most of those looking at demographics in the 1960s and 1970s, he had no detailed idea of how real people would work together (industry, government, NGOs, and communities) through the following decades to provide enough water and food and resources and housing for billions more - but not all - people.

Someone as well informed as Brunner had to be aware of what was going on with agriculture and the Green Revolution: his character Sugaiguntung genetically engineers more productive strains of rubber trees and tilapia. But just as the novel does not foresee the rise of community-based feminism, it also doesn't see the rise of community-based Green consciousness,  a broader form of the existing conservation and anti-pollution movements.

Why Brunner didn't portray real life social organization accurately:
Speculative fiction is "the literature of ideas" and many authors - from Wells to Asimov and dozens of others have a strong interest in social organization and the sweep of history. But remarkably few authors, even those who do a little reading in the human sciences, have a detailed picture of the range and potential of human social organization. And fiction writers naturally want to tell a story that features their own exciting genius ideas on the topic.  And what editor is going to publish a novel that features coffee shop gossip, committee meetings, training workshops, budgets, drafts of reports, and people apologizing for misunderstandings?

I read a lot of Brunner over the years, but I don't feel like retracing my steps through a dozen books to get a clearer picture of how he constructed characters, how he saw societies, how he moved the action along, and what ideas he wanted to convey. But SoZ by itself presents Brunner's opinion clearly: the central characters are near-genius independent thinkers with flaws, not ordinary people embedded in community and workplace relationships. And while the technology executive Norman Niblock House does go to meetings, those meetings focus on power relationships and top-down decisions, not building a community consensus.  House's solution to rural poverty is not grass-roots political action and land reform rooted in local tradition, but massive resource-extraction industrial development and what we used to call Westernization.

Brunner's sociobiology is no better than his sociology. SoZ features some ideas about the biological basis of mammal behaviour that are not completely wrong, but are massively misleading. The core ideas of the book are:
    crowding makes people crazy, and
    crazy people become violent, because
    humans are always potentially violent.
And the book features lots of violence, a riot, and a quite a few deaths. It's not as bad as a Jack Reacher novel by Lee Child, but there are parts that I wish I could unsee.

A pair of flawed solutions:
Among the fictional concepts that make the book feel especially dated are the eugenics laws and universal public awareness of demographic issues - a future that didn't happen.  We won't get into the complex and divisive and sometimes oppressive history of these topics here. But there is one consensus now broadly shared by those who care about humanity and our biosphere: women's education and women's rights are pivotal social issues that we need to resolve. As I noted above, SoZ does not engage with the gender politics that were playing out in the late 1960s; Brunner emphasized the sexual politics instead.

That's an observation, not a criticism. When you look at other SF and fantasy books with their interstellar empires in conflict and sword-wielding warriors, SoZ was revolutionary for its anti-military narrative and for the way it connected the future so directly to the lives of its readers. My guess is that there was so much cultural activity in the late 1960s that Brunner simply missed the significance of what was happening around him. Or maybe he was a little early: Greenpeace was founded in 1971, Ms. Magazine started publication in  1972.

So instead of cultural changes to fix the problems of his future - our recent past - he pulls two biological tricks out of his magical bag of fiction. One is the promise of human optimization through genetics, a seductive technology if you see human progress as led by smart people like science fiction writers.

And the other Brunner bio-solution is the Shinka, a fictional ethnic group who make poor slaves, rarely lose their temper, get along well with others, and have a great sense of humour. In spite of these highly desirable workplace and political traits, they live in poverty and starvation, unable to apply common sense group solutions to practical economic problems. That's because their attributes are not cultural: they are biological. The fictional Shinkas exude an equally fictional biological tranquilizer that makes them totally chill to hang out with.

Our real world:
There are no naturally-evolved Shinkas, people who exist in a biologically-induced party zone. But many, many people have worked on Brunner's catalog of social problems in the five decades since Stand on Zanzibar. And, unsurprisingly, they have demonstrated some solutions, ones that need no genetic modifications and no biotranquilizers, solutions that work reasonably well with most people just as they are.

If Brunner were still alive, he'd have opinions about that long list of proven, half-proven, and dubious solutions. But some of the ones that promise to be most effective seem to contradict the elitism that marks SoZ and maybe some of his other work. I would have liked to hear his thoughts, but Brunner died of a heart attack when he was only 61. But I am sure of one thing: if he were here, he would be as angry now as he was then at those blocking the path of human social progress.

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Appendix: Other Visions of Our Future

Norman Borlaug - To understand real-world context that Brunner was working in - perhaps for a term paper or literary article -  you need to read Borlaug's 1970 Nobel Lecture on food and population.  Buried in that speech is a remarkable line, " .... in all biological populations there are innate devices to adjust population growth to the carrying capacity of the environment. Undoubtedly, some such device exists in man ......".  The massive irony here is that the mysterious "innate device" was simply to allow women social equality and reproductive freedom, something that Borlaug and Brunner both had trouble seeing and expressing.  

Ursula LeGuin - a contemporary of Brunner's with a different SF take on human social possibilities

Philip Slater - a real-life counterpart to Brunner's sociologist author Chad Mulligan. His "Earthwalk" asks the same "how do we make human societies work?" questions as SoZ, but it is insightful non-fiction based on scraps of fantasy (Freudian psychology), whereas SoZ is insightful fantasy based on scraps of science.

Kim Stanley Robinson is one of the relatively few SF authors writing about the Near Future.  KSR  uses the same story location as Brunner in his New York: 2140. Another parallel work is KSR's recent "The Ministry for the Future". It features some of the same ready-to-scream frustration that characterizes Stand on Zanzibar.

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There are dozens and dozens of non-fiction authors interested in better futures. Here are few:

William Ury, co-founder of the Harvard Program on Negotiation
Thomas Homer Dixon - especially "The Upside of Down"
Dacher Keltner and the Greater Good Science Centre
Robert Sutton - the guy who wrote "The No-Asshole Rule"
Anand Giridharadas - how elites maintain soft power
Alastair Smith and Bruce Bueno de Mesquita - the logic of authoritarian hard power
Chris Hadfield - Brunner's future has people living on the moon and one of them delivers a rant about human behaviour. But real-life astronaut Hadfield has a fuller, more complex, message about life in space that anyone living on earth could benefit from reading. The short version: you have to be hard-working and competitive to become an astronaut and then you have to learn how to be hard-working and co-operative to actually be an astronaut. 

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Again: Brunner understood that the success of our species is no longer constrained by our cleverness and technology (the defining features of genre SF); it is constrained by how we behave. To illustrate this, he created his fictional ethnic group, the Shinkas, people who get along without coercion. He made this trait biological, although all around him people were going through a wave of hippie social experimentation, trying to achieve similar results through cultural change. Some resources on cultural and political change that I know about:

The Co-operative Movement - While most of us are born with some basic natural talent for getting along with others, it is a skill that can be taught and developed. Think of co-operation like drumming: most people can tap out a simple rhythm, but you need to practice if you want to lay down a beat that gets people up and dancing together. Wherever you live on the planet, some agency promoting co-operative housing  will offer training related to co-operative living.

The Popular Education Movement - A tradition in Latin America that takes many forms in its examination of injustices and types of oppression. I attended an eye-opening workshop decades ago where one of the presenters explained why consensus decision-making has advantages over simple majority voting.

Anne Bishop's "Becoming an Ally"  - practical advice and useful concepts from someone with years of experience co-leading anti-racism workshops.

Project Aristotle - Google spent over a million dollars to find out why a workplace team of capable but ordinary people can outperform a team of superstars. It is a question whose answer has implications far beyond the original scope of the study. The key factor in group performance is "psychological safety" built on positive informal interactions. There are lots of superficial reports on this topic that sound like the same old business school BS, so I recommend the NY Times article by Charles Duhigg or anything that features project leaders Julia Rozovsky and Abeer Dubey.

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