.jpg)
John Brunner was a British science fiction author. His best known work is this one, Stand on Zanzibar, for which he won the Hugo for Best Novel in 1969. According to many accounts he was a rather difficult person to work with, and towards the end of his life his deteriorating personal relationships were at least partly to blame for the majority of his books going out of print.
A note on the title: this book has absolutely nothing to do with Zanzibar. In Brunner's time there was an adage that every person on Earth, if gathered together, would fit on the island of Zanzibar. As Stand on Zanzibar is set in what was (for the author at least) the distant future, the Earth is even more overpopulated than it was in 1968. The novel's title thus refers to the fact that in the book's "distant future" all of the Earth's people couldn't fit on the island of Zanzibar, and that this is why population controls were enacted.
This book is one of those "important" things like Gravity's Rainbow or Infinite Jest that certain, "more literate" people think you should read. On this front they point to the novel's prescient aspects, given that some of the things Brunner postulates as existing in the future have actually come to be to some extent. I can't give him too many points for his predictions, however, as I think the similarities between the world of Stand on Zanzibar and our own present day are merely lucky guesses. This book's predictive capacity also pales in comparison with some other novels in the same genre, written around the same time.
Its plot is somewhat hard to explain. The author even calls it a "non novel" at the book's close. It has characters, and these characters do things, but there's no real overarching narrative here, at least not a narrative with any kind of conclusion. People pop in and out of the story, many of them meeting grisly ends, but none of them are very likeable or easy to relate to, and even fewer of them have character arcs that sustain themselves for any length of time.
What plot this book has mostly centers around Donald and Norman, two roommates living in New York. Norman is an executive at a firm managing the world's smartest computer. Donald works as something called a "synthesist," someone who synthesizes various branches of human knowledge. They aren't really friends and they aren't really adversaries. They just kind of are.
In the course of the story Norman is drawn to the African nation of Beninia, an impoverished state whose people share a peculiarly nonviolent nature. Donald, on the other hand, is drawn to the Pacific island of Yatakang, where a project to create a race of supermen is well underway. The fates of both Beninia and Yatakang are underpinned by an understanding of genetics, and it is through Donald's and Norman's drive to understand these genetic factors that they become enmeshed in the local politics of their respective countries.
It's a lot to take in, and I don't think it amounts to much. The "ending" of this book is particularly frustrating, as it's something of a cop-out involving pheromones and a geneticist unable to continue his work. Another mark against Stand on Zanzibar is the fact that no one really comes off better or worse at the end of this novel, and that the only character that really develops is the book's AI, Shalmaneser, which doesn't feature in that much of the story.
I wouldn't recommend Stand on Zanzibar. Certain prognosticators might stroke themselves over it, but I don't think there's much here for those uninterested in confirming their own biases. In terms of science fiction novels that anticipate the future I think you'd be better served by Arthur C. Clarke's novels, or by some of Isaac Asimov's earlier works.
Related Entries:
沒有留言:
張貼留言