Stand on Zanzibar
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Narrated by:
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Erik Bergmann
About this listen
The brilliant 1969 Hugo Award-winning novel from John Brunner, Stand on Zanzibar, now includes a foreword by Bruce Sterling
Niblock House is a rising executive at General Technics, one of a few all-powerful corporations. His work is leading General Technics to the forefront of global domination, both in the marketplace and politically - it's about to take over a country in Africa.
Donald Hogan is his roommate, a seemingly sheepish bookworm. But Hogan is a spy, and he's about to discover a breakthrough in genetic engineering that will change the world...and kill him.
These two men's lives weave through one of science fiction's most praised novels. Written in a way that echoes John Dos Passos' USA Trilogy, Stand on Zanzibar is a cross-section of a world overpopulated by the billions. Where society is squeezed into hive-living madness by god-like mega computers, mass-marketed psychedelic drugs, and mundane uses of genetic engineering. Though written in 1968, it speaks of now, and is frighteningly prescient and intensely powerful.
©1968 John Brunner (P)2011 Macmillan AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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North Power Air is in trouble. Their aircraft are crashing at an alarming rate and no one can figure out the cause. Desperate for an answer, they turn to Waldo, a crippled misanthropic genius who lives in a home in orbit around Earth, where the absence of gravity means that his feeble muscle strength does not confine him helplessly in a wheelchair. But Waldo has little reason to want to help the rest of humanity - until he learns that the solution to Earth’s problems also holds the key to his own.
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I'M NEVER IN A HURRY
- By Jim "The Impatient" on 02-13-16
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Unwind
- Unwind Dystology, Book 1
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After America’s Second Civil War, the Pro-Choice and Pro-Life armies came to an agreement. According to their Bill of Life, human life may not be terminated from the moment of conception until the age of thirteen. But between the ages of thirteen and eighteen, the child may be gotten rid of by their parent through a process called “unwinding.”
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Chilling, Scary, Difficult to Read
- By Joe on 11-11-20
By: Neal Shusterman
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Angelmaker
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Joe Spork repairs clocks, a far cry from his late father, a flashy London gangster. But when Joe fixes one particularly unusual device, his life is suddenly upended. Joe's client, Edie Banister, is more than just a kindly old lady - she's a former superspy. And the device? It's a 1950s doomsday machine. And having triggered it, Joe now faces the wrath of both the government and a diabolical South Asian dictator, Edie's old arch-nemesis.
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A cure for the modern cynic
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Now Wait for Last Year
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Earth is trapped in the crossfire of an unwinnable war between two alien civilizations. Its leader is perpetually on the verge of death. And on top of that, a new drug has just entered circulation - a drug that haphazardly sends its users traveling through time. In an attempt to escape his doomed marriage, Dr. Eric Sweetscent becomes caught up in all of it. But he has questions: Is Earth on the right side of the war? Is he supposed to heal Earth’s leader or keep him sick? And can he change the harrowing future that the drug has shown him?
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Last/Best Self-help Book for Couples and Suicides
- By Darwin8u on 02-07-15
By: Philip K. Dick
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Red Plenty
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Strange as it may seem, the gray, oppressive USSR was founded on a fairy tale. It was built on the 20th-century magic called "the planned economy," which was going to gush forth an abundance of good things that the lands of capitalism could never match. And just for a little while, in the heady years of the late 1950s, the magic seemed to be working. Red Plenty is about that moment in history, and how it came, and how it went away. Red Plenty is history, it's fiction, it's as ambitious as Sputnik, and as uncompromising as an Aeroflot flight attendant.
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Simple review
- By Jay J Peters on 06-24-18
By: Francis Spufford
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The Chronoliths
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Scott Warden is a man haunted by the past-and soon to be haunted by the future. In early 21st-century Thailand, Scott is an expatriate slacker. Then, one day, he inadvertently witnesses an impossible event: the violent appearance of a 200-foot stone pillar in the forested interior. Its arrival collapses trees for a quarter mile around its base, freezing ice out of the air and emitting a burst of ionizing radiation. It appears to be composed of an exotic form of matter.
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A haunting, beautiful work...
- By M. Stephenson on 11-20-09
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The Patriots
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Florence Fein grows up in Brooklyn in the 1930s, in a family that is gaining a foothold in the middle class. At City College she becomes engaged politically with the left-leaning student groups, and eventually, in the midst of the Depression, she takes a job with a trade organization that has a position for her in Moscow. There, she falls in love with another expatriate American and has a son. Soon after, Florence is sent to a work camp and her son to an orphanage.
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Point of View of characters, past and present collide
- By Angela Adams on 01-29-19
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A Hymn Before Battle
- Legacy of the Aldenata
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With Earth in the path of the rapacious Posleen, the Galactic Federation offers help to the backward humans - for a price. You can protect yourself from your enemies, but God save you from your allies!
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Another heads up!
- By Dr. Daniel Chapman on 06-12-14
By: John Ringo
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What listeners say about Stand on Zanzibar
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Amazon Customer
- 05-30-20
Christ, what an imagination I have
I would consider this book a slow burn, as it took me a few attempts to get hooked. The point that really transfixed my attention is when the author's self insert makes an appearance, and is a voice of reason I. an insane world.
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- Daniel Cascaddan
- 01-29-19
visionary
I must have rechecked three times, during the reading, that it really was written around the time I was born. This could have been written yesterday. In science, for theory to be considered valid, it must exhibit predictive capacity. And of course, great science fiction is the same. This novel is brilliant in its social predictive capacity. I am sorry to be redundant, but I must write it again. Brilliant! I even bought a copy for my favorite student. I am, dying to see what sar thinks of it.
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- gabriele renzi
- 03-23-23
I didn't love it
the world building in this book is great, but the style (fragmented bits, storylines which are only barely connected, zapping-like segments) is not my cup of tea.
OTOH realizing that this was written in the '60s is mind-blowing, it passed the test of time with flying colors.
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- Ted Tschopp
- 06-18-19
The world changed in 1968
They say the world changed in 1968. This book is one writers attempt to determine what 2010 would look like given those changes. The author gets a shocking number of things right in this dystopian view of the future.
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2 people found this helpful
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- Kyle
- 07-11-24
Great story of society and what it can become.
There was some points where the narration could have been edited better but other than that this was a great book.
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- Darryl
- 03-24-14
perfect audio experience
this is one of the best novels I've listened to. it is less scifi to me than i would have thought, and not dated and reads more like Pynchon. while it may not be of the poetic density of Moby, this narrator coupled with this material, makes for a superb listen. Great narrator, one of the best. Wonderful slang and word play. This novel is a scattershot type structure, with multiple blasts of images and ideas--more ideas than a dozen current pop novels.
the story itself involves our near future (written in 1968 it predicts 7 billion people by 2010 and we are near that) and concerns to an extent overpopulation and corporate greed with side stories involving genetic engineering and sterilization and computer intelligence but don't get caught up in arguing whether he got all the "predictions" accurate. He's much more concerned about people existing in such a possible world and what they might go through. Poverty, drug abuse etc.
it will be helpful to know that it is structured with "rotating" sections, i took this from wiki entry:
"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[3] and in one chapter, actual headlines from the 1960s.
a key line from opening: "A point of view can be a dangerous luxury when substituted for insight and understanding." Marshall McLuhan: The Gutenburg Galaxy
loved it. going on my list of best novels. hoping for Sheep Look Up and Shockwave Rider now, definitely interested in Brunner more.
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24 people found this helpful
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- Gereg Jones Muller
- 02-02-23
way too good for comfort
Far more predictive than the author would have preferred, this dense, polylinear tale unfolds a 2010 of corporations with the power of nations, urban mass killings, a hint of Covid awareness, and others realities of modern life.
Reading all these perspectives - from channel-surfing news summaries to unattribured dialogue in an international variety of accents - is done in a truly masterful way. I've got a very picky ear for accents and names, and this fellow is far and away the most versatile at them that I've heard.
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- Michael G Kurilla
- 01-26-17
A classic that stands the test of time
Stand on Zanzibar is John Brunner's 1968, Hugo award winning classic that depicted the future world in 2010. In spite of that future now being in the past, the story has aged well. Rather than a simple story, Brunner chose to relate an intersecting duo of plots regarding a small, fictional outlier African nation with a fictional Asian nation claiming to be embarking on human genetic engineering at the population level.
The greatest attribute of the novel is the uncanny accuracy regarding life in 2010. There are so many scientific, social, and political elements that Brunner nailed: cigarettes would be vilified, while marijuana is tolerated, an advanced computer like Deep Blue or Watson is an integral part of the tale. While he didn't foresee the internet, he anticipated computer assisted news aggregation and interactive television. Both China and terrorism come to dominate US interests, while Europe is united. Perhaps, the only major theme that didn't pan out was the over emphasis on global population size and the resulting social and legal developments (eugenics laws).
One additional feature that makes the book intriguing is that in addition to the main story which is the weakest part of the whole work, Brunner injects side stories, irrelevant to the main plot that serve to highlight and explore social and political developments. At the same time, he also injects snippets of pop culture in the form of commercials, advertisements, and book excerpts that provide a comprehensive overview of multiple aspects of life in 2010.
The narration is outstanding given the range of characters with global diversity as well as a range of presentation styles. For anyone who was alive in 1968 and can remember the mood of the times, 2010 as envisioned through that lens will especially appreciated this depiction.
Note: While there is a President Obomi in the story, he is president of a fictional African nation and not the president of the United States as has been erroneously reported in some internet postings. Brunner was good, but not that good.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Jim Harris
- 01-30-16
One of the most ambitious science fiction novels ever written
In 1968 John Brunner extrapolated what he thought life would be like in 2010. It was a future that scared me back in 1968, and one I hope would not come true. Tragically it did.
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Performance
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Story
- Matthew
- 10-31-11
Buy the paperback.
Throughout the book are whole chapters of schizophrenic commercials chopped off and randomized to give the reader an impression of someone changing stations rapidly. I'm sure the author intended this to help immerse the reader in his universe, however in AUDIO book form it has the opposite effect. If you're the kind of person that mutes tv or radio commercials you will hate the Audio version of this book.
The narrator does a great job of painstakingly voice acting every commercial in the book. This is part of the problem. Imagine you're listening to any given audiobook you've already bought from audible. Now imagine that story being CONSTANTLY interrupted by 7-15 minutes worth of well voice acted radio commercials.
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8 people found this helpful